This Is What I Believe

The past couple of weeks I've been sick. And I don't mean the garden variety sniffle or two. I mean the kind of sick where you shiver with cold and misery; where, even though you may have plenty of help and human love surrounding you, you feel distant from it all, forced into retreat. The fever makes you say strange things. The aching in your muscles keeps you up at night. And when some semblance of equilibrium is finally regained, and you find yourself out and about, engaged in your normal routine, you can't help feeling somewhat shaken. After all you've been informed, yes freshly informed that the vessel of your body is not unsinkable. Your mind is not unshakeable. Your happiness is under no warranty. You are mortal, vulnerable, prone to loss. These are of course good facts to know. But they are not easy ones to digest.

Being sick though, comes with its gifts as well. For one thing, the process of recuperation deeply changes your relationship to time, so that, if your relationship with that mysterious entity is usually one of animosity and struggle, well you can give that up right now, because there's no way back to health but to accept time as an ally and friend and to let it pass over you like the waves of the surf or like the notes of a chant. You see, all of that activity and motion that normally places you in opposition to time and in rebellion against the limits of time—I mean the shopping and the bank errands, the driving here and there, the business meetings, the busy ins and outs of your professional life—you have to give this all up, along with the can-do attitude and the bravado of control. You are no longer the “manager” of your time. Time is no longer yours to control. It is no resource of yours. It is its own master and always has been. You must give yourself up to time. Your assignment is to lie back under the blanket and be. It is to give yourself up to the taskless task of recuperation, the laborless labor of healing.

And what I'm saying is that the general experience of lying back and letting the office be an office without you, letting the dirty laundry stay dirty laundry and the cooking stay uncooked—all this has the power to connect us once again with the basic rhythms of the world. And here I mean the sort of world we knew in childhood, in which everything seemed to come with a mysterious signature of its own, which maybe you could not decipher directly or comprehend completely, but which you knew had meaning. Lying there in bed (quietly, receptively, as you did in childhood perhaps waiting for sleep) you hear the traffic outdoors and it communicates something to you. No longer is it faceless and random. Instead it feels like a presence in its own right, full of expressive thought; that stray flick of gravel thrown from the tire says something definite and true, equal absolutely to itself. Or as you watch the sunlight slanting in through the picture window, noting how it changes its slant slowly from hour to hour, somehow the slow fact of its motion fills you with gratefulness and with the simple two words “how beautiful.” 

Other transformations unfold themselves, like angels of Van Eyck opening their peacock-rainbow wings. When I was ten years old, and sick with pneumonia, convalescing in an old house (in a town without birches called Birch Run) my mother's houseplants gained character and charisma and presence and soul as I sat with them hour after hour trying to breath: I remember the Hindu rope, complexly knotted with leaves a marbled green and white. And the Christmas cactus, saying "It's December again," in the language of curly shrimp-like flowers. The philodendron that climbed any stick. The rubber plant that bled an immaculate white latex when cut—all these together arranged themselves into a sort of living choir of contemplation, whose song consisted of the modulations of silence—a silence comparable to the one I have savored over the course of my illness here at Sunnyside in the company of my own plant collection: my delicate ivies, my bushy quartet of Norfolk pines, a gnarled jade that used to belong to my mother, and all the rest I love. 

It is the great mental tragedy of our wasteful and consumptive times that we take nothing seriously unless we can place it outside ourselves, and doll it up as a metaphysical stranger to us; a not-me that we can comfortably measure with a stick and with properly placed numbers. This mulish reductionism, this tragedy of apartness from the inner truth of things, this puniness of heart, this obsession with surfaces, this insistence on the enoughness of the artificial, this scorn of the imagination, this neurotic turning of our backs on our own inner life, this perpetual epistemology of doubt, this distrust of the competence of the human mind (even a child's!) to place itself in the universe accurately, and to assess the meaning of its life in relationship with that universe: all this is tragic in the deepest sense. For it is was and is preventable. 

It is time once again for us all to say, along with Hamlet, that great saint of the Universal-Inward: “Here I am! I am not nothing! I am a mind! I am a will! I am a perceiving soul! A powerful angel of awareness! A stubborn barnacle of thought upon the heaving ship of the infinite!” I am sick of people estimating their minds too low. I am tired of people enslaving themselves to convictions that an intelligent dog would not believe, namely that we have no will, that we are machines, that Consciousness itself—the Thing without which there would in fact be nothing—is, of all things, an illusion! An accidental illusory squirt. A poor and dismissible ghost in the neural machine. These convictions are, in fact, not only questionable, but very unlikely to be true. They are violently extreme. They certainly do not conform to common sense, and the metaphysics on which they are based is perplexed with self-contradictions. 

And yet again, these pronouncements and estimations of the non-existence of our thoughts are treated as self-evident axioms by people who ought to know better than not to doubt their axioms. Furthermore anyone who does dare to doubt them is dismissed as a throwback to a mathematical Frenchman who sited the soul in the pituitary gland. I am frankly sick of this. I am sick of investigators who never examine their metaphysics. Sick of researchers in neurology and biology who have never considered the perfectly obvious possibility that consciousness might be a primary phenomenon like Time or Space; after all, some of the best physicists (nearly a century ago now!) led by the redoubtable Neils Bohr considered consciousness in the informative act of observation to be the best explanation for how so many interesting and perplexing things happen in the world of the very small. How so much information seems to gets around. 

You may think I am getting off my original subject. I assure you I am not. I am on the subject of sickness and health. And here is what I wonder: I wonder if we may need to lie down as a civilization in order to see again, as I needed to lie down in my sickness in order to wake up once again to the speech of the world. I wonder whether our rationalist reductionist materialist take on the world is so far off of the accurate balance that it might be possible to say that we are insane and that our civilization is insane. And again there is no fix but to lie down and "see feelingly" toward a new vision of ourselves and our relationship with the earth.

I think all this is very possible. 

Consider after all what our civilization produces. We base our economy on consumption, and so very thoroughly does the practice of consumption rule our world that it can be said that the two most plentiful products of our civilization are waste heat and garbage. That is what we make. Overwhelmingly! Waste heat and garbage! And a poisoned, wasted earth is the outward sign of our “progress” in this endeavor. And in our work of consumption, who are our most intimate and powerful allies but our machines? Our combustion engines and refrigerators, our conveyor belts and lasers, our computers programmed to speculate and sell in order to fan the flames of consumption. 

And tell me, dear Reader: is there no connection, none, between how we have thought of ourselves these past two or three centuries of the industrial age, and what we and our machines have made of our world? No connection between the destruction we have wrought with our machines upon the earth, and our insistence that we ourselves are machines, and that the earth we inhabit is a machine? A stranger-machine at that, an enemy machine, a competitor that we must master and overwhelm? 

And is it not possible to say that, in this regard, we are insane? 

Surely it's time to dismantle this metaphor. Time to lie down and think of other metaphors until the machine-mind evaporates away. Time to look inward to consider a world choked with the beauty of inwardness. With texts that can be read inwardly by us. And read with joy and reverence and sympathy and love.

We are living beings. As is the earth. As is the magical universe itself, that has given rise to us, its children. We are not simply piles of separable parts keeping time. Furthermore our minds are capable of intent. And our intentions culminate and find their most burning accurate center in acts of tenderness, imagination, and love. We can give freely of ourselves! Without reference to the machine! We can speak the word "love," and know what it means and know what it costs, and then not just say it, but make it happen—love. We can dare to say “beauty is what I inwardly see, and infinity too, in the green context of my home the earth, where the fishes swim and the birds take to the air joyously and fly, and nothing can take the reality of beauty from me, nor the infinity of the inward: no not all the reductionist fantasies of “here you are, we've got you, we've pinned you down, little mechanical-computational human being, and you are nothing really, nothing that cannot be explained, or at the least explained away.” 

Again, in the words of William Blake the poet and engraver, “We become what we behold.” Thus if we see ourselves as nothing more than computational machinery, and measure everything around us as machinery, we will inevitably become like machinery ourselves: Thoughtless. Inwardly impoverished. Incapable of change or mindful attention, and above all, less given to the practice of love. And in hewing to this vision we will destroy ourselves. There is no question about this. All we need do is look around us and see what that vision of the machine has, over the past three centuries, wrought upon our home the earth. To continue in this path is true insanity. A deep sickness from which we must all awake!

It is a curious and almost inexplicable habit of human beings to enslave themselves to their own metaphors, until they forget they ever made them up, and therefore have the power to change them. But! If we change our metaphors, we change our minds; we behold something new. 

So. What will our new metaphor be? Shall we be living beings again with souls? Gardeners of the earth? Guardians of the planet? Crafters of beauty? Lovers of the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, able to speak to them all? Well then! That will not be the end of it, for the world that we inhabit will change as well. And the beauty and the scale of that change will be extraordinary. It will be a beauty, the likes of which we cannot at present even conceive. 

This is what I believe.

HB

Next Post Friday, January 9!

Trying to Enjoy Ourselves, Trying to Learn

When I was fourteen, I had some fairly serious thoughts about playing clarinet professionally. I read all my father's old music history books (he has a degree in musicology). I listened to hours of classical music on the radio every day. I practiced with some real discipline. And that particular summer, when my father suggested that I go to music camp, I said sure why not? 

Man did I ride it high that summer at camp! I was a year younger than the others, so a bit of a wunderkind reputation stuck to me. I was top dog clarinetist in the band. I asked questions in music theory that hinted at some basic knowledge of harmony, which also caused a bit of a stir. Most astonishingly of all, a flutist (really cute) took to waiting outside my practice room door for me, listening. She would wait till I was done, and when I came out, she'd talk to me. Honestly I was so flummoxed with my good luck there, that I squandered it by telling her the fib that I already had a girlfriend back home. At the end of the two weeks, when my father came to pick me up and asked me what I had learned, I was exhilarated. I was also a bit puffed up. But I had plenty to report, and I'm sure that in general he was pleased. 

A year went by. I had earned a scholarship for a second round at the camp, and so I went again. Needless to say, the reprise was an unmitigated disaster. Nothing, nothing, nothing was the same. No wunderkind reputation. No cute flutist. No opportunities for showing my blinding erudition in the science of harmony (I didn't feel like paying attention in class). Heck, I didn't even make first chair in the band! So, on the final day of camp, after the final concert, when my father picked me up to take me home in the car, what did I have to report? 

“Nothing,” I said. 

“Nothing?!” he asked. “Two weeks at music camp and you learned nothing?”

I should have heard it in his voice right then and there. The consternation. The surprise. It was like that moment in King Lear, when Lear asks Cordelia to amend her answer about how much she loves him: “Nothing will come of nothing” he says. Though of course my situation was hardly so innocent as Cordelia's. Which was also why, unlike Cordelia, I could not be silent, and instead let loose like an armory on fire with a long inventory of complaints. The dorms were unbearably hot. The auditions were rigged. My roommate was a percussionist. No one was friendly to me. The classes were too basic. The food was rot. And there was not enough Mozart. 

We were not out of town yet, and my father actually pulled over and stopped the car. Even with the scholarship, he said, my family had paid good money to help me learn something that month. And good people at the camp had taken the time to teach me. What was my problem? So I wasn't first chair in the clarinet section? What difference should that have have made? And so what about any of the rest of my complaints? None of them need to have prevented me from deepening my acquaintance with the classical tradition. My laziness and refusal to learn had been the response of a spoiled child, not that of a thoughtful committed musician. 

“Did you even try to enjoy yourself?” he demanded, finally. “Did you even try to learn?”

So here it is the end of the year 2014, and once again most of us find ourselves looking back and wondering where all the time went. What we did with it. Whether we spent it wisely. And as usual for myself, being the imperfect person I am, I can think of plenty of choices I made over the past year that were questionable. Choices comparable to the choices I made that second summer at music camp—choices to sulk and to retire into myself, and to withhold my passion and intelligence from the proper spheres of their application. Times when, instead of just getting to work, I just complained. Times when I allowed myself to despair. Times when I just applied irony to every situation, as if irony were ever truly constructive!

Then I hear my father's words: “Did you ever even try to enjoy yourself? Did you ever even try to learn?” and I have to say no and repent of my mistakes there and say to myself "Well, I hope I can do better this next year."

On the other hand I can also think of times when I did okay. Times when instead of despairing, I just got down to work. Times when I gamely took my chances, despite doubts, because I judged the risk was worth it. Times when I just swallowed my pride and let someone's purposeful injury to me just be, by saying “I am not my ego; my ego is not me.”  Times when, in spite of bad news coming in from all corners of the world, I managed to focus on what I could do in local time and space to make it just a little better: maybe by weeding the garden. Or sitting down and making a little music with a friend. Or just finding something to laugh at... 

Times in other words, when I think I really did manage to enjoy myself and to learn a little more about the beautiful slippery mystery that is my life. And hey guess what? Those are the moments and experiences that I am proudest of, looking back, and the ones I hope to manage to make happen just a little more often in the coming year. And by the way, I don't expect rapid improvement in these departments. It's hard figuring out how to make enjoyment and learning happen. They don't just happen by themselves. You have to work at them. You have to give up some of your pride.

Best wishes to all of you, my readers, in the year to come! You honor me with the gift of your time. Your attention to my work is truly one of the great satisfactions of my life!

HB

(Next Post January 1st)

The Death of a Squirrel

He lay on his side on the sidewalk, white and gray, and there was nothing hideous about him. His eyes were closed, there was no blood. I don't think he was struck by a car. I wonder if he died of a fall; such things do happen. Or of a sickness. Though his coat was rich. And he looked plump enough. Who knows? The tree nearest to where he lay was a silver maple, and a very tall and handsome tree at that, planted close enough to the sidewalk to have caused some buckling in the concrete. When I first came on the body, I looked up into the branches of the tree, wondering if maybe he had a nest there. I didn't see one, so maybe it wasn't exactly home to him. Still, you might call it his final address. And I would also say that, if you could choose a tree under which to stretch out and die—something simulating the dome of heaven, like the fan vault at King's College in Cambridge—that silver maple would be a pretty good choice. I wouldn't have minded it for my own last view. 

The house, in front of which stands the silver maple and beneath which lay the squirrel, used to belong to a couple who were living in the neighborhood when we first moved to Sunnyside. They were about our age, maybe a little younger, and they had a baby, and their neighbors also had a baby. The babies learned to walk, and they were friends, in the way that babies are friends, playing in familiar parallel with each other until boom there's some kind of collision of desires or maybe even an actual collision that has to be cleared away by the parents. Anyhow it was always so pleasant back in our first days in the neighborhood, during the warm months, to walk past those two houses in the late afternoon or early evening, because there they would be, all the grown-ups just watching the babies and chatting away. It was exactly the way a neighborhood ought to be. 

Well then one of the couples sold the one house and moved somewhere else in the area, and the other (the family with the silver maple) went to Peru believe it or not, because that's where the father's folks were from and I guess some opportunity presented itself in the way of work. Now at the house with the maple, there are no babies outside. Not anymore. Instead what happens is that during the warmer times of the year, the lawn service comes now and then with their chemical fingers to turn the knobs on the flower garden and to adjust the contrast level on the lawn occasionally too. Then in winter the driveway gets plowed, but the sidewalk does not. Instead the snow just piles up on the sidewalk beneath the maple. I wonder if the owner even knows that there is a sidewalk. I kind of doubt it. I mean, just look at the squirrel.

Well finally I guess I just decided it was time for someone to show some respect. Some reverence for the dead. Some sense of class about the sidewalk. So the day before yesterday, I buried the squirrel—just off the walk, but still snug up to the maple. I used just what tools and materials I had on hand, which was a thick stick and some garden dirt and some pieces of bark and also some spare but useful moments of my time. 

As I worked, I sang. I sang to the body of the squirrel. I have a kind of shaman-sounding voice that I use when I'm working with anything natural now, especially plants, but I guess with squirrels too. It's nothing impressive, this singing voice. Just a sort of right-brained glossolalia sung down low, that I like to make to lilt. And I'm convinced that the plants recognize it and enjoy it. And maybe the ghost of a squirrel. Why don't I just sing in English? Well, because regular words are just way too specific. They don't say anything that's wide enough to encompass what I'm trying to communicate to plants and squirrels and such like. But the shaman voice does, and so that's what I use. 

But so I sang. I sang to a bunch of squirrel memories. Memories of jumping from branch to branch like an acrobat. Of hiding nuts away in gutters and flower gardens and garage attics. Of eating all those nuts for midnight snack. Of walking along the telephone wires now and then. Of chasing other squirrels here and there for love and hate. Of curling up on a rainy day in a nest of leaves tucked away in the fork of some high-up branches of an oak, and just lying there and moving with the wind. Swaying here and there. Nothing wrong with that. Just being lazy some days. Just being lazy like that. 

So anyway I sang as I moved him with a stick. And I sang as I slid him from the sidewalk to the base of the maple tree—to a sort of harbor there between two large, kindly roots. And I sang a little more as I dug some dirt with the same stick and covered him up with it. And finally I sang as I took a few pieces of maple bark and planted them on top of the little mound of dirt. Like flags I guess. Here lies a squirrel. Friend of this maple. Friend of the earth.

And now I'm writing this. Well squirrel. This is just to say that someone knows you're gone. Thanks for your life in our neighborhood. Thanks for your death on the sidewalk, by means of which you gave me the chance to reacquaint myself with what St. Francis called our Brother Death. Thanks for choosing the maple, if that was your choice. And thanks for the chance to remember the family that went to Peru. And just in general thanks for giving me a little chance to be decent. And to sing. Hope you liked it. It's sure a beautiful world isn't it? I do wish more of us would notice it.

Cheers and have a good afterlife. Maybe in Peru?

HB

(Next post December 22nd)

Playing the Part (part two)

I'm picking up here on last week's discussion, in which I introduced the concept of scripts beyond the playwright's script. These are not, strictly speaking, written scripts, but actions we observe and copy. Ceremonies we live by. Phrases we catch and pass on like germs. Attitudes we get good at projecting—all just by living and watching and being the social beings that we are, and all stored away in a sort of inner mental script library, to be dug out again and again as needed, as circumstances demand. 

A script in this sense is not a difficult concept to groove to, once you get the idea, and of course I'm hardly claiming it's original to me, or even that it's unmatched as a metaphor (the concept of algorithms is maybe a good parallel). But if you're still puzzling over what I mean, a few examples might help. Last week I referred to the Disgruntled Patient script. Everyone knows that routine—the words, the look, the attitude; put them together and you have what I'm calling a script. And anyone who has been in a job interview knows the need, in that situation, for a script. As does every contestant in a beauty pageant.

This week I'm interested in scripts for society at large: cultural scripts, economic scripts, political scripts, all of which channel our behavior at the macro level. Take, on the brighter side of experience, the non-violent protest script, created by folks like Gandhi and King, and honed to perfection under all sorts of difficult conditions. It's a powerful script indeed, and one that's almost literal: with mapped-out routes for marches, snappy slogans to shout, props to hold and carry, understood limits to behavior. And it really is worth reflecting on the organized, invented nature of a protest or protest march. In my book, the non-violent protest (especially in the context of civil disobedience)  is one of the great inventions of the last three or four centuries, right up there with the scientific method and organic agriculture. I mean it. It's hard to over-value something so instrumental to so many good outcomes! Indian independence, de-segregation in the United States, the end of communism in eastern Europe. May the list go on!

At the same time we mustn't get sidetracked by praise, because scripts always have their downsides too—downsides tied, in fact, directly to their strengths. Note for instance that one of the qualities that makes the performance of any script successful is what you might call its automaticity, that is, the almost memorized nature of it. The ability of the performers to stick to the script without really having to think too hard. Again, in the context say of the street protest, this automaticity is useful and good. It keeps people safe precisely because if you're following the script, yelling the slogan, lifting the sign, speaking your mind, you don't stop to ask, “Should I throw this rock?” or “What if I just wailed on that policeman?” You just follow the script and hopefully things will be okay. 

Unfortunately, the same automaticity, especially in the performance of scripts that are not framed by a beginning or an end, often serves to prevent our ever questioning the value of the script or the assumptions that helped to write it. It may even cause us to confuse a mere script with a demonstration of objective truth. 

Take what I call the “Economic Growth is the Cat's Pajamas” script. It's a pretty common script around the world, and has been for a long time in my country. It encourages people to get off their couches and shop. To travel long distances with jets. To replace their gadgets yearly. To start new businesses and to hire new help. To look for work with confidence. To invest in the stock market and real estate and in a college education. To take out loans to buy new houses.To feel cheerful and optimistic when the economic reports indicate what the economists and the government define for us as growth, and also to feel depressed when, by the same definitions and measures, the economy shrinks. 

Here's the secret though—one to be whispered discretely from every rooftop: "Economic Growth is the Cat's Pajamas" is a script, culturally learned and defined. It's a set of directions and slogans and responses and assumptions that are all so ingrained in us, so memorized and smooth with use, that we forget it's just a script, written with certain assumptions in mind—assumptions that can be questioned, and probably should be. But that cannot be questioned until we step outside of the script ourselves! 

Now, here in my country, we're only beginning to ask whether economic growth is compatible with the ecological health of the planet, or whether it really encourages human happiness, or lends meaning to existence, or whether it can even continue indefinitely (it can't, of course, for reasons economic, mathematical, thermodynamic, and ecological!). Even these question though are only being asked at the radical fringe, while in many other places in the world—say India, China, Brazil—well, my understanding is that the popularity of the Pajamas in question is still very much on the upswing. Soon enough, the script may be so globally known, so well digested and assimilated into so many cultures, that most citizens of the world probably won't see it as a script at all, but as the objective truth of things as they really are. Everyone will be wearing the cat's pajamas. Or almost everyone. 

This is not a happy situation. In my opinion. The Earth can't take much more of the same beating we're giving it, in order to have this growth. And Earth happens to be the island where we live. Our beautiful island in space. Our only home. Continue to follow this script, and the story has an end all right. Just not a happy one. Indeed a very bleak and ugly one. 

For what it's worth, I don't expect the citizens of the world to start questioning "Economic Growth is the Cat's Pajamas" anytime soon. Eventually yes, but only as one of the effects of a long drawn out decline in prosperity, accompanied by the occasional spectacle of a market crash or two, not to mention the melting of many icebergs. I wish that we could start asking the necessary questions and changing our lives before all those unpleasant things occurred. But it seems to me that it's just not a human habit to think ahead and make sacrifices now, so that a good story (in a beautiful setting) can go on.

Or is that a fair evaluation of what humans are capable of? You dear reader, will help decide.

HB

(Next Post Monday, December the 15th)

Playing the Part (part one)

Being a playwright, I'm attracted to the concept of scripts, and scripts not just on the printed page, but everywhere. I unabashedly generalize the concept. I see scripts in the way people dress, or how they talk to one another in line at the post office. How they celebrate their holidays. Or pray. Or speak to the boss, or interact with the help. So, when I say script, I mean words and actions that are bound to the situation and to the roles we choose to play in that situation. Sometimes we really do know the words or actions by heart ahead of time. Other times, we improvise, but within clear guidelines, and these guidelines help us to know what to do and say. 

• An experienced teacher teaching long division for the seventeenth year is following a script: “So don't forget, this is the hundreds place.”
• A grief counselor expertly helping a child get through the loss of her mother, is going to be following a script: “Is there a favorite memory you'd like to share?”
• A construction worker informing the college student that he can't be walking past the orange warning fence, may also be following a script. “Hey bud. No.”

I'm aware that my definition of script is a bit idiosyncratic. But I find it useful. For me, it calls attention to a fact that a great deal of what we say and do in this life is generated without a whole lot of effort on our part—in more or less the same way as we walk to the park or do the dishes. You just do it. You don't have to think all that hard.

What about the downsides to scripting though? 

They do exist.

This morning, for instance, I had to get a filling done on a tooth. My appointment was for 8:00, and I woke up early to light the stove, have breakfast, and do a little reading—all with an eye to leaving enough time for the walk to the dentist. I walked. And at 8:00 sharp, I arrived. And how much good did all this concern for punctuality do me? 

I waited and waited. And the waiting room was small. And a very loud television was broadcasting very bad news. After forty minutes, I got up and presented myself at the window. You might say I was Disgruntled Patient, speaking to Harried Receptionist. And, true to the part I was playing, I had already put on my outdoor hat, and I had an arm through one sleeve of my coat.

“Forty minutes is a long time to wait at eight o'clock in the morning,” I said.

“I'm sorry, we're behind. But your chart is next.”

I sat back down. Five minutes more and just as I was pulling on my coat again to leave, the assistant poked her head out the waiting room door and called my name. I went with her.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Oh...could be better.”

Well, I suspect news had gotten around, because everyone was polite and kind to me. The dentist was whistling as he shot me up with Novocain. And as I sat in the chair, waiting with a fat lip for the stuff to take effect, the assistant chatted on about the cold weather. And then—and this killed my script—she talked about about her pellet stove: her pellet stove that kept her home warm in the winter! She was a complete geek about her pellet stove. Full of information about it. Full of affection for it. Which of course could have been annoying. Except that for some reason it wasn't. “Okay," I said to myself, "I have a choice. I could rebuff her and continue to follow the script of Disgruntled Patient. Or I can talk to this woman and actually relate. The choice is mine.”

So I started to talk. I talked about my new wood stove at home. I talked about the general project of homesteading. And surprise surprise, pretty much right away the two of us were off to the conversational races: talking pellets, BTU's, the price of corn, and the uses of being off the grid. Within five minutes, Disgruntled Patient had made a full exit, and there I was sitting back in the dental chair, more or less satisfied with my place in life, and ready to get myself a filling. 

Now, please note: we need scripts. We lean on them. They help us through all sorts of situations. They help us to come up with words to make our opinions clear. They help us apologize. They help us get through funerals and weddings. They help us cohere as communities and as colleagues. They help us to ask each other to dance. 

But even the good and helpful scripts sometimes outlive their usefulness, sometimes within minutes. My own (retrospective) opinion is that Disgruntled Patient probably belonged to the category of useful-for-a-time-but-important-to-discard. After all, for a time I did have reasonable cause to complain: the office had probably over-scheduled itself, and no one had apologized, or done anything to make my wait more pleasant or easier. On the other hand, what was the point in perpetuating the business, once I had had my say? Seems to me that, just as with everything else in the world, there are limits to scripts. Limits to how long the show can go on. Or ought to... 

More on life-scripts next week!

HB

(Next Post Saturday, December 6th)

Burning Questions

We bought a wood-burning stove recently, to help keep us warm here at Sunnyside through the winter months. Four or five days still have to go by before we can light it; the insulating mortar in the chimney has to cure all the way and harden up. But the stove itself stands in the dining room, like a cadet at attention, ready to be commanded, and our stack of wood outdoors beside the hedge looks forward to shrinking. All that's left is to fire the thing up. Put it through its paces. And then of course sit back and enjoy the warmth and the beauty of the fire. 

Now, I don't want to make 9-volt Nomad into a venue of praise for home improvement. I love our home, but in general when it comes to home improvement—well, let's just say that almost nothing depresses me more effectively than even just five minutes of one of those TV shows in which the home-owners gravely consider whether it'll be granite or stainless steel for their kitchen counters, or whether a ten-foot ceiling is of sufficient height for the upstairs bathroom. These programs seem like prime instances of our culture's obsession with surfaces, and remind me that whole industries thrive on creating human dissatisfaction with life as it is, though life as it is would be beautiful and interesting enough if we bothered to look deeper than the all-consuming skin.

So. This post is not meant as encouragement to buy a stove. Really it's not. I intend it as a sort of balanced recollection. An attempt to trace a line of reasoning. I want to ask “why did we at Sunnyside get a wood-burning stove, and why might it be more than an extra, a vanity, a thing owned essentially for the sake of show?” 

Here are few reasons that I would put forward:

First, Northwest Indiana is prime ice storm territory, and in the aftermath of a really bad storm, it's possible for the power (and therefore the forced-air furnace) to be off for weeks. Now, my wife and I prefer it at least tolerably warm in the home in winter, and by that I mean oh sixty degrees (15 C) and a sweater. Our houseplants, which are largely tropical, would of course not take kindly to an indoor freeze; and many of these are heirlooms from my mother and grandmother, which I would never want to lose. Then too there are all our vegetable seedlings, which we start indoors in flats many weeks ahead of spring planting. Their loss would be a tremendous waste of labor, and would substantially reduce our harvest.

Second, we're trying to reduce our carbon footprint, and within certain parameters, heating with wood can be considered carbon neutral and sustainable. New trees can be grown to replace those that have been burned, and what carbon is released in their burning gets stored in their growing.

Third, it's a do-it-yourself kind of thing—heating with wood—and I like that. I like the idea of just saying no to the utility's gas, lugging in the splintery wood, and getting down to the business of keeping soulfully warm. I especially like the idea of getting up early on a cold morning and making a fire for my wife, whose need for warmth is tied up in the meaning of my existence. Then affection makes the labor light. Then, in the streets of the City of What's Difficult, I walk uphill, humming a tune of love.

Fourth, our wood-stove will serve as a means of travel! To the past! To the ends of the earth! You see, I have such fond memories of stoves and fires. When I was a boy living up in the high hills of Southern India, at about seven thousand feet, it would get plenty cold believe me, and we heated with wood sometimes, and had a wood-burning stove in our kitchen. I can remember so many rainy afternoons sitting in the kitchen on a yellow bench just letting the stove transmit its warmth to me—me like a grateful planet, and the stove, my sun. I remember one particular day, me coming home from school in the rain, and our housekeeper Pushpam toweling me down. She let me squat right in front of the stove to dry. I shivered extra-dramatically and she laughed. On another occasion, I got too close to the stove and branded a little length of my thigh on it. I still have that scar. 

Years later, when I was living in the highlands of New Guinea, and going to boarding school, I stayed in a boarding house that came equipped with a ginormous fireplace. There were coils above the fireplace to harvest the heat to heat our water. And every morning, as an agreeable daily chore, I would get up early in the quietness and light a fire in the hearth, so we all could have hot showers. Then I would go out walking on the red dirt roads of the base, and my hands would smell like ashes and embers half the morning. On Friday nights too sometimes, when everyone else in the boarding house was out doing something social, I would stay home and make a fire and sit and watch its lovely life cycle from fuel to flame to ash. This was oh-so-therapeutic for me. Sometimes the fire was my only company. 

Fifth, the stove can be considered a gift to others and to the future: when it's cold and we have guests for dinner. Or when there's that big emergency, which we hope doesn't come, but might. Then too, given the future that I see in store for us, which is a very uncertain one, I doubt if the stove will ever be replaced or torn out on a whim. I think people will see its value. 

So do these reasons convince you? I myself admit that I can't know for sure. Maybe it makes perfect sense to have it. Maybe a future of difficult circumstances will prove its purchase to have been a choice fortunate beyond belief. But maybe too, vanity is always mixed up in decisions like this, and you can't get away from that, no matter how hard you soup it up with poetic appreciations and semi-green homesteading/emergency-preparedness justifications.

Ah, what a bitter paradox it is—this conflict between two domesticities—between the comforts of our individual homes, and the health of our home-at-large the Earth, from whom so much is taken to provide those comforts! Sometimes I wonder whether we can do anything these days without tromping hard on the life of the planet. Humanity has heavy feet these days, there's no denying it. There are so many of us. And all of us want more than what we truly need. 

I like thinking about this stove's long ride into the future though, because I do anticipate that it'll have a longer life here at Sunnyside than I do. And what I hope more than anything else for the stove, is that whoever owns it after us, will use and love it too, and find meaning and poetry in the making of a fire. Of course, even with me, as time goes on, a good number of the initial pleasures of the brotherhood of the flame will doubtless wear thin, and the whole business of tending the stove will grow to be more of a chore. But then I'm not afraid of chores either. Chores are what makes the world go round. Chores are universal. Even Adam and Eve in the fabulous biblical garden seem to have had chores, and that was paradise.

HB

(Next Post Friday, November 28th)

"Hear Now, the Noble Theme"

The other day, I went to a lecture-recital given by two musicologists, one of whom we have gotten to know here at Sunnyside, because we like to invite people to dinner here. The point of the lecture was to propose an approximate date of composition for a violin sonata written by the Archduke Rudolph, who was a longtime friend and pupil of Beethoven. Some of the evidence offered (for dating it as they did) turned out to be purely musical in nature, and their reasoning went like this: “We know for certain that such and such piece by Beethoven was written in such and such a year, and it includes such and such a theme. Now, a theme found in the archduke's sonata is very similar to this one by Beethoven, and we think the pupil was probably imitating his teacher. So it seems likely that the Archduke's piece had to have been written after...”

Now I really get into this sort of thing. I just like it when other people solve these little puzzles of history and interpretation and then inform me of their findings. It provides a kind of vicarious scholarly thrill. “Hey that seems possible,” you can say. Or “Nah, I don't believe it.” But the point is, you yourself don't have to do the work. Someone else does it all for you, and you get to just sit there and hear them tell you what they've figured out. So what's not to like?

I also like the skepticism that decent historians have for their own work. You hear them say things like  “it seems likely,” or “we think it's possible,” or “it may be a bit of a stretch, but probably...” I'm a big fan of the reasonable doubt. I think humility is in order in almost all our endeavors, and I don't see enough of it afoot in the world.

Well, anyway, I found the lecture interesting, as well as convincing. As well as expressive of responsible humility. 

But there's one moment of that lecture that I want to zero in on here. 

Again, there were two presenters. Two musicologist/performers, and they delivered the lecture together, and occasionally as the lecture proceeded, they would play portions of the pieces in question, to illustrate their points. And at one point, one of them—the one who has visited us here at Sunnyside—said, in her beautiful German accent: 

“Hear now, the noble theme of the slow movement of Beethoven's Archduke trio.”

Well right away I knew I wanted to write something about that sentence: first of all, because it's a beautiful-sounding thing, just chock full of nice round o's, and don't you just love the lovely, formal, antique-sounding imperative “Hear now...” Most of all though, I took an immediate shine to the word “noble.” It heartened me. I believe it was an act of love, using that word. An act of philosophy too. 

How so? Well here's the thing. We live in a world obsessed with surfaces. With analytical reduction to component parts. And with supposedly objective measurement. We anatomize. We deconstruct. We do not characterize from the heart. "How could a set of notes be “noble?” we ask. “How can you prove they're noble. Where's your nobility measurement tool? What scale would you use?"

But here was a scholar who just didn't really seem to consider the possible doubters. She just said “Hear now, the noble theme...” Which really asserted a whole way of looking at life. A way that says “No, the heart matters. How we subjectively characterize a thing matters. And if I say the theme is noble, that's because that's how it feels to me. And sometimes it's important to say what you feel. Students, listen. Sure it's important to say what a thing looks like from the outside, but it's also important to articulate what you think may be “inside” of it, at the unseen heart of it. And to make that judgement from the inside of yourself.”

I hope I'm starting to make myself clear. 

Let me try from another angle too. Think of any human being you love. How is it possible to love someone without ascribing qualities to him or her? Sweetness, kindness, handsomeness, thoughtfulness... Likewise with every great work of music or literature or art, or with any aspect of the world. How after all, can we possibly relate to something, I mean, really clasp it to the heart, if we cannot say “this is what it makes me feel like. This is how I would describe it.” Then too, what is life, if not a period of time in which we're given (mysteriously!) the privilege of taking in the world and all those that inhabit it, and all the beautiful things they make and do, and of clasping them all, as many as possible, to our inmost heart? 

Now. This isn't to say anyone ever has to accept anyone else's personal characterization of anything as the final word. I might have listened to the “noble theme,” and after hearing it, decided that no, it wasn't exactly noble, but say "solemn" or "brooding" or oh, maybe even "chocolaty," or “indigo blue.”

(I like adjectives. They are one of the handiest ways of connecting ourselves to our experience. You say the right adjective and it's like you just roped yourself a calf. Or shot a swishy basket. Or finished a dot to dot when you were a kid.) 

So was it noble, the theme? Well, as it happened, when her colleague sat down at the beautiful, long, black, and shiny piano—and played the theme of the slow movement of Beethoven's Archduke trio—well, I sure felt that “noble” was right. Stately. Serene. Communicating a sense of power properly employed. Of restraint flowering from certainty of worth. Of merit made visible. Of quality declaring itself, spelling out its own true name. Sure, noble was right. Spot on. 

Now. To me becoming a nine-volt nomad is all about altering my perceptions. It's about trading in our culture's fanatic attachment to stuff and to gleaming surfaces. It's about letting go of the obsession with power and speed and efficiency and productivity and reputation for expertise. Maybe above all, it's about realizing once and for all that the universe isn't just going to cotton to all our wishes, so it would be way better for us to stop trying to make it do so, and instead appreciate it the way it is—the way it presents itself to us, take it or leave it. We can't have infinite economic growth. We can't have infinite sources of  energy sending us infinite flows of information forever. We can't have runaway prosperity in every way in our lives. We can't. The survival of the earth depends on us learning that we can't.

But! We can have the beauty and power of our minds. We can have interesting lectures. We can have friendship. We can have the music of Ludwig Van Beethoven. We can even have adjectives.

A friend of mine once told about a professor of his, who consistently referred to his wife as “the marvelous Alice.” This is, again, the sort of thing I'm talking about: consciously and persistently using the power of the mind to alter and refine its own relationship to the world at large. Not in order to manipulate and acquire. But to remind ourselves, with faithful consistency, what we cherish and where our sources of enchantment lie. 

“Hear now: the noble theme...” 

HB

(Next Post Wednesday, November 19th)

An Invitation

For those of you who haven't yet noticed, I've started a second blog, in which I am presenting a novelized version of my second stage-play, The Cliffs of Incognita. That play was premiered several years ago, and I am still proud of the production and the script. Nevertheless, for some time now I've wanted to do something more ambitious with it. I want more villainy. More politics. More enchantment in the place. More oaks. More moss. More epistemology. More grief and joy. More girlhood and boyhood. More questions. More butterflies. More logging. More of a eerie sense of parallel between the story's world and ours. In general more.

And so I am presenting The Cliffs of Incognita in a blog, creating it week by week in serialized form for as long as it takes to unfold what I hope will be the gorgeous mental silk of the story. I do this partly as a challenge in literary improvisation—a mental lark, a DIY dare—and partly too because I consider blogging to be as practical a means as any to force myself to move forward with an extended tale, and at a clip that takes into account my mortal nature! It's natural to be a little afraid of the larger project. It's a big, fat, and rocky something-to-climb and you look up and the whole unaccomplished thing looks down at you and says "ha, you?" You wonder how, page after page, you'll be able to keep up the quality. You worry for the integrity of the plot, which should be like a well-made dome; supporting itself from every testable spot. But the only way to see your way up to the view is to trust to your gifts and get to work and climb. And again, what better way to encourage the daily work of the literary ascent, than to publish your work piece by piece, and in a forum in which the whole argument all at once is neither expected, nor desired? A place where piecemeal improvisation and experimentation is almost the expectation. 

So. I think the blog's the ticket.

Vladimir Nabokov once compared literary drafts to sputum, and roundly condemned anyone who would show theirs around for observation. Hmm. That's a pretty strong opinion, one that's based on an image of writer-hood that I doubt was ever really embodied in any actual human being, even great VN himself. Here I mean the image of the indomitable and indefatigable craftsman, working in utter privacy, hunched at the desk. His many drafts snow him in. But the great salty snowplow of his mind plows on. 

I'm saying that the creation of literature actually happens much more socially than this, whether or not it feels that way to the writer. A writer may be responding to someone else's work (the Cliffs fits into this category.) Or maybe the writer has an argument with society at large—some injustice or evil to expose. Or maybe she sees something beautiful and holy and worth rejoicing in, and wants to hold that up for others to see and love and admire as well. Or maybe it's just the phenomenon of the world itself that fascinates or obsesses her, and she just has to get it all down dammit on paper. And the list goes on as lists tend to do, but in any case, none of this happens from one side. Nor by any means exclusively at the desk. I know I draft a lot of my work in discussion with friends and family, and in readerly conversation with my books. All of this is social. Changing. Relational. Inchoate. Provisional. Sputum-like, I suppose, if that's the way you have to think of it. Germy. Full of life's beginnings.  

Even when it comes to the actual written words, no writer can write at optimum quality without a sympathetic reader's eye as a guide. Again, even the great V. Nabokov—and he is truly great—had his canny and long-suffering wife Vera alongside him day after day, playing chess against him, driving him here and there to his butterfly-catching venues, and yes, critiquing his stories. 

Now of course with a extended project like The Cliffs, I expect that once the initial draft has been blogged to completion, all sorts of things are going to have to be taken apart, pieced together, and adjusted to get the whole machine to really fly. That's the breaks. That's the way the ball bounces. But none of this—none of it—means that a good writer, just like a good jazz musician, can't make something week after week, that's worth checking out. Fearless improvisation is the stuff of art. It's where the whole kit and kaboodle kicks off. It's how the game is played. 

All of which is to say that I can't promise a perfect Cliffs of Incognita the first time around. Only a fool would make a promise like that. I can, though, promise to make its creation an interesting ride, week after week, until a decent draft is done. 

So, if you haven't already checked it out, and you're willing to take the chance, please come over for a visit! The Cliffs of Incognita await you!

HB
(Next Post for 9-volt Nomad will be November 11)

Small Parable for Late Autumn

"Nuts," said our dear Barbara Enders, on being shown why her case was hopelessly inoperable. At which word a member of her soul's ecology that for years she had overlooked and ignored (it was so common) came scampering over the wires of her consciousness, made a leap, and landed on her shoulder, swishing its flag-like tail.

"Oh look!" it said, indicating the scan the doctor had set before her. "Your tumor, lodged in the blood vessels and dendrites of your brain, is like my nest clotted in the bare branches of December. It too is a sort of covered bridge over seasons, a shelter that some instinctively over-wintering part of you has built as storehouse and habitation."

And he went on to tell her what it might be like for her to curl up in that dark spot on the scan and [    ?    ],  [    ?    ] till, swayed by a wind whose warmth she'd surely recognize, she woke as one of the choice acrobats of spring. 

And from that day on till the end, Barbara walked around in a measured way, keeping the creature continually balanced on her shoulder, never bending too suddenly, and always looking out over the nearby cornfields for hawks and kestrels--not out of anxiety for herself of course, but lest this creature she now so loved should ever be startled into leaving.

HB 

Nothing Else To Do?

Yesterday at the Blackbird (a coffee shop here in town) I was shooting the breeze with a friend of mine. I don't see this friend much; he shows up every couple of weeks toward the end of the week and we talk, gosh about almost anything—the miracles of St. Francis, the age of the smart phone and the sad state of romance therein, the glories and vicissitudes of growing up on the South Side of Chicago and let's see what else, oh what the prince's name is, in Romeo and Juliet, and why, in a play that's all about names after all, his name might be meaningful. Et cetera.

Yesterday the topic for a few minutes anyway was my mother's letters, specifically my mother's letters from India. There's a bevy of them, two thick black binders' worth: a sort of papery airmail flock, its fluttery bounty a tribute to the power of her characteristic discipline and persistence. She was an industrious cultivator of words, good sturdy sentence-vines of them, hybrids of information and incident, bearing the fruits of clarity and nutritious common sense. Anyhow I was glorying a little just in the straightforward high number of them. Hundreds, I said. She wrote pretty much at a minimum once every two weeks. And how many of us ever manage to do something every two weeks without fail?

My friend seemed cheerfully unimpressed.

“Well of course she wrote,” he said. “There was nothing else to do, right?”

“What do you mean there was nothing to do? She was always working. Maybe especially in India.”

“She worked at home though right?”

“Well, yes, a lot of the time. Though she also taught.”

“But so I mean her mind. There was nothing for her mind in that work.”

“Oh, you think she lived in a continual mental haze, caused by all the boring household work? 

“Well, work is work, right?”

I took a deep breath.

Mom's gone now; she has been for six years. But the house where Dad still lives in Minnesota was the house where she died, and so there's plenty there that still reminds the family of her. To us the house drips with the memory of her the way the trees drip after a storm that's past. Like the perennial garden that she started out behind the garage. Or the bird feeder outside the window that was her last view of things. And all the household stuff that she handled and had some feeling for: her coffee mug, her measuring cups and spoons. A big waterpot from India made of brass. Or the houseplants. Or the letters.

I went out to Minnesota just last week, in part to find the letters and bring them back home with me to copy and scan; and now that I'm back, I've spent some time looking them over and reading a few. I love them, not just for the woman who wrote them, but truly for what they say, and for the daily domesticity they describe—a domesticity incidentally practiced largely without the benefit of the conveniences and mechanical servants of the industrialized West. Which in turn means that her work as a homemaker in that faraway place can serve as an example for me as I strive at Sunnyside to do with less of all that myself: less carbon, less electricity, less machinery, less reflex-expectation of leisure and ease.  

You see, the facts as I see them are these:

• The planet suffers, truly suffers, from humanity's excessive pursuit of material wealth.
• Humans suffer too from the consequences of that same pursuit. We suffer from a lack of meaningful labor. From the unequal distribution of what is truly good in life. From being too busy to attend to friendships and family. From separation from the true source of our vitality, which is in fact our home the earth.
• We must change. And if we do not change by choice, all sorts of changes will come upon us against our will; either way we end up in the same place: needing to do more for ourselves with less. 
• Why not be ahead of the game? Why not change now?
• The surest way to accomplish the necessary universal change is to look homeward. Home is not just where the heart is, but where it changes too.
• On the way to change, which is to say, on the way back home, we MUST get away from the idea that physical labor, in and of itself, is dehumanizing, stupefying, a bore and a chore and a thing to do our very slippery darndest to avoid.

All of this suspicion we harbor for the domestic arts and all this abiding by the notion that they diminish our minds is in fact childish and silly. It is itself a kind of pap and candy for the mind. We suck on it as a tasty way to pretend that the way we live now is the nicest and the best. It's time to grow up and learn. 

I bring up my mother and her fine letters (to her own intelligent mother) in order to say this: reading them, you sense that this was one whip-smart, complete-kit of a woman, this Karen Bjornstad living in the high hills of Southern India (foreign to her), standing in line in 1973 for any available gallon of kerosene, bargaining in Tamil for moong dhal, or bravely drawing, as part of one of those letters, a shaky but serviceable diagram of a washing machine part that needed replacing. Now you tell me: Was this woman everything she was DESPITE all that daily, largely-domestic work? Or is it just possible, and maybe even a wee-bit-more-than-passably likely, that the daily challenges of keeping a home in that place and in those days, far from dumbing her down and boring her, actually served to sharpen her mind, nerve her spirit, pump up her strength, characterize and delineate her soul?

Any venue of human existence can be a vale of soul making or field of grand endeavor, although sometimes, paradoxically, to make it so, we must actually arrange to make the work more difficult. Especially in these latter days, when machines surround us, insulating us from physical reality, defining us by what we no longer have to do for ourselves, convincing us in fact that to do without machines is to regress and become less human. As if the more machines we had, the more human we'd become!

I can almost feel the traditional feminists, the hopeful progressive technologists, and the economists who would see nothing wrong with attaching our schoolchildren by IV's to computers if that prepared them for their career--all rolling their eyes at once. Our future is limitless! they say. Resources are boundless because human ingenuity is boundless. The financialization of the economy has saved us and will continue to save us. The best measure of respect is money, and what, you patriarchal throwback, do you want us all to be making doilies again?

But I persist. I persist because I respect my own intelligence and my own experience. I persist because I myself, a capable intelligent man, do a great deal of the day-to-day work at Sunnyside, and have done so now for years; and furthermore I find that work to be full of food for the mind: in fact for the whole of me. I persist because I believe the body has a basic dignity and that therefore the work that the body does has a basic dignity too. I persist because the sharpness of our minds is dependent on the health of the body, and the health of the body is dependent on movement, and household labor is necessarily full of movement. I persist because we are incarnate beings for whom the features of our physical environment and how they match our hearts and how directly they flow from our hands are fundamentally important. I persist because for generations and generations the manifold crafts of kneading the bread dough to make it rise, and hemming up trousers to make them fit, and of gathering herbs for healing, and of engineering children's routines in such a way as to protect their peace and joy, and of planting gardens by the signs, and of preserving their bounty safely: all, all this has been the daily challenge of huge portions of the human race. And do we really want to say all that endeavor is as nothing, at least when compared to a well-paid office job?

I said a fair bit of this to my father and wife and son out in Minnesota last week, in conversation with them about living on less, and I said it again to my friend in the coffee shop here in Valparaiso just a few days later. I say it again here at 9-volt now. I say it because I believe it. I say it for the sake of the healing of humanity. I say it for the sake of the healing of the earth.

HB

A Picture of Happiness

It's not about being right. It's not about being able to say I told you so. It's not about the state of the weather. It's not about everything going your way. It's not about being in luck. It's not about relationships always working out. It's not about understanding quantum physics. It's not about people recognizing you on the street and waving. It's not about your ideal weight. It's not about your father's or your mother's approval. It's not about material security—cash or silver, or the value of your portfolio, or the appraised value of your home. It's not about having the right skills-set for the era. It's not about the laundry being done. It's not about owning beautiful, unbroken things. It's not about being voted most likely to succeed, or following that up with actual success. It's not about your underwear. It's not about the stain on the tablecloth. 

A lot of what people call the blessings of life are nice to have. And when these come to you, it's appropriate to be grateful. It makes sense to smile when they arrive. But they're extras. You'll take them when they come. You'd be a fool not to. But do you need them for happiness? No.  

It's not about a colorful and convincing resume. It's not about the temperature of the house in winter. It's not about knowing for sure if there is or isn't a God. Again, it's not about being right. No, it's definitely not about being right.  

So what is the stuff then? What's happiness?

Well one thing's for sure it's experienced in the now only. It's receptivity now. It's generosity now. It's allowing someone else's pain to touch you now. It's that red and yellow leaf falling with such grace and unconcern and beauty now. It's the touch of reassurance from your friend right now. It's listening to that music right now, not just on the surface, but as deep down as the music goes. Oh gosh yes, it's about depths. It's about paying attention to how deep down and how far back you yourself go—the wisdom that you've accumulated over the years, the experiences you've had. It's about respecting your own mind. It's about reverence for your own life and for the lives of all living things. 

It's about trying. It's about taking the risk. It's about saying yes, but often enough it's also about saying no. It's about accepting other people's answers (yes or no) with equanimity and poise. It's about living in your body. It's about taking the time. It's about praying if it's in you to pray. It's about crying if it's in you to cry. It's about allowing your life to contradict itself sometimes. It's about letting yourself lie back on this or that paradox of existence, the way that you can float on water if you just lie back. It's about a golden pear in the hand, ripe and curved and full of an understood sweetness. It's about biting in now and tasting. It's about the thought that the kingdom of heaven is something that can be known now, like that pear; and by the way all the wisest people who have ever lived seem to agree on that, East or West. 

Happiness is about traveling between your heart and anothers. Your mind and another's. Your soul and another's. Your well-being and another's. It's about dying into the distances between you. According to the poet William Blake, it's about dying many little deaths each day for the sake of another.

In general, your happiness shouldn't depend on the attitude of others toward you. It shouldn't depend on the vagaries of fate. If it does, then your happiness is poorly grounded. Its foundation is inadequate. Even cracked. 

In general, happiness is probably what you're feeling when you're most free of the question of happiness and how to achieve it. It's probably something that can't really be achieved at all. 

And yet it's not wholly a gift either. It requires a certain consciously chosen attitude of inner attenuation. You aim yourself like an antenna to receive it. Or it's like the fisherman throwing the fly in just the right place in the stream where the fishes are going to be biting, but without really trying either, just knowing, just doing. 

Some people will say happiness is a shallow thing to pursue, or too vague in definition to care about. But I say it's maybe neither shallow nor deep, and that we know it well enough when we see it, and that yes, it has something to say about us. Let's not call it a destination. Let's say it's more like a measure of your speed. Or your direction of travel. Let's say that it's just one means of many to give you a read on how you're proceeding. Where you are in life. What you're about. Where you ought to be going. 

Certainly it is not everything, happiness. It may be in fact that our expertise in the field of feeling grief is every bit as vital to our depth as human beings. 

HB

Ten Green Commandments, Articulated in the Positive Polarity

1. Thou shalt love the earth for its own sake, thine own, and for the sake of others, for love is the only sustainable policy, and the earth humanity's only home.
2. Thou shalt unlearn the poor, monotonous language of money as it relates to the earth, and seek instead to unleash the many rich languages of reverence, including languages of thy very own individual design (rich in action verbs).
3. Thou shalt banish despair; it is the dark flag of apocalypse.
4. Thou shalt banish as well, however, all glib talk of easy solutions to our planetary troubles, particularly those “solutions” that appeal because they ask nothing of thee (except perhaps to shop).
5. Thou shalt inhabit thine own body as richly as possible; truly it is an engine of delight.
6. Thou shalt declare bodily movement in the home a basic force for necessary change, and follow through with action. Shovels, washboards, and mixing spoons shall almost adhere to thee. Other humans will see and follow suit.
7. Thou shalt consider relationship, memory, beauty, and creativity, the only sure currencies of meaning in thy life. Stuff is shallow. Money merely instrumental.
8. Day by day, exactly where thou art, shalt thou cultivate a pilgrim's marveling, receptive heart; for there is no literal movement necessary for wonder, except perhaps a widening of thine eyes.
9. Garden trellis and wash tub, screw driver and scythe, cooking flame and slotted spoon: by these shalt thou steer thy way toward freedom, as fugitives once followed the drinking gourd.
10. Thou shalt exercise mercy toward thine own self and thine efforts in relation to these commands. Inflexibility and inclemency are hallmarks of the Machine.  

HB

The Lost Keys to Happiness

Back when I was in college (now some twenty five years ago) it was a running joke with my roommate how often I found myself frantically searching my side of the room for my keys, or how often I'd come running back into the room some five minutes after leaving for class, having realized I had left my keys behind. I accepted the jibes, at least after I found the truant keys, but to my memory, never once in all my four years as a student--never once!--did I sit down to consider just what such a habit of misplacement and forgetfulness might mean. About the unwarranted busyness of my hours. About the unquiet in my mind. 

I mark it down as an improvement that these days I lose track of my keys only rarely. Nevertheless, it does happen; and when it does, I still find myself pretty dependably reluctant to draw any conclusions about the event beyond the moment. “General?” I say. “Say anything general about my life? No no, it was just a temporary lapse; just gravity acting at the wrong time, making me drop them. It was that stupid local advertising flyer okay? I laid it down over my key ring and fob, which made me accidentally lose sight of them!” And of course there's no need to fixate on literal keys alone. Missed appointments are lost keys. Fits of temper are lost keys. Tears of stress are lost keys. 

There is a hermetic proverb that declares that the everyday realities of our daily life mirror and refer to a larger macrocosmic order. The proverb goes: “As above, so below.” And we might just as easily alter the proverb and say, “As in your outer life, so within.” “Look at your life,” we ought to say to ourselves more often. “Take its events into your heart for purposes of reflection and diagnosis." When stress rules our lives; when schedules are so crowded they feel like ferries about to capsize; when necessary objects such as keys go AWOL on a regular basis--what does all this suggest about our inner lives? A lack of the food for reflection perhaps? A disconnection from the sources of sanity? A poorly meditated set of values? A dearth of music, deeply heard, or of other forms of beauty? 

Just the other day, I ran across a sixteenth century poem by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, called “The Means to attain Happy Life:” which I think might just as easily be called “The Keys to the Happy Life,” or even “The Lost Keys to the Happy Life.” It begins:

Martial, the things that do attain
The happy life be these, I find:
The richesse left, not got with pain,
The fruitful ground, the quiet mind.... 

I like it that the poem is addressed to someone called “Martial,” which of course, suggests someone used to fighting. Someone given to solving trouble with discipline, organization, order, and machines that multiply your strength. Is Martial the sort of person we're trying to be--as soldiers of the schedule? As the prize-fighters of career ambition? As faceless troopers marching to the beat of universal consumption and a narrowly defined prosperity? 

Yet look at the advice the poem offers!  “Don't work so hard for happiness,” it says, “Don't try to force it. Trust to the fruitful ground. To the quiet mind. Trust the riches that come to you free more than the riches that cost so much in spirit to attain."

The poem runs beautifully on:

The equal friend, no grudge, no strife.
No charge of rule, nor governance,
Without disease, the healthful life,
The household of continuance.

The mean diet, no delicate fare;
True wisdom join'd with simpleness;
The night discharged of all care,
Where wine the wit may not oppress. 

The faithful wife, without debate;
Such sleeps as may beguile the night:
Contented with thine own estate
Ne wish for death, ne fear his might.

I wont' try to paraphrase it all. It's clear enough isn't it, that here was a man who, despite the privileges that might have blinded him, (privileges, let's admit it, of wealth and rank that he enjoyed as an earl), understood that true happiness depends not so much on what one can count and control, but on gifts beyond the individual's immediate power to invoke or even precisely define--friendship, human love, intimate social interaction, the ability of food to nourish us, a decent night's rest: none of these, NONE, can be forced into being, or bought, but rather must be accepted as gifts when they arrive, and then tended like a pleasant fire within a general atmosphere of generosity, gratefulness, freedom, common sense, conviviality, and trust.

Now. If such gifts as Henry Howard enumerates truly are the keys to the happy life, how have we lost them?

• We have lost them by lack of reflection.
• We have lost them by asking too much of ourselves in some dimensions, and not enough in others.
• We have lost them by asking too much of the planet.
• We have lost them by forgetting the word "enough."
• We have lost them by taking for our own exclusive use what ought in fairness to belong to others as well. 
• We have lost them.
• We have lost them by losing track in our vocations of what makes us personally passionate. We have followed money instead of our hearts.   
• We have lost them by neglecting our families.
• We have lost them in the noise and the glare of electronic distraction. 
• We have lost them. 
• We have lost them by thinking of time as a means to an end (such as making money) and not as pure gift.
• We have lost them by neglecting to cultivate our inner lives with the beauty of art and with the ordinary warmth of the outdoor sun.
• We have lost them in the belief that everything that we humans make for ourselves at great expense is an improvement on what nature gives us for free.
• We have lost them in the foolish belief that power trumps beauty. That speed trumps meditation. That efficiency trumps happiness. 
• We have lost them.  

Time to consider how to get them back. Time to seek a different way. 

HB

The Young Man and The Flute

Once there was a young man who left home in search of a way to make his mark on the world. One day in his journeying he came to a forest, where he heard the sound of a flute. It was such a beautiful sound that he entered the forest in search of it. 

But the sound came from deeper in the forest than he had guessed. Even after several hours of his pursuing it, it still sounded in the distance, and then not at all. It grew dark. The young man took shelter in the hollow of a large tree and the next morning sought a way out of the forest. About mid-morning he heard the flute again, but he did not go in search of it. Instead he cursed it for leading him astray. "Perhaps," he thought, "it will even prove to have led me to my death."

But that afternoon he stumbled upon a stream where a bearded old man sat playing a wooden flute, making the sparkles on the water scatter and dance in intricate patterns according to the melodies he played. As the young man listened and watched, he was overcome with a desire to learn the same skill. He went up to the old man and begged to be taught. 

"Ah, it's not what you think," the old man said. But the young man persisted and at length convinced the old man to take him on as a pupil.

So the young man stayed and learned the secrets of the flute. He learned the melodies to summon starlight and to make it fringe the pine boughs, and the melodies to make moonlight fall in soft rustles of light as if it were a lovely woman letting down her golden hair. Sunlight, the young man discovered, was more difficult--like untamed, flashing horses. Yet eventually he could braid bits and bridles of light and set those steeds galloping across the sky, right and left above the forest floor.

Then one day the old man said, "I will take you back to the road. You have learned everything you can from me, and the flute is yours." So the young man followed his master out to the forest's edge, and, after thanking the old man, set out for the nearest town. He dreamed of his new power. With it, he thought, he would find love, gain fame, maybe even become a great king.

That evening at an inn, the young man decided he would make a start on his dreams. It had been raining for days, and the firewood was soaked, so that in the great hall of the inn, the fire smoldered dismally. The young man bet the innkeeper and all those gathered at the tables in the hall that he could make the fire burn brighter, without touching it or even blowing on it. 

"And how will you manage this?" asked the innkeeper.

"With a melody from this," said the young man, drawing out his flute. Laughter burst out on all sides and the innkeeper and everyone in the hall gladly accepted the grounds of the bet, as the young man put the flute to his lips. 

The melody he played was lovely, high and shimmering, but soon it was drowned out by laughter, because to the young man's surprise and consternation, no matter how he played the firelight burned no differently: no brighter or warmer or friendlier or cleaner. He stopped playing and stared at the flute in astonishment. But no, it was the same flute; you could tell by the beautiful inscriptions in the wood and the unmistakable tones it had produced. The young man put the flute away, paid the innkeeper and the patrons the money he had bet (it was all the money he had), and hurriedly left the inn.

For days he wandered, despairing that the flute had lost its power. He would take the flute out in some isolated spot and play, hoping against hope. But still, nothing: no starlight resting on the pine boughs, no sunlight willing to be tamed. He thought of turning back and entering the forest again, but he sensed he would not find the old man there.

Since he had no more money, he was forced to play on the streets of the towns he wandered through, and to put his hat out in front of him on the road for whatever people would give him. All who heard him play were amazed at the loveliness of the flute's tone and at the beauty of the melodies he played, and he earned enough to keep himself clothed and fed. But the young man hardly heard his own music, because it no longer gave him the power he had dreamed of using. In fact, it so depressed him to keep playing that one day he decided to rid himself of the instrument and with it, his misfortunes. He went to a bridge over a deep river and held the flute above the moving water. 

Just then an old blind man tapping his stick along the surface of the road, arrived at the bridge. He stopped and begged the young man for alms.

The young man turned from viewing the water. "I have nothing, old man," he said, "but a few pennies that I must keep, and this miserable flute that I am about to throw into the water."

"Play to me then," said the old man, "Before you let it go. I love to hear music."

The young man sighed. It would do no harm to play for the beggar. And, he thought, since it was to be the last time he played the instrument, he would play it well. So he played the loveliest tune he knew, a tune that in his days in the forest, had made the meteors run in streaks down heaven. He played so beautifully, that the old man, listening, wept. 

"Once," said the young man, "this flute was magical."

"Ah" replied the old man, as he moved along, "if only you could see."

The sound of the blind man's tapping grew dim; the young man was overcome with remorse. He suddenly understood that all his foolish wishes to become great in the world's eyes meant nothing, for what could be more meaningful than what had just passed between him and the beggar? He repented of his wish to destroy the flute and from that day forward played it gladly. And although the flute had a strange way of keeping itself a secret--the young man never became famous, and when he died, the flute was lost--it was said that near the end, he could make even the most hard-hearted miser weep with it, the most miserable orphan smile. 

And sometimes when he played (people said) the smallest, loveliest things would happen: the shoe on a horse would unexpectedly flash, or a water drop splashed from a pail would throw a bright, momentary rainbow before it fell to the dust.

HB