"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
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Sunday, October 19, 2014
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:
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
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
Sunday, October 12, 2014
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
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
Sunday, October 5, 2014
Ten Green Commandments, Articulated in the Positive Polarity
- 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.
- 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).
- Thou shalt banish despair; it is the dark flag of apocalypse.
- 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).
- Thou shalt inhabit thine own body as richly as possible; truly it is an engine of delight.
- 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.
- Thou shalt consider relationship, memory, beauty, and creativity, the only sure currencies of meaning in thy life. Stuff is shallow. Money merely instrumental.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
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