Many Verbs Make the Hummus Light

Hummus, the creamy pasty stuff that's good for dipping with vegetable sticks and falafel, is made with chickpeas. Lots of chickpeas. And chickpeas come with skins, little saggy sleeves of vegetable matter that the peas can't shrug off by themselves, even with a good and proper boiling. Now say (just say!) you're making your own hummus. And you dream of it light and creamy. Well, for the creation of that light and creamy hummus, the skins need to come off of the peas. And yet taking the skin off of each cooked chickpea is a bore. Each one has to be picked individually up and slipped out of the skin. This takes time, patience, and over the course of many minutes of labor, even a little finger strength.  

Now I know that all sorts of methods have been proposed to make the job easier. It may be that some of these methods even work. But I'm not here today to recommend a chickpea-skinning efficiency hack. I'm here to recommend the opposite. 

I'm bringing up the skinning of chickpeas as an illustration of a whole class of labor that we pretty much wholly reject these days. Arduous, we call it. Boring. Mind-numbing. Manual. These adjectives are like the bright dashed lines that utility workers paint onto the lawn-grass. They indicate there's something deeper underground: in this case a copious pipeline of disdain. Need to weed the lawn of dandelions? Don't root them out with a dandelion digging tool; just spray and kill with herbicide! Dishes need washing? Put them in the dishwasher with some soap powder, flick a switch. Want to copy a poem? Call it up on a website and print the darned thing out. Then, with the time you've just saved, go do something more meaningful.

But what if this is just flat out wrong? Or mostly wrong? Or even just partly wrong? What if food is better, precisely because our own hands were involved in its making? What if poems are more enjoyable precisely because we copy them out by hand with a pen or with the percussive strike of typewriter keys? What if the reason we equate physical labor with meaninglessness is that we keep stubbornly neglecting to add something essential to the labor itself? Such as singing? Such as children playing in background? Such as the swapping of stories? Such as listening to the birds? Such as the simple striving to feel a Zen affection for the present moment? 

Especially conversation makes work go sweetly by. There is no human gift so beautiful and everyday as the gift of conversation. And yet we discount it. Avoid it. Replace it with machines. I think we should do more conversing. And I think that, to encourage us to do more of it, we ought to do boring chores, more of them, just in general more.

As you may have guessed, not long ago Sunnyside was witness to the skinning of a certain population of chickpeas. I do not remember all the particulars of that episode of labor: exactly how long it took, or even what time of day it was when I myself took part in the work of de-skinning. I think it was late morning. But I do remember this. I was with my wife. And we sat across the dining room table from one another, and, as we did the work with our hands, that is, as we picked up peas from one metal bowl, skinned them, and deposited them nude and glistening into a different bowl, bing, we talked. And now the jar of tasty hummus that sits in our refrigerator, is also a sign of meaning exchanged, stories transferred. It is part of the cement of relationship, a gift to ourselves that she and I made together. 

I really am saying we ought to do more chores, if we possibly can, and especially if we can do them together, and especially if the chores in question give us space to talk with one another: maybe in silence, because even certain kinds of silence can be forms of conversation, but probably more often with actual nouns and verbs strung together aloud to communicate love and to create a common story.

As Eve says to Adam in Paradise Lost:

With thee conversing I forget all time,/All seasons and their change, all please alike...

Time to talk. Time to weed the garden. Skin the peas. Try it. Really. Maybe instead of boredom you'll feel something more like the return of time itself, which is to say, the return of light and creamy nutritious life.

HB

How to Deal With the Pain

So. True harm has been done to you. Real injury. Particular injustice. How to respond? 

No need to multiply the sum of anger and sorrow in this life. No need.
No need to extend the hurt beyond the circle of what's done. No need.
No need to daily anatomize the wrongs done to you. No need.
No need to endlessly rehearse the anger. No need.
No need to tell and retell the outrage. No need.

Always keep the task of healing in view. 

Bring friends into your service as forces of prayer and pondering.

Consider your own past as a tool for the understanding of truth. Precedent often has something to say. 

Consider relevant scripture. 

Seek reconciliation in person. Legal tools are blunt and brutal.

Do not fear failure, even if you know you cannot possibly win.

Believe that there is not a human being on this earth who is not made in the image of God. Whom you must honor in person. Every person. Including yourself.


HB 

The Boy, the Dog, and the Money

Once I was mugged at dog-point. I was twelve years old, biking through a park after school, when the huge animal was suddenly right alongside me, snapping at my ankles. I got off and put the bike between me and him, a barricade of Schwinn, while he barked and bristled and in general made me understand he did not much like my living looks, and would do his best to turn me inside out. I was at that time maybe five feet tall. The dog may have been as heavy as me. Of course when you're talking about a dog that size, he might as well have been an archangel. I shook. Every inch of me.

Then, at a command, the dog retreated. Two men came near. One of them demanded money.

I turned the pockets of my pants inside out and there was precisely nothing in my pockets except a few pieces of lint, so he told me to get going you little shit. I got back on the bike and pretended to be off. 

Though actually I did my best to track the three. I doubled back and followed at a distance. In a parking lot bordered by trees, the three of them got into their two door sedan. The dog jumped in first. It still kind of breaks my heart to think of that moment: the creature jumping into the back seat, in that eager scrabbling way that dogs often have of getting into cars. Enthusiastic. Full of the desire to please. He was just like any dog that knew his way around his life, and his owner's life. He might as well have just come from an innocent hour at the beach, catching Frisbee tosses. Though in fact he had just been used to mug a twelve year old boy. 

Nothing came of my trying to get close enough to read the license plate. When I got home, I told my mother what had happened. She called the police, and an officer arrived. He asked a lot of good questions, the ones you'd expect, among them:

"Did they take anything?”

“Five dollars,” I said. Which yes, was embellishment. Why did I lie like this? Why did I say that the men and the dog had taken money? There's only one reason, I think: I wanted to be taken seriously. And the only guarantee of that, I thought, lay in saying that money had been subtracted from my pockets.  Otherwise no one would really care. So I thought. 

Later that afternoon, I went to catechism class—getting there a little late on account of everything that had happened. All my classmates had been apprised of events by the pastor, who, when I came in through a door in the back of the room, was sitting in front, at a lectern, on a tall metal stool. His eyes, filled with kindness and concern, found mine across the distance of the room.

“How are you?” he asked. Fine, I answered quietly, fine, though of course this was not precisely true. I took a seat, not far from a girl I liked, but not too close to her either, because there's a certain distance from what you love that helps you believe in its continual perfection. Class proceeded. Maybe we were talking about the creed: "We all believe in one true God."

(Who is not the god of Money.)


HB 

Rich in Opinion, Rich in Mind

For most of us, one is never enough, right? Cars, houses, adoring admirers, flowers, beaches in Costa Rica, sets of silver, Olympic gold medals...I mean, you could always accept another one, right? And not complain?

But opinions? No, not opinions! When it comes to opinions, we want only one, and that's the right one. Which is ours. The rest we go on the hunt for and destroy, like old one-legged Ahab and the white whale. Gotta get it. I'll take the whole ship down if necessary, drown every sailor of kind intention and cabin boy of sympathy, but that wrong opinion's got to go.

But why DON'T we want to be rich in opinions? Why should we NOT want to be of many minds? I myself say that certainty is boring. Insistence generally ugly. It's a mono-cropping of the intellectual life. A one-party totalitarianism of the heart. Away with it! Remind me of the earth, and its myriad geologic and animal forms, and make my mind a mirror of its multiplicity. Give me Shakespeare with his rebels and kings. Give me opinions galore. Stuff me with opinion. Not just to inform me, mind you, but to feed me. In order that I might digest it all, and turn it all to fuel for the natural impulses of my mind. Sure, there's going to be stuff that's bitter to me. Or over-sweet. Sure there will be material that does not nourish me. But even that gristle and fiber is necessary to the process. Right? Left?

I meet weekly with a friend, whose opinions are so far to the right, you might confuse him for a gutterball that missed Alabama. Or a really late release on a Frisbee throw. He believes that socialists hate children. That all rapists should be executed. That pedophile priests were, nearly without exception, communist infiltrators. And most interestingly, that William Shakespeare of Stratford was a superbly subversive Catholic saint of sorts, writing in a perpetual allegorical code to fellow underground believers, all aching for sermons on the stage. Shylock is not a Jew; he's Henry VIII. And Cassio in Othello is really blessed John Cassian. And Othello in general is a theatrical analysis of Aquinas's theology of the will. (I keep telling him to start a blog, because people might be interested.)

But the point is, when I meet with him, do I agree with him? Um no, not generally. Do I listen? I certainly do. These days, I jump at any chance to interact with another well-read human mind. Well-read minds are getting rare. Then too even his opinions, as opinions, interest me. Sure, sometimes they seem like curiosities of crankiness. More often though, if you dig, you find some genuinely stable metaphysical stance that underlies it, which gives it all consistency and sense, at least to him. Here is man who believes in the Holy Sefiroth. The sands of purgatory. Limbo for unbaptized infants. Why wouldn't he perceive Dante's Inferno in parts of Chicago?

Now. Should I avoid him, and instead have a long discussion with someone whose views I generally agree with? I suppose it depends. Solidarity has uses of its own. Still, I find that when I simply agree with those around me, I lose much of my own sense of the value of my argument. I forget why that view is meaningful to me. I am not moved even to speak articulately about it. I'm like a man between facing mirrors, getting littler and littler the more he repeats himself. When, however, I'm with someone intelligent whose cast of thought and habit of mind truly differs from my own, well then...

How about a metaphor to describe what happens? 

I wash the laundry here at Sunnyside, using a plunger and a utility tub. All the clothes of all Sunnysiders go into the tub at once. One motley mix. One slapdash sartorial salad. This is like a healthy mix of opinions in a room. Now there are clothes in the tub that do not fit me and never will. Clothes that feel way too rough, or maybe ridiculously soft for me. They'll never be mine. Nevertheless I throw mine in with the clothes that are not mine and agitate the whole population together in the tub. Each piece rubs against the other, and voila they ALL come out cleaner for the rubbing. 

Just so: I'm saying that the process of jostling opinions together in discussion and conversation provides us all with what might usefully be called the cleanliness of communal sanity. It's not that we'll all start wearing one another's clothes. It's just that the clothes are better for the agitation. The togetherness in spin. 

The metaphor is not perfect. It makes sense only if, in the discussion we're comparing the washing to, everyone actively participates; and we have to remember that such participation always, always demands active, sympathetic listening. Good listening is hard to come by in this culture. I think we could all use more practice, listening with the heart. Almost stethoscopically. 

Beat beat.

HB

Goats, Books, and Nomads

The imagination is the real nomad.  Books are its goats.

HB

Nomads and goats often come as a package deal. A symbiotic bundle. An interdependent two-fer.  The goats, for their participation in the relationship, mostly get protection from predators, along with some helpful midwifery when they have kids. Also their sores and hoof-troubles are tended to.  As for the nomads, eventually they get meat, and from day to day, milk. And from the milk they make curds and cheese. Plus as anyone knows who has spent any time with goats, goats serve as entertainment units. They're fun to watch and interact with. 

There are good reasons to emulate nomads. For instance, nomads are indefatigable walkers, and we should all probably walk more than we do. Nomads play flutes and drums. More of us should play flutes and drums. Nomads generally have only a few changes of beautiful clothes, and when it comes to possessions of all kinds (not just clothes) “few-but-beautiful” really is a good all-around philosophy.  Finally, nomads are always out in the wind and weather; adopting their closeness to the elements would do us good as well. Not only would we be healthier, but also we would probably treat the earth better if we knew where it was. (Hint: look underfoot and around.) 

I think that dissatisfaction in life can often be summed up by saying we feel stuck. Hemmed in. Can't. Move.  Not without losing the house. Not without giving up the job. Not without setting aside your pride. Not without, not without...What to do? Well, emulate a nomad and move on of course! Though there we sometimes need goading, reminding, and  inspiration. 

Which is where the goats come in: goats that are like books, books that are like goats. Goats, mind you, remind their herder-nomads that hey the pastures here in this location are cropped as far down as they can go. "It's dryyyyy heeeere," they say out loud. "Aaaall the grass is eeeeaten." And so on. They bleat. They insist. They suck in their stomachs to show their ribs. They stop giving milk. Finally their nomads move on. 

Well, the best books can do the same good services for us. They can alert us to what's wrong. They can tell us it's time to change. They can inspire us to move on. Take Walden for instance. Walden is pretty much a lead goat for me. For instance:

When we consider...what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.

Now, when you're feeling that general sense of stuckness in life, how could you possibly ask for more inspiring words, or anything better suited to opening your mind to new possibilities: ones not necessarily more ambitious in the worldly sense, but tending much more toward human happiness and flourishing?

So. What are you reading these days? What goat of a book is leading you on, to new pastures of mind and soul? And hey, just as playful coda, here are a few other ways that books are like goats:

• They both demand your time. Lots of it. It takes time to milk a goat. It takes time to milk a book.
• Both books and goats love a good view. Just look at bookshelves, where all the books stand and look out as far as they can... And goats, well they'll climb positively anything.
• Neither a goat nor a book cares what you think of it. Which is part of what makes both goats and books so valuable as critics.

HB

Advice to Myself

There is no optimal time for writing.
Or rather, the optimal time is almost certainly now.

Write when you are happy, that your words might proceed from the authority of someone who knows happiness.

Write when you are hungry, that your words might proceed from the authority of someone who knows hunger.

Write when you are in love, that your words might proceed from the authority of someone who knows love.

Write when you are in grief, that your words might proceed from the authority of someone who knows grief.

Write even in moments of fatuousness, that your words might proceed from the authority of someone who knows what it is to be fatuous.

Write even in your sleep, if you can will it. 

Likewise with every state of mind and feeling in the heart. Let none of them lack expression. And dedicate to each and every act of their expression the fullness of your intelligence, the four-fold completeness of your being: passions, senses, imagination, mind. 

Above all, hold nothing back. Believe.

HB

Honesty, Action, Meaning

It would be nice to say: “there are no easy answers to these questions about consumption and travel and the general burning of carbon.” But that, I think, would be dishonest.  No, at least some of the answers are actually pretty easy:

• Stay where you are.
• Love what you have.
• Share what you own.
• Make what you need.
• Grow what you eat.

It's ACCEPTING the answers that's hard. Especially if, in the word “accepting,” you include the notion of following through. Acting upon the truth. Changing your life.

Yes the changes can be painful. Especially at the start. The extraordinary thing though, is that the more you change your life, the more the changes surround and bless you with their own frame of reference. Your expectations reset themselves. Your tastes change. Some wishes positively disappear. 

But, how could traveling less give me a happier life, if traveling makes me happy? 

Or, how could not owning and consuming make me happier, if I just like to own and consume?

Well, there is really only one way to accomplish any of this. And it's NOT to say “travel is stupid.” Or “possessions are bad.” Or “consumption is selfish.” No the thing to do instead, is to take the life you adopt without travel, and make it into a life that does for you what traveling does. It's to take the life you adopt with fewer possessions and make it into a life that does for you what possessions do.  It's to take the life you adopt with less consumption, and make it into a life that does for you what consumption does. 

I'm not talking here just about taking a bad thing and making it into something that passes for good. This is not the proverbial “taking a lemon and making lemonade.”

Nor is this just about making do with less of something you really like. It's not giving a big sigh and going panning for gold flakes after you fail to break into Ft. Knox for an ingot.

It's something deeper. TS Eliot, in a different, though not SO different context, speaks of it this way:

...To arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.

The point is that once you've committed to a certain kind of life and faithfully entered it, that life itself will transform you to fit the new pattern. You're changed by changing your life, and so you naturally feel at one with the change. It's something like getting into the water bravely with an “Aughh this is cold!” but then as time goes on and you've been swimming and immersed, you'd stay in the water if you could, because now it's getting back out in the open air that would make you cold.

Does this all sound silly? Impractical? Unnecessary? Maybe too abstract? Well, the evaluation is up to you. I think the beauty of life on earth is very great. I also think that it's in grave danger. The way that we relate to the earth has got to fundamentally change. Deeply, quickly, and exactly now we have to start living in such a way as to reverence the earth and the life upon it, human and non-human. I myself think that such reverence means moving toward the elemental and the basic, and in general stepping back from complexity and artifice. So, dirt and hands, not glass and robots; bikes and legs, not electric cars.

But most important, I think that this path of reverence and simplicity is in fact a path to fundamental meaning, and not a step away from meaning. I'm saying that, as time goes on, and the ice caps melt, learning to do with less for the sake of the ALL is in fact, exactly where meaning will most profitably be found.

HB

Seven Proverbs to Live by

1. Here and Now sing their duet. Someday-When can't carry a tune.
2. The imagination is the real nomad. Books are its goats. 
3. Lavish affection on your life, and on the people in it. 
4. Dearth is our teacher tomorrow, if we cannot learn from plenty today. 
5. Do it now, do it cheerfully.
6. By itself, money never spoke a word of hope. 
7. Difficulty breeds loveliness, beauty equals application of time.

HB

Antaeus Shows How It's Done

We all need to keep connected to the nourishing fundamentals of our lives. For a runner, it's shoes and a road. For the Zen practitioner, a floor to sit on, and counting the breath. For the gardener, it's warm black soil at the fingertips, and seeds. It's beautiful, what basic stuff can keep us strong, if we keep in continual contact with it. And we should, heck even giants need a foundation when they go around being giants. Just consider Antaeus.

According to the ancient Greeks, who were very wise about many things, Antaeus was a giant. His father was Poseidon, and his mother was the earth goddess, Gaia. Antaeus wrestled. And so long as his feet were firmly planted on the earth (his mother) he could wrestle anytime and anyone, and win. For years and years he won against every challenger, and he had plenty. Always his victory was total. Every defeated opponent—ahem—well, Antaeus took the skull, and added it to a temple he was building to his father, ruler of the wine-dark sea, these skulls being not just ambiance and decor for the place, but what the whole thing was made of, grin grin. The very walls.

Antaeus was eventually beaten by Hercules, who in the ultimate mythic match up, strategically lifted Antaeus so that his feet were off the ground, then crushed him against his body in a suffocating bear hug. I have mixed feeling about Hercules here. I suspect he wasn't playing by the rules. Though of course, at least as far as the skulls go, we can probably leave Antaeus out as a role model too.

But the general Greek point here is: keep connected with what gives you strength, because that's your ultimate mother. Never step away from her. Never let anyone rip you apart from her. And yes, this is about dependence. Not the dependence that says "aw honey you don't have to fight," but the dependence that provides the fizz of the fight in you, and that stabilizes and confirms.

It happens that in the last couple of years or so, I've come to discover that my Gaia, my ground of support, is really other people. A turn of the door knob. Footsteps I know. Familiar voices cheerful or sad. A chink of glasses. A slap on the shoulder. A press of the hand. A smile reflected. An insight communicated. A grudge rehashed. A bit of gossip whispered low. A punchline and a slap of the thigh.  A "remember when?" A "do you see?" I love all these. I need them.

It's probably important to say that what nourishes us in a deep way isn't necessarily just one thing, or to be found in only one venue. It isn't even necessarily what we're obviously and outwardly attached to while we're doing what others would say we "do," though when it's not directly with us, we may need to imagine it being there. When I write my plays, for instance, I try to write them with specific actors in mind. People I know. Real people I love. This approach, because it grounds itself in my love of people, is I think a real source of strength. It makes me want to write in such a way as to make these people radiate the truth that I know is in them. To pair their gestures and smiles with suitable words. To embody the intonations of their speech in living story. 

When do you feel most connected to what nourishes you? Are you in contact with it now?

HB