A Parable about Living Imaginatively

The whole thing started out as a funny miscommunication: the kind where, when you say "Yo Jennifer," the other guy hears something like “pro janitor” or, if you say “mezzanine” he hears “Pez machine.”

So one day, when Jordan Reynolds was talking to his boy, he used the words "somewhat strange."

Back then, Jordan was produce manager of the Bellevue Piggly Wiggly. His son, who was five, loved to come to work with him. He watched his father stacking the fruit. He watched the customers pushing their carts past the produce and sometimes (oh joy!) stopping and picking items out and bagging them up for purchase. The boy had learned to identify almost all the produce in the store. Even the seasonal and specialty stuff. The artichokes for instance. Scallions. Shallots. Pomelo.

“Kumquat strange?” asked the boy. Which Jordan found very funny, especially since the boy's facial expression in that moment communicated a kind of extravagant puzzlement. 

"He had this hilarious frown," Jordan says.

At first “kumquat strange” served as a consistent in-joke, a family phrase:

"We'd used it for comic relief," says Jordan. "Say after an argument. Or maybe during a traffic jam, to cheer up the situation." But then, after his boy fell from a tree and was killed, and after the subsequent break-up of Jordan’s marriage (it came only a year after the boy's loss)--after all this, Jordan Reynolds began to regard "kumquat strange" as a phrase to live by.

• He moved to an orange trailer and drove a small orange car. 
• He bought a dog and he named him Quat.
• He had Quat dyed orange and trained him to respond appropriately to the command: “Come, Quat!”
• He (Jordan) meditates an hour a day, visualizing himself as a fruit on a kumquat tree and visualizing every blood cell in his body as one of the cells of that kumquat. 
• He eats kumquats. Every possible day. Kumquat after kumquat.

To be sure, Jordan has experienced many obstructions and disappointments in the pursuit of his unique passion. Not once, but twice for instance, the greenhouse glass (of his backyard kumquat orangerie) has been broken by vandals. Also, just last year, his KUMQUAT vanity plate was stolen off of his car; it has not been recovered. And yes, five years ago, “Quat” the dog went lame in one leg, and eventually had to be put down.

In general though, what does he feel about his less-than-average life? Are the kumquats obtrusive? Will he ever get over them? Should he change fruits? Our conversations on these subjects have been deep and long, so I summarize his response:

First:  No one should dismiss his enthusiasm for kumquats as a “stage.” Kumquats represent a continuing era in Jordan's life, an era with its own wisdom, challenges, defeats and triumphs. If he were a painter, Jordan says, kumquats would be both the subject of his work as well as the paint. In other words the means of expression and the thing expressed. 

Second, to anyone who might consider his passion trivial or trite: who's to say that the kumquat (both as object and ideal) isn’t a fruit worth living for? Even dying for? Isn't every kumquat God’s handiwork too? Doesn't it amount to something like a beautiful bright letter in the greater text of life? Never never discount the importance of a single exuberant letter in that Text, Jordan Reynolds says. No matter how small it is. No matter what others say. No matter even whether it reminds you (somewhat mercilessly) of a brighter time.


HB

Until Saturday the 9th!

Earth-Notes Toward Human Unity

•  It is time to dignify the work of the hands again. Even the most humble household tasks. It is time.
• Mockery is a terrible impediment to necessary change. Mockery is nuclear.
• It is time for simplicity and plain living to become the norm.
• Time for us to leave off speaking of progress in computational and mechanical terms, and seek instead connections of the heart.
• Time itself has always been the first instrument of the imagination. To re-imagine the world, one must first re-imagine the use of time.
• To renew the earth, one must take and spend the time.
• For two centuries now we have obsessively substituted the ownership of machines and the burning of fuel for the blessing of undivided attention connecting heart to human heart and humanity to the earth. But for all that we have gained in terms of physical comfort and material weath, we have lost so much. Even in our immediate neighborhoods, we no longer believe ourselves made for one another: capable of comforting one another and of managing our trials communally. Here is an obesity of self-regard, which makes us unfit for the hundred foot walk to the neighbors house to say how are you, and really how are you?
• The home. The castle of the soul. The possible ground of expression of every nuance of decency and human relationship: The look of adoration. The word spoken in comfort. The prayer uttered in sorrow. To keep it clean, this place. To decorate it in sincerity of heart. To fashion it into an instrument of hospitality. To fill it with the smell of wholesome food. What are these labors if not holy, and beyond the measure of every number, except perhaps for the holy number one, which represents unity and amity? How outrageous that our understanding is so diminished as to denigrate the work that might be done at home, because that work cannot and is not remunerated in money. Infinitely sad.
• Many will consider our low-tech labors a foolish waste of time. We ought to consider them as acts of love: love of the earth expressed in preserving as best we can the gifts of nature for the uses of the future; and also love of meaningful labor. Love of the movement of the body. Love of the consistent incarnational miracle of the body's labor and the mind's attention translating into order, utility, and beauty. Take for instance the chaos of the overfilled dirty-clothes hamper, the contents of which by means of the labors of the body, are transformed to a neat pile of clean and folded clothes, which can then be used to clothe and dignify the body. A bountiful circle. A virtuous cycle. We need more of these, in all places and at all levels. God grant us more.
• Nothing sadder and more wasteful than our modern underestimation of the body to heal itself and keep itself and the psyche happy. We do not sing when we work. We used to sing when we worked! Why not sing again?  
• It is time for us to speak not of growth but of managed decline. Material consumption must no longer be used as a means to wield power over the earth or its inhabitants. On the contrary, consumption must consciously be avoided and the world re-defined and re-experienced as a space of shared enjoyment, in which the primary effort is toward a prosperity of perception and imagination.
• Here is the inexplicable gift of life. What shall we do with it? Enjoy it. Love it. Live it. Cultivate it to greater and greater beauty by means of the collective application of the human imagination, which can often be done without a single cent or mechanical crutch. Consider Socrates, who taught without a book. Consider choirs, who produce music without any instruments other than the human voice. Consider the game of tag, whose only necessary ingredients are self-locomotive children and a knowledge of the game. Consider mere conversation, which is the most nourishing food of human friendship and conviviality that there can be. Consider the act of sexual love, with its power literally to produce humanity.
• There are no necessary limits to the growth of love, but there are many that we ourselves impose on love and human unity: avarice being the most obvious and the most viciously barbed.
• Let's choose love.

HB

Until Tuesday 22!

Twelve Crooked Steps to Fuller Consciousness

Improvement makes straight roads, 
but crooked roads are roads of genius.

W. Blake

1. For a few minutes sit beneath a tree. Remember that its roots reach down into the darkness every bit as far beneath you as its branches reach upward toward the light.
2. Consider your own more metaphysical roots: the means by which you grasp the nourishment of the intangible necessities of life (beauty, friendship, the certainty that you are loved and are worth loving). How do we come by these intangibles; how are they filtered, assimilated, perceived? 
3. Talk for a time with a friend, and talk long enough so that the conversation at some point comes to a contented lull. (It is one of the supreme proofs of a friendship--the moment when you realize that even silence feeds it). Now, within that moment of silence, think of the roots of the tree. 
4. And at least for this moment refrain from picturing yourself as a separate body; after all, you extend with your friend into the silent spaces of mutual comprehension in the same way that trees reach their roots (mutually tangling) into the earth. You overlap with other lives everywhere. Why should the body always be considered the primary phenomenon? What is the body anyway? "Matter," we say. Which is? Sets of probability-points in calculation. Energy in motion. An above-ground happening merely.
5. Find something beautiful and hand-made and take a few moments to admire it. Consider the fact that the object itself is a secondary phenomenon--just as driftwood is a secondary phenomenon of the willow that produced the branch, or just as the ripples on a pond are a secondary phenomenon of the duck taking flight. But what is the primary here, as you look at the object before you? I say consciousness itself--the maker's and yours, the admirer's. 
6. Imagine (or if you like, pretend) that the objects around you in your home all have an inner life: the jackknife smiles at a relevant pear, the hourglass whispers going going gone, and the jade plant is slowly, sorrowfully forgetting its childhood Mandarin. Indeed now that you think about it everything around you--every object--seems to leak with mystery like the radioactive water from the tanks at Fukushima. 
7. What you are experiencing is powerful and dangerous. It is the fire that fuels the cypresses of Van Gogh. It is Jehovah speaking to Moses from the burning bush. It is the unutterable archangel clothed in your neurology a billion years in the developing that holds in its metaphorical right hand Time and in its metaphorical left hand Space, and brings them together continually to form the critical mass of subjective experience. Boom. Blaze. Now transcendence. Now possession. Now the poetry of a fuller life, if we would only see. Don't laugh. Believe. So much in regard to humanity's survival is riding on how well we manage to entertain ourselves without burning up the obvious, material stuff; the oil, the trees, our enemies, ourselves. Yet we love the sensation of risk. So let's be firebugs of the metaphysical, like Moses and Van Gogh.
8. Reflect on the fact that what we directly see is merely the present arrangement of an infinite pattern forever receding into itself. Behind and within the duck-in-flight is a duck swimming on the lake moments before. Behind and within the gray driftwood branch is a willow branch once green and flexible. Behind and within the young man headed off to college on a train is maybe a little boy delightfully voicing the letters on his alphabet blocks.
9. Consider a nine-volt battery cell, and the many ways in which its power can be converted into something that might almost be described as a skill. For instance in the context of a smoke detector, the power of the nine-volt can sniff out burning toast. Or in the context of a weather radio, the nine volts of a nine-volt can deliver the weather forecast.
10. Consider the human systems that we humans have created: the nation state, the global economy, our schools and our many venues of work. Into what, by means of the algorithmic gears of these systems, is the power of our human consciousness converted? Whose benefit do these conversions serve?
11. Think over your daily routine. Ask yourself: is this a vibrant and purposeful routine--one that (say) like the hydrologic cycle, beautifully, perpetually, feeds itself? Or as a total sum of striving does it seem more purposeless and empty--a mouse forced with shocks to remain on a treadmill, or a car spinning its wheels in deepening snow? 
12. How much needs changing? Where must that change begin?

Until Saturday the 5th!

HB