Category Archives: Humanities

A Day Brightener

I so enjoyed this vignette from Witt Bits:

On another note, I have this loyalty to my breakfast cereal. I find one brand, one flavor, decide I like it, and eat nothing but that cereal for breakfast for months… sometimes years. My morning choice since I joined Weight Watchers 3 years ago has been Kashi Good Friends. Last week I decided I was ready for a change. I purchased a package of Nature’s Path Organic Optimum Zen Cereal, Cranberry Ginger “for inner harmony.” I can do ZEN. After all I’m taking yoga lessons once a week so Zen would be good. This morning I was ready for the Zen experience. I opened the cardboard, flip tab. Reached in to open the inner plastic bag. Pulled, tugged and struggled for a good five minutes. No luck. This was not a Zen moment. Then I saw the inside flap with the little picture of Scissors cutting off the corner of a bag. I got my glasses out. “Airtight bags for freshness…cut bag.” Now to find the scissors. Let’s just say by the time I found the scissors it was not a Zen breakfast and my innards have not harmonized.

Thanks for the laugh, m’dear! I too have struggled with the Nature’s Path supersealed bag. Only mine is the Optimum cereal with blueberries, and it didn’t promise a transcendent experience.

May Sarton: The Indomitable Writer

One of my favorite authors is not extremely well-known, though she is well-read in feminist and lesbian circles. Two years ago I read May Sarton: A Biography, by Margot Peters. In Sarton’s novels, the reader is infused with a sense of healing — there is a tenderness in her handling of complex human issues. She wrote about growth, love, transformation. She expressed herself poetically. Even her journals — raw, at times — can be exquisite in their detail and insight. However, the biography revealed her to be needy, verbally abusive, impulsive, arrogant, intense, rageful, and, I suspect, bipolar. Did that dismay me? No, actually not. For as unattractively as she could behave, her work stands on its own. The critics never gave her the due she desired and, I think, deserved. She also wanted to be a poet, and this is what she considered herself primarily to be. She wrote novels and taught to put a roof over her head (with the help of family money).

Sarton was revealed to me as a fragile, broken person through whom beauty emerged. Isn’t that what we all are, and what we aspire to do?

I Googled around and found lots of bibliographies (not an extensive search, mind you) but all listed the work alphabetically. I read May Sarton’s book about a cat as a teenager, and then I worked my way through her oeuvre, reading her recent novels; only later could I get ahold of her first works. I think it’s important to read an author chronologically to experience their development. There’s a lot more of Sarton remaining for me to read; I have only read one journal and a book of poems. She was prolific. When she died at age 83, she had published 53 books. What follows is a selected bibliography based on what I scouted on the net. A brief biography can be read here.
Continue reading →

Clarifying Attribution

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

—Marianne Williamson

This quote is often misattributed to Nelson Mandela’s inauguration speech of 1994. Here are links to his speech:

South Africa Government Online website

African National Congress website

Who Else But You?

who else but you
please tell me who else
can ever take your place

now give yourself a smile
what is the worth of a diamond
if it doesn’t smile

how can i ever put a price
on the diamond that you are
you are the entire treasure of the house

–Rumi

[from Ghazal 2148, from the Diwan-e Shams Poetic translation by Nader Khalili “Rumi, Fountain of Fire” Cal-Earth Press, 1994]

They’re Joking, Right? Right?!!

The federal government has warned that grave legal consequences against publishers may result if they edit manuscripts from disfavored countries. Why? Because “such tinkering amounts to trading with the enemy.”

Publishers are forbidden to:

  • reorder paragraphs or sentences
  • correct syntax or grammar
  • replace “inappropriate words”
  • add illustrations

“It is against the principles of scholarship and freedom of expression, as well as the interests of science, to require publishers to get U.S. government permission to publish the works of scholars and researchers who happen to live in countries with oppressive regimes,” said Eric A. Swanson, a senior vice president at John Wiley & Sons, which publishes scientific, technical and medical books and journals.

Nahid Mozaffari, a scholar and editor specializing in literature from Iran, called the implications staggering. “A story, a poem, an article on history, archaeology, linguistics, engineering, physics, mathematics, or any other area of knowledge cannot be translated, and even if submitted in English, cannot be edited in the U.S.,” she said.

[New York Times]

Exactly

I couldn’t have said it any better, and the whole entry was so good that I couldn’t just snip a sentence out of it. Kurt has been exploring the role writing has in his life:

I regard writing not just as personal expression but as practice, as another tool in the small kit I bring with me to the spiritual search. This search is most easily characterized by a desire to get beyond mere belief to knowledge, and this in turn requires that I be fully open to each moment, prepared to learn whatever it has to teach me, without preconceptions or dogma. Writing, by its nature, is interpretive. If the fruit of religious practice is a sense of the sublime, then writing about it is essentially reductive. At its most absurd, it is an attempt to contain the uncontainable, to cage the wild animal. How is Mystery served by doing this?

On the other hand, not to make the interpretive attempt is not really an option. The expressive impulse is part of human nature, which includes the need to communicate — to think symbolically, to be conscious, to share with others. We are a social animal. Sealing off the dimension of the numinous from such a basic instinct is impossible. We are meaning makers at heart, and the attempt to share wisdom must be made.

People who write — who need to put words to paper or screen as consistently as they need to breathe — are in effect using a spiritual practice. I believe the word “spiritual” applies even to those who reject or don’t acknowledge the concepts of god and religion, because one definition of spiritual is of or pertaining to the intellectual and higher endowments of the mind; mental; intellectual. I clarify this point so as to be inclusive to readers who do not ascribe to religious beliefs.

Connections

Below is an excerpt from an article by Ken Wilber that focuses on what tenets most of the world’s religions share.

  1. Spirit, by whatever name, exists.
  2. Spirit, although existing “out there,” is found “in here,” or revealed within to the open heart and mind.
  3. Most of us don’t realize this Spirit within, however, because we are living in a world of sin, separation, or duality — that is, we are living in a fallen, illusory, or fragmented state.
  4. There is a way out of this fallen state (of sin or illusion or disharmony), there is a Path to our liberation.
  5. If we follow this Path to its conclusion, the result is a Rebirth or Enlightenment, a direct experience of Spirit within and without, a Supreme Liberation, which
  6. marks the end of sin and suffering, and
  7. manifests in social action of mercy and compassion on behalf of all sentient beings.

[via Joe Perez at The Soulful Blogger]

Licking Honey From Thorns

Mortal love is but the licking of honey from thorns.

–Anonymous woman at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, (1198), in Helen Lawrenson, Whistling Girl (1978)

One must desire something, to be alive; perhaps absolute satisfaction is only another name for Death.

–Margaret Deland, Florida Days (1889)

Sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.

–May Sarton, Recovering (1980)

The concept in Buddhism that desire contributes to our suffering remains complicated to me. The end of the journey — Nirvana — is the state of desirelessness, nothingness. But isn’t the goal of Nirvana a desire in itself? Is Nirvana reached only when one stops caring about it as a destination or accomplishment? I suppose that is when death, as we know it, would happen.

Meanwhile, I like the image of licking honey from thorns. It appeals to attraction to duality — instead of either/or, however, the image suggests both/and. You can have love, if you’re willing to lick the thorns, risking some injury to yourself. Or you can have pain, as long as you understand the sweetness that lies on the other side — not-pain.

The Color of Purity

“The Color of Purity”

Inside myself I breathe
the fragrance of the Friend.

In the garden last night
an urge ran through my head;
a sun shone out of my eyes;
an inner river began to flow.

Lips became laughing roses
without the thorns of existence,
safe from the sword of decay.

The trees and plants in the meadow,
which to normal eyes looked fixed and still,
seemed to dance.
When our tall Cypress appeared,
the garden lost itself entirely,
and the plane tree clapped its hands.

A face of fire, a burning wine,
a blazing love, all happy together,
and the self, overwhelmed, screaming,
“Let me out of here.”

In the world of Unity
there’s no room for number.
But out of necessity number exists
in the worlds of five and four.

You can count a hundred thousand
sweet apples in your hands.
If you wish to make them one,
crush them all together!

Without thinking of the letters,
listen to the language of the heart.
The color of purity
belongs to the creative Source.
Where the sun of Tabriz sits,
my verses line up like willing slaves.

— Version by Kabir Helminski
“Love is a Stranger”
Threshold Books, 1993

One Attempt To Answer

The question of life purpose is a frequent topic on this blog and in my life. It’s also a topic central to religion, philosophy, and existential psychology. Today a guest blogger, Cicada, provides a review of a book that attempts to shed light on the subject.

What Should I Do with My Life? (The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question)
Po Bronson
Random House, 2002
400 pages
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Po Bronson is a writer obsessed with spirit. Much of his work has been about how people struggle to “hang on to [their souls] against the crushing forces of technology, prestige, and greed.” His latest book, What Should I Do with My Life?, continues this study with stunning results.

I once thought that “The Question” was probably unique to our society, because our relative level of wealth and the everyday amenities we take for granted are so far beyond that of the average world citizen. In other words, one would be likely to ask The Question only when the basic necessities of life (food, clean water, shelter, and so on) had been achieved. I also thought that knowledge of one’s purpose arrived like an epiphany, clearly and loudly. Bronson’s book convinced me otherwise. “Our purpose doesn’t arrive neatly packaged as destiny,” he writes. “We only get a whisper. A blank, nonspecific urge. That’s how it starts.”

Bronson began asking The Question of himself a couple of years ago, when the television show he wrote for was cancelled. Though his three previous books had all been international bestsellers, he had reached a personal existential crisis of sorts. His fame was built on the successes and excesses of the dotcom revolution, which had gone bust. It was a world he understood—a world he had helped to make famous in his books, The Nudist on the Late Shift and The First $20 Million Is the Hardest.

He’d been proud of his work, but after the crash, Bronson felt guilty about pointing people toward Silicon Valley, responsible for the losses they sustained there. Out of work himself, he could have easily gotten other work in the same vein. Somehow that just didn’t feel right to him. Instead, he found himself asking The Question of others. Within a short time, Bronson began hearing from hundreds of people about their own journeys in search of destiny.

Besides Bronson’s own story, there are fifty-five others in What Should I Do with My Life?. The stories come from all over the world, from people late in their lives and from those just starting out, from men and from women, from people of widely diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. Reading the stories, I realized that The Question is truly an essential part of our makeup, hardwired into our very souls. The search for one’s true calling is evolutionary—the only way to find meaningful answers is to dare to be honest with oneself, regardless of how discomforting the results of that honesty might be.

Critics of What Should I Do with My Life? have complained that it is not a “systematic study” nor a “true self-help book”. Bronson’s writing offers no career counseling, no glib answers, no direction or guidance for his subjects, and is therefore “wrong.” These critics have entirely missed the point of the book, which is that there is no easy answer to The Question, no one-size-fits-all approach to finding one’s true calling.

Bronson’s honesty is a revelation—throughout the book he remains open, vulnerable, puzzled, irritated, and intuitive—and worried about his subjects. We see him bothered about the decisions they make, the direction their lives take, as well as wondering about his own journey. He lays bare his own spirit, revealing how his sterling qualities and foibles alike have affected his path. In the end, I found Bronson’s story one of the most compelling in the book. It’s a great read—not a quick one, because finding the meaning of the stories is left to the reader, but I believe that makes it all the more valuable. What you’ll take away from these studies is personal, just like your own answer to The Question.