When Less is Just Less

Sometimes less is just less, and that's okay. 

Yesterday my band, which is called Give and Take, got to hear a new song by one of its members, called "Love in a Tiny Town." The song just goes through several stanzas in which someone who's in love says to the one that he or she loves, “We may not have a big city here to get lost in, we may not have a million entertaining things to go to, so maybe all we're actually going to do this evening is walk around the block in the rain and then sit down at the table to eat, with a candle to light the experience. But all that's okay. We'll be okay."

It's a beautiful song, and I look forward to performing it. Partly just because it's beautiful, but partly because I think people really need to hear its message. There's something so useful about looking at life as an exercise in richly making do. More maybe to my point here though: there's also something useful about honoring what our present lives do NOT contain, so that we're not fooling ourselves into living by a fake and shallow appearance of wisdom. 

I've always been suspicious of the slogan “less is more.”  I think of all sorts of talented people who have given up full professional lives for the sake of their marriages and kids. Yes, that decision probably does provide them with richer, calmer family lives, and maybe on the whole they believe the sacrifices were right for them. But having to dial back your professional aspirations is unquestionably a loss too, and in those hours in which that loss is being rued and grieved, is it really appropriate to say “cheer up, less is more”? Or I think of my own family's decision not to travel abroad or drive long distances. We feel the carbon costs to that kind of travel are just too high, but is staying at home in Northwest Indiana always going to feel more rich in beauty and replete with possibility than say, a week in snowy Banff, or a month in greenest Ireland?  No it's not. And the loss of the possible experience is real. If I am honest with myself, I will admit that.

The same can be said of any number of decisions that good people make every day for the sake of true sustainability: Plunging into making real food instead of buying it processed. Spending the extra bucks to buy your goods locally. Saying yes to an invitation to live in an intentional community. All these efforts and personal campaigns, at some point, are going to involve personal loss. And again, in the moment in which that loss is being felt, it's not appropriate to say, to yourself or to anyone else, “cheer up, less is more.” 

No, sometimes less is just less, and that's okay. Feel the loss. Allow it to be what it is. Then and only then go on with the task of making the most of what you really have.

HB

Class This Ass

We're stubborn about class in this country. Stubborn in not wanting to talk about it. Stubborn about not wanting to do much about it. Conservatives mostly want to believe class doesn't matter, because opportunity abounds for everyone, right, and Houdini-like we can just slip our bonds and swim free, surfacing with a big happy breath in the big time. Progressives on the other hand will occasionally talk about class, but prefer talking gender and race, mostly I think because they've tasted at least some success against the forces of injustice there. But class seems more like a messy hurricane. It overwhelms us with its almost continental hugeness and complexity. Plus, not to put too fine a point on it, there are a lot of pretty well-heeled progressives. It's hard pointing out your own advantages.

Here's a challenge for progressives. Who would you welcome more as a neighbor? A black middle class professional couple, with two kids in college? Or a law-abiding, but NASCAR watching, white family that has country music going in the garage on Saturday afternoons and keeps broken tricycles on their lawn? I'm assuming it's no contest.

I'm not trying to be cynical. I'm trying to be truthful. Because I see this every day in myself: a tendency to make the people I least want to talk to, invisible. Dismissible. Even laughable. I think money talks, and lack of money smells, at an uncanny distance, like its unmistakable self. I may not wish this to be the case, but it is. And I want to fight its implications.

Even at my church, which is full of kind, concerned, activist, progressive types, we tend to focus our discussions about social justice on what makes us look hip and up-to-date in our lack of prejudice. This focus may be unconscious, may be accidental, but it's real, and the upshot is that we welcome the young lesbian with the nose ring, ply her with lots of questions about her new spouse. A good thing. But when it comes to the quiet working class guy with a paunch, who works as a mechanic or a seasonal carpenter, we don't even sit down to coffee with him. Ask him how things are going with his Mom's lumpectomy. Not a good thing.

The problem of poverty is far less black and urban than it is rural and white. Do we ever admit this? How many of us even know this to be a fact?

We're spending a lot of energy nowadays castigating the leaders of Flint about their poisonous water system. And good. They deserve it. But does the fact that coal miners in West Virginia and Kentucky die of black lung all the time, cause anything like the same outrage? Would it ever? Listen to the accent of those miners, and you'll know the answer.

I believe we need to look straight at the problem of inequality wherever it shows itself. I think that thoughtful, feeling people will agree with me.

Finally, a question that might help bring this topic of class to a focus, along with our visceral reactions to class-markers. Though crude, it's a real question. Not an ironic one. And again, it's meant especially for progressives. Here it is: When it comes to pants riding a little low on a male, which would you MOST rather not see: a white ass-crack, or a black one?

What does this mean?

HB

A Dump of Trump

This past Tuesday something remarkable happened on my street, that reminded me of our national politics. A huge truckload of garbage was dumped in the driveway of one of my neighbors. We're talking the driveway to a double car garage. Plugged. Stuffed. Piled a good six feet high in places. Plus the whole pile, which was full of thin white bags, absolutely reeked. It had the sour smell of dumpsters behind restaurants, or at groceries, or at campgrounds, where food and grease is involved, and where everything is trying to go rancid at once. 

Now I've asked around the neighborhood. This was not a prank. It was an act of revenge. And as such, it's colorful, passionate, almost operatic. It reminds me of an insult in an Icelandic saga, as when someone throws a sheep's head at Steingrimr Ornolfsson in the Reykdoela saga. There's a certain level of anger necessary to activate the logistical imagination in matters like these, which is why for most of us, it never comes to sheeps' heads or dump trucks. Still, imagine the total amount of low grade anger in any given town, or state, or country these days. What happens when the level gets high enough, or when a nice handy sheep's head suddenly appears, right there on the debate stage, with the initials D.T.?

I know that political hand-wringing is all the rage, but I'm not afraid to assert it myself: the unholy trinity of our politics these days is anger, frustration, and despair. People, as everyone keeps repeating, are fed up. With something. It's hard to say what. But for many of us it really doesn't matter. For many of us abstract analysis is beside the point, and if anything the inarticulate nature of the trinity makes it all the more powerfully explosive. The need to get back at the system is rampant. Contagious. It's like a spooky yeast getting into all corners of the dough, making the whole thing rise really ugly and deformed. 

Now, let's be clear. The reasons should not be any big mystery. Huge segments of the population are without meaningful work. Other segments know the robots are coming for theirs. Real wages have been falling for decades. We have students fresh out of school carrying around planets of debt ("don't shrug, little Atlas, or you go to jail"). Ecological limits assert themselves daily in every new report. Health care just gets more expensive and confusing. And everywhere in finance and education we get the same dishonest analytical read: just wait a little longer. Prosperity will come. 

To which the billionaire in the baseball cap, whispering over our collective left shoulder, says: “Stop listening to all them. Listen to your gut. OF COURSE you've been screwed. And no, no one in the establishment cares about you. Only I, among all the rich and powerful, actually care about you. So, this is what you do. Just drive this truck full of all this garbage to the polling station. Pull this lever that says "dump 'em." Then let them smell the result. You'll see. We'll win.”

HB

Taking Time to Treasure Time

I never seem to learn. I almost always start these entries too late to make them as beautiful as I could within the time frame I've set for myself. Nine days ought to be enough I suppose, but it never proves to be, given my skills at not-writing, which are highly developed!

It's not all me though. Really it's circumstance too. Things get in the way or you could say they muscle the writing out. Things both good and bad and somewhere in between. All the regular daily work of course. The music rehearsals. The walking to get where you want to go. The dishes, the laundry, the gardening, or the chopping of the firewood, the returning of the library books three days overdue. And then there are the unexpected daily variations too. The necessary shopping ahead of the big storm. The phone calls that start out as hey a how are yas but pretty soon turn into hour-long conversations and whoa where did the time go? 

The point here isn't to moralize or even to commit myself to somehow doing better. It's just to state the facts: that just like everyone who's reading this, I have my juggling to do too. Of time and priorities. Sometimes I manage that juggling better than at others. Sometimes too, the juggling gets to me, and I ask myself is this the life I really want, and should I seek greater efficiency or greater simplicity? And if I chose to change, what would that change entail? What would improve and what would regress? 

Here's a thought I had today though:

You're probably trying to do too much, if you find yourself forgetting about the most beautiful things that happen to you. 

About a week ago I dreamed about my mother, who has been dead these seven years now. I don't as a rule remember many of my dreams, but this was a beautiful dream, beautiful and compelling. She had long hair, the way she did only when I was young. But she was neither young nor old, and how can I say it, but she looked like an archangel of herself: full of power, and projecting it, but having no need in the moment to use it. No light. No spectacle. Just the essential her, spiritualized and indelible.

The two of us sat on opposite sides at an ordinary wooden table. And she calmly smiled. And I reached out my hand and she reached out hers and took it, and then she dissolved from sight. And when she left, there was this moment of strong grief for me, but then—well then it was as if the grief I was feeling was a storm up on the surface of the sea, while beneath it, far enough beneath it, there was only the deep undercurrent of peace and that's where I found myself, traveling in the deeper peace of things, knowing that obviously she was not truly gone, but had in fact just met me and assured me that she was simply gone from here, and how exactly can death be as bad as we seem to consider it, when it is nothing more than an usher into that greater hall? A wooden, beneficial door?

That was my dream, and when I had dreamed it to the end, I actually woke up and it was maybe four in the morning. So I just lay there next to my life-companion under the warmth of the covers thinking over that dream, turning the image of my mother's truest face over and over in my mind. And then when I had gotten up and my wife had come downstairs to eat breakfast and I was cutting shavings from a log of cherry-wood to light the stove, I told her about my dream. And for the rest of the day, and for a day or two after that, the dream stayed with me as a sort of talisman against despair of any kind.

But here's my question. Why was it that, yesterday afternoon, a mere five days after I had that dream, when I first sat down to work on this post, I was not sure what I should write about? How could an experience so full meaning for me have fallen, in that small interval of time, fallen completely off of my heart's list of meditative concerns? 

The answer? Activity I suppose. Activity crowds out thought. Busy-ness nixes meditation. 

Nothing removes us from the touch of ultimacy more effectively than a crowded schedule or a long list that says at the top, “to do.” Worry. Stress. What others think of us. What we feel we ought to expect of ourselves. Most of this is impediment. It blocks. It prevents. It obscures. It diverts. It distracts. It divides us from our our wisest and most knowledgeable dreams. It causes us to forget who we really are: servants of transcendence, human beings crowned with consciousness, and intricately designed for the enjoyment of the living earth. Living gifts to one another. Co-creators of play. These are facts. And yet again and again we forget them.

What to do? 

Some possibilities.

1. Find someone who helps you reflect on your experience by listening to you, by means of conversation with you, by just being interested in you and in what you are becoming. This is to say, find a friend or two. Pass some time together. As much as possible. 
2. Cut back on the expectations. Do less. You are probably already richer in experience than you know. 
3. At the end of the day, take a few minutes to think over your day. Try to remember what happened. A small kindness done by a neighbor, a smile from someone on the street—these can stick with you for a long time, if you just think about them a little.
4. Remember that what makes an experience important to you, is not just the initial experience itself, but how often you return to it. It's like going to a favorite campground. The more often you go there, the more favorite it becomes!

Of course these are all just suggestions. But I encourage you to consider them. Even just small steps in the direction of slowing down and reflecting on where you have been can prove enormously rewarding. 

Best wishes in the journey!

HB