Middle Season #36

 

DRL history highlights - the facts

 January

• Garage door opener broke; dad and I replaced it
• we get a new dishwasher
• I smash my finger in the car door; nail turns black
• HG gets COVID

February

• JG gets COVID
• Russia invades Ukraine
• Beijing Olympics
• Harry and Dennis hunt for a condo (J and I visit, stay at the Thompson)
• 125K on Touareg
• mask mandate ends at school

March

• J interviews at Vine Academy, DGS, Leyden
• I buy iPhone 13
• remove black nail 3/20 (two months after I do it)
• We take spring break trip to Austin

April

• Harry & Dennis close on condo 40 E Delaware
• J interviews OPRF
• buy patio furniture

May

• heavy rain, seepage
• plant garden
• J interviews at Nazareth Academy, Fenwick,
• I do a lot of hardscaping, landscaping, visit lots of nurseries

June

• fule is 5.99/gal
• 130K on Touareg
• Supreme Court overrules Roe v. Wade
• Nashville trip
• St. Louis for Trey's wedding

July

• Glacier Trip
• get big mirror for bedroom from H&D
• basement leak after storm
• buy small Bose speaker ($79)

100 Things That Made My Year

100 Thing of 2022

Here is 2021's list: link. Here's is 2020's list: link Here is 2018's list: link  Here's 2017's list: link

1. I made a daily checklist of things to do, organized by these categories: attend, care, make, learn
2. "Note 10" broken down into categories: nature, others, art
3. I start monthly meditation schedule of guided meditations on Insight Timer.  There are different "guides" (Tara Brach, Joseph Goldstein) each day of the week, different recordings from them on different weeks.
4. I begin making weekly cruciferous salad and pot of beans (likely influenced by How Not to Die)
5. I begin "basement workout" that's focused and brief: 10 HIIT on stationary bike, 10 mins of yoga, 10 mins of bodyweight exercises
6. I begin airfrying tofu, and never go back to pan or oven frying
7. I build complex new budget program in Google Sheets based on a template
8. Todd and Julie and Jennie and I go to see four concerts at SPACE in Evanston through year: Son Volt (feb), Chris Smither (apr), John Scofield (sept), Alejandro Escovedo (Oct)
9. Begin adding a poem to the blog on each day after Middle Season (so, 1st, 11th, 21st of each month). This encourages me to read more poetry books.
10. I complete big landscaping project that transforms front yard
11. Jennie and I also see in concert Lucinda Williams
12. Transforming idea: health is like a piggy bank -- there are "contributions" that you can make each day
13. Expanded backyard garden to the patio area with two standing boxes and a couple of urns
14. Began making weekly playlists for Todd (he maybe began this and I reciprocated)
15. Trip to Nashville at the end of the schoolyear with HG... last one before Dennis and Harry move
16. Trey Page wedding in St. Louis (in June?)
17. Begin "where to find" spreadsheet to try to tame my inability to find important paperwork, tools, etc. when I need them
18. Take 10 pictures of leaves in the forest on the solstice
19. Create "Middle Seasons Philology" doc to keep middle seasons notes
20. Montana/Glacier Trip in July
21. Make hummus
22. Begin teaching again after a couple (three?) year break.  Lots of prep over the summer, WAY busier at school, WAY more homework
23. Make Glacier photobook
24. Begin way to get a lot done in 60 minutes: 6x10... focus on one thing (weed garden, water, trim bushes, whatever) for 10 minutes only... landscape triage
25. HG golf competitions
26. Begin "100 Days of..." project... guitar, lower body stability
27. Begin listening to WFMU, specifically Michael Shelley... which transforms my "New Finds" playlists
28. I do my own IFS session (see p. 23 in July)
29. Dew point observation obsession (p. 22, 23). Focusing on the related data of humidity vs. temp vs dew point
30. Guitar - MEMORIZE Satie: gymnopedia, a couple "Study #"s, get back to recording them in voice memos
31. Watch Unforgotten 3 seasons; Leftovers 2 seasons
32. Tom Ryan therapy: you are fucked
33. start jogging 1 mile; end up at 26 or so.  10 at 1 mile; 10 at 1.5; 6 at 2
34. Making lots of song seeds, but no songs
35. get 2 kettlebells to swing
36. 2 great songs: Rami and the Reliables - Red Lil Ditty and NRBQ - Be Here Now
37. Continue guitar - 14 in a row, record Studies 3, 4, 5, 9
38. Evanston Farmers Market -- walking around Blick Art Store
39. Make (at least) 4 pestos in Aug and Sept
40. 10x10 project: learn coding
41. 10x10 project: watercolor technique
42. Madison visit
43. 3x10... 10 mins of office paperwork/house tidying/deeper clean of ONE thing
44. start poem index
45. do a lot of blog index
46. Honey Hill apple picking
47. Dick Blick apron that Jenni gets me for Xmas; 
48. Begin listening to Cool Tools podcast... following what Kevin Kelly is doing
49. Run 7 days in a row
50. making garbanzos in the instantpot; making applesauce in instantpot
51. Roadtrip to Dodgeville in Oct
52. Plant tulips; clean up garden
53. 51st year blog index project completed
54. get to 59x guitar practice
55. Pyramid of daily dozen (p. 73)
56. Several new recipes - Green Owl, Curry, White beans, migas tacos
57. Do 30 poem drafts in November
58. Get out of sad funk with pomos and Bemis walk
59. Achieve breaking point with kid and family; don't attend Christmas; take a break from talking, seeing (lots of sad reflection in Nov and Dec)
60. Captivate by mulch after run (p. 8)
61. Created color "master to do" list for work and home 
62. I small glass of wine at Xmas eve; none at xmas... none on vacation... none in the new year (it's now 1/20)
63. Restart/complete Brach/Kornfield meditation course
64. Jennie gives me wool clogs like the ones we saw on kid/man in Montana
65. TV Shows: 10 Houses that Changed America
66. Books:

100 Tips for a Better Life

 This blog lists what the title says.... a little bit like the Kevin Kelly list.  I like how it's divided in the following categories:

1. Possessions
2. Cooking
3. Productivity
4. Body
5. Success
6. Rationality
7. Self
8. Hazards
9. Others
10. Joy

I think there are 10 items in each.   Unlike Kelly's, it's just a list of stuff he found online, including a couple that I found that Kelly himself wrote. I wouldn't use these exact categories.  

There's another website called "52 Things I Learned This Year."  Same thing... stuff culled online... I like it a little bit because it seems like it's a steady learning each week.

I'm here - the snow falling - Issa

 

Hasui Kawase

Here,

I'm here -

The snow falling    Issa Kobayashi

Today I thanked her

 Thanking a Monkey

There’s a monkey in my mindswinging on a trapeze,reaching back to the pastor leaning into the future,never standing still.
Sometimes I want to killthat monkey, shoot it squarebetween the eyes so I won’thave to think anymoreor feel the pain of worry.
But today I thanked herand she jumped downstraight into my lap,trapeze still swingingas we sat still.
Kaveri Patel. Learned about on Tara brach # 20

Christmas Gifts

 

Something else I am working on this year – graciously accepting gifts. Gifts are not really my love language and for the past few years I have been unfairly projecting that onto everyone else around me, campaigning for the end of family gifts or dismissing gift lovers as superficial victims of consumer culture. When in reality... giving a gift is THE ultimate form of love for a lot of people. And it feels really unfair to reject that. It is heartbreaking to imagine giving love and having it shot down. Or hearing from someone “I know you want to try to love me in a way that feels meaningful to you, but please don’t.” Long story short – my goal this year is to remember that we all show love in different ways. And I hope to be more gracious in receiving it across the board.

Found this on Olivia Herrick Designs on Instagram.  

Move at a gentle pace

 

The object returns to wholeness

 

Kintsukuroi: the art of repairing broken pottery with powdered gold or platinum mixed with lacquer; the repair reflects the history of breakage. The “repaired” object mirrors the fragility and imperfection of life & also its beauty & strength. The object returns to wholeness. 

The “golden repair” is not hidden. It shows a vessel’s undisguised damage, combining ordinary stuff & precious metals to repair the brokenness. but not hiding it. This is how transformation happens by incorporating the suffering into a stronger material, the material of goodness.

From Joan Halifax Tweet

Winter confinement

 

Shufu Miyamoto

Tired of hearing Worldly things: Winter confinement

Kyoshi Takahama

Winter Begins!

 

 Pieter Bruegel the Elder

In seed time learn

in harvest teach,

in winter enjoy

-William Blake

Middle Season #35

 

If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things

Early dusk.  The first "staying" snow.  Photo from nearby park. 

 Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,

a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.

If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,

this is the best season of your life.

- Wu-men

The first day of summer

 

From a Tweet by the English Oak Project: Shortest day soon, which is to all eternal optimists, the first day of summer

The buds on the trees in winter

 From a Tweet by Leif Bersweden:  "Have you ever noticed the buds on the trees in winter?"

Tree species, L-R, top to bottom:

Guelder-rose (Viburnum opulus)

Wild Privet (Ligustrum vulgare)

Alder Buckthorn (Frangula alnus)

Ash (Fraxinus excelsior)

Spindle (Euonymus europaeus)

Buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica)

Wayfaring-tree (Viburnum lantana)

Dogwood (Cornus sanguinea)

Field Maple (Acer campestre)

Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus)

Horse-chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum)

Elder (Sambucus nigra)

He wrote a book called "Trees in Winter"

Knowledge and Power

 LBJ 644, 645

Cultivating the friendship with rich contracter Herman Brown to (at first) secure a federal contract to build a dam near Austin was one of the most important actions that LBJ did.  Brown got richer and began financing LBJ in big and bigger ways.  A second pivotal power move was to get himself associated with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which helped financial Congressional elections.  LBJ used Brown's money (and the money that Brown arranged from his wide network) to support many many Congressmen.  He made sure that the Congressmen knew (through letters and telegrams) that the money came to them from him.

How LBJ (a) cultivated connections and offered money and help, creating a network.

(b) how this gave him knowledge and power

One of the things he does is make lists of individual people who needed money during the 1940 election (so Democrats wouldn't lose the House in a time when Roosevelt and (especially) the Democrats were facing enormous pressured).  (He also activated key friends from the dam building contractor to contribute lots of money.).  These lists took a lot of research about the candidates' chances and positions on key issues that he wanted.  This list-building was key.  He used these lists (districts that have coal mines that produce over 1,000,000 tons of coal per month, etc.) for many other purposes later.

Once he began the correspondence and offered his help, he would ask for election data ("With many of the checks that went out, there went out also a request for a status report, not only on the Congressman's own chances in his district, but on the President's"). (how is FDR likely to do?  How are you likely to do?). Johnson became a nexus for this dispersed information.  The the infancy of the Gallup Poll, this data was key information for the White House.... so he became valuable to White House people.  "Most important," writes Caro, "Johnson could not only get information for the President, he could get it for him fast." He reached out again right before the election to request "real time" information on Election Day.

When Congress returned to session, Johnson was no longer just an irritating (to many) newbie Congressman.  He had connections to party machines in Chicago and New York.  Many senior people knew him and had been helped by him.  According to Caro, "All these things combined to radically alter Johnson's status."  And "His power was simply the power of money." (659)

The book is -- at heart -- about the building of status and power.  And this is a remarkable section of the book.  Having cultivated money backing (from Brown), he used that money (other people's money) to make connections and put others in his debt.  Caro takes care to say that Johnson never had a political philosophy beyond building power.  Lots of his money came from super conservative oil men in Texas who knew that, though they knew he was liberal, Johnson would never allow them to lose some huge financial perks.

Both knoweldge and money produced power

Fully Living

Tomioka Soichiro (Japanese, 1922-1994)

Trees, 1961

 Oil on canvas

This week, after work, there's been nothing but homework, chores, a bit of exercise, making dinner, and a bit of reading.  The me outside of that has dwindled. (and not just this week.) What is there, after the chores, the work, exercise, after the TV, the compulsive reading?  Where is the true life? What is the true life? Would woodwork scratch this itch? Having a summer home? Drinking better wine? What's the stuff of "real life"?

Would having a better relationship with my kids?

I started a list in my journal, compelled from these thinkings, a version of "Ideas Towards a Larger Life."  What would make me feel like I was "fully living"?

I know the Buddhist answer would be: live the life you are living right now, enjoy the "now."

I have "accomplished" a great number of things: healthier eating, regular exercise (including resistance and mini HIIT training).  I keep a journal, do gratefulness lists every day.  I meditate daily, sometimes 2x/day.  I have 12 or 13 things on my daily checklist of things of "wise habits" that I hit 40-50% at each day... and get the impression now that I could be getting 100% and not feel any different.

Last night on PBS Newshour, there was a mother of a child killed at Sandy Hook Elementary 10 years ago.  The journalist asked how she spends the anniversary.  She replied that she had several rituals, but the day always ended with several hours walking on the seashore.  She said she was "re-grounded in nature." (or something like that).  In this case, being in nature isn't necessarily the "stuff of life," but a necessary corrective to the trauma.

 

The structure of teaching

I'm listening to Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield's 40-day introduction to meditation on Insight Timer.  Several helpful things they do almost every time make me think about teaching. 

There is always a clear sense of continuity from day to day, like:

On the first of practice, you x, y, z.  Today we'll explore this we move into practice.

In the last few days, we have been (working on negative emotions), we can also cultivate POSITIVE emotions.  

In the past sessions, you've been widening your field of...

You're now prepared to learn one of the most important aspects of mindfulness practice: how to respond when you have strong emotions. 

Very often there will be a connection to a "scientific" why, like: 

recent studies have shown that...

Very often there will be a connection to a wisdom person -- Dali Lama, Thomas Merton, a poem

Brach takes part of this quote, ignoring the activism and focusing on the the idea that we were are all involved in the "rush and pressure."  “There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.

At the end of the session there's always a connection to how this can affect your life today, like:

Enter your next activity with relaxed spacious presence.  

Don't Complicate Life

 

From Brad Stulberg on Twitter:

Just like you become your habits, you also become the people with whom you surround yourself. Choose wisely. You might think this means "happy" or "positive" people. But I'd challenge you to think about it as authentic, vulnerable, honest, humble, and curious people.

Someone responds to that Tweet with:

Do they give us energy?  And Do we learn from them? 

Toil of farming

Robert Caro writes about the endless toil on a Hill Country farm before electricity.  There was milking and getting water (leaving all women stoop-shouldered) and ironing, shearing, and cooking from scratch every day. Women looked worn out and old at 45... at 35.  Here's a example of the book about canning.

In the Hill Country, canning was required for a family's very survival. Too poor to buy food, most Hill Country families lived through the Winter largely on the vegetables and fruit pricked in the Summer and preserved in jars.

   Since- because there was no electricity- there were no refrigerators in the Hill Country, vegetables or fruit had to be canned the very day hey cane ripe. And, from June through September, something was coming ripe almost every day, it seemed; on a single peach tree, the fruit on different branches would come ripe on different days. In a single orchard, the peaches might be reaching ripeness over a span as long as two weeks; "You'd be in the kitchen with the peaches for two weeks," Hill Country wives recall. And after the peaches, the strawberries would begin coming ripe, and then the gooseberries, and then the blueberries. The tomatoes would become ripe before the okra, the okra before the zucchini, the zucchini before the corn.

So the canning would go on with only brief intervals -- all Summer.

   Canning required constant attendance on the stove. Since boiling water was essential, the fire in the stove had to be kept roaring hot, so logs had to be continually put into the firebox. At least twice during a day's canning, moreover--probably three or four times a woman would have to empty the ash container, which meant wrestling the heavy, unwieldy device out from under the firebox. And when the housewife wasn't bending down to the flames, she was standing over them. In canning fruit, for example, first sugar was dropped into the huge iron canning pot, and watched carefully and stirred constantly, so that it would not become lumpy, until it was completely dissolved. Then the fruit-perhaps peaches, which would have been peeled earlier- was put in the pot, and boiled until it turned into a soft and mushy jam that would be packed into jars (which would have been boiling to sterilize them.- in another pot) and sealed with wax. Boiling the peaches would take more than an hour, and during that time they had to be stirred constantly so that they would not stick to the pot. And when one load of

*peaches was finished, another load would be put in, and another. Canning was an all-day job. So when a woman was canning, she would have to spend all day in a little room with a tin or sheet-iron roof on which a blazing sun was beating down without mercy, standing in front of the iron stove and the wood fire within it. And every time the heat in that stove died down even a bit, she would have to make it hotter again.

Hive by Kevin Young

 Hive 

by Kevin Young

The honey bees’ exile
     is almost complete.
You can carry

them from hive
     to hive, the child thought
& that is what

he tried, walking
     with them thronging
between his pressed palms.

Let him be right.
     Let the gods look away
as always. Let this boy

who carries the entire
     actual, whirring
world in his calm

unwashed hands,
     barely walking, bear
us all there

buzzing, unstung.

Middle Season #34

 

Assiduously Cultivating Clark Foreman

When LBJ was building power as a young Senator, he was both charming and energetic and a master manipulator of others, using their passions, interests, vanity to make them want to work for him.  His power was "cultivating people."  The book "Path to Power" by Robert Caro is filled with stories of such cultivating... the doing of favors to be called in later, sycophancy, flattery.

About one important White House figure, Goldschmidt... "But, easy-going and not as intensely fired by personal ambition as the other members of his group, he was malleable material in Johnson's hands. He was... passionately idealistic, and the focus of his passion was public power... When Johnson put the case for the Marshall Ford Dam in those terms, Goldschmidt believed him -- and was willing to do anything he could to advance the cause of the dam."

"Johnson knew how to make the most of such willingness. He had been assiduously cultivating Clark Foreman..."

He wasn't cultivating "the friendship" of.... he was cultivating him.

Caro's book is the tracing of the political power. 

LBJ's path to success is not often pretty.  The chapter "Longlea" details his affair with a beautiful wife of a very powerful Texas man.  Caro talks about how he uses his normal sycophantic moves to the older man (Branch?) while he has a secret affair with his longtime girlfriend, X Glass.  Caro notes the effect that this has on people in the house (Longlea, a 1000-acre compound in Virginia build by Branch for Glass), including Branch's children who saw him buttering up Caro and making love to his long-time girlfriend.

Transforming Fear

 From Insight Hour Podcast with Joseph Goldstein #143: Transforming Fear

Aversion can manifest in striking out, in grieving loss, and in fear.

The goal of this talk is to "transform feelings from fear to freedom."

He says there's benefit for practitioners to be at the edges, boundaries, limits of fear to investigate.  That's where fear reveals itself.  

Fear can be of pain, of change, of not changing, of discomfort, and emotional pain.

He wonders to what extent is comfort the condition for any of our actions?  He asks us to investigate "what initiates movement" throughout the day?  (from avoiding minor pain to going to get food to eat to avoiding conversations) To "avoid unpleasantness."  He advises us to try not to move at all for a time.  To investigate "what are the causes of movement"

Fear often is "contracting" physically (or emotionally); self-pity

There's a Pali word that's often translated as "selflessness" which is also translated as "understanding that things are ungovernable.. things have their own laws".... it's not as I wish... things react to conditions (ungovernableness of things)

He talks about fear of emotions... "touching the shadow side of ourselves"... this is when emotions we have are not acceptable to ourselves and we don't even recognize that.  These are emotions that makes us feel unworthy, jealous, abandoned, failures

We create a personae to show the world in order to get validation of a thing that we are not

Imagine that big emotions are like kids in Halloween costumes.  You're not really scared of them.

as we open, we see the insubstantial nature of phenomenon.

There is no security -- all is arising and dissolving; in flow; 

We all have strategies for "fixing" or "holding" or "keeping" a moment

We don't have to push the river.

"Let it go" is almost too active.  Better is "let it flow" let it follow its own nature

Story from Carlos Castenada book.  when we are stressed, we might respond with wrath or self-pity.  We train ourselves unconsciously to do this.  After struggle, we have learned to feel sorry for ourselves.  And one feature of this thing is that it's ready to advise us in our times of stress.  Death, though, is a better advisor.  We can learn to feel our impending death.  Let each act be your last battle on earthy.  You'll find a strange consuming happiness with this attitude.

Goldstein says that we should pay attention throughout the day for moments that we are free of desires, when we are not clinging.  Our mind is cooled from the fire of wanting.  We have direct experience of teh absence of fear.  the more we recognize it, the more we have access to it.

The steps: be mindful of the fear, accept it (it's OK, the fear is here, it's OK), then let it pass.  Courage is not the absence of fear.  

Extra glands

 From Path to Power by Robert Caro.

Rowe and Corcoran, disciples of Justice Holmes, called the tirelessness and enthusiasm that they admired "energy. "Holmes used to say that in the last analysis the only thing that mattered was energy, " Corcoran says, "and Lyndon just bristled with it." Fortas, more precise, says, "It was a matter of intensity more than anything, an intense concentration on whatever was being talked about, or on whatever was the problem in hand."... "The guy's just got extra glands."  [Rowe said] "Listen, I mean I worked for Roosevelt and Holmes. They were the two perfect people.  Johnson was never going to [become one of my idols] -- he and I were of an age -- but he didn't bore me for one minute. He never bored anyone.  He was a magnetic man physically, and you never knew what was going to happen next. He was a remarkable man."

...

And in describing Lyndon Johnson, the words the members of this little group use are "vibrancy," "vitality," "urgency," "intensity," "energy," -- and "passion."  

There is something I should learn here

 From Art of Noticing Newsletter; readers wrote about their own ways to get out of boring situations.  This one I liked:

“Boredom/ anxiety-trick at social events I didn't particularly want to attend is: 'I'm undercover, trying to find useful information, don't know from who, but there is definitely something I should learn here.' This gives me interest and social courage, helps me ask much better questions, and I always end up enjoying the event, even when I was SURE I wouldn't.”

Simply trust

 Simply trust:

 do not the petals flutter down,
               just like that

Issa

Do the next and most necessary thing

 Dear Frau V. 15 December 1933

Your questions are unanswerable because you want to know how one ought to live. 

One lives as one can. 

There is no single, definite way for the individual which is prescribed for him or would be the proper one. 

If that’s what you want you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what. 

Moreover this way fits in  with the average way of mankind in general. 

But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. 

If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. 

Then is it naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. 

And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. 

So long as you think you don’t yet know what this is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. 

But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate. 

With Kind regards and wishes, 

Yours, sincerely,

C.G. Jung

He made them feel needed

Brittanica Online

In The Path to Power, Robert Caro illustrates the transformation of LBJ from someone noone liked through his childhood and college into someone with incredible charisma.  Earlier I noted the section on his incredible effort and drive that showed up in his early school teaching career.  

Here, LBJ is working as a NYA administrator and being incredibly rude and abusive to workers in his office... yet people still were drawn to him.  

Cursing his men one moment, he removed the curse the next -- with hugs ("I saw him get angry at Sherman Birdwell one time, and he used most of the cuss words and combinations I  had ever heard," Morgan says, "and just as soon as he got through eating his ass out, he had his arm around him") and with compliments, compliments which, if infrequent, were as extravagant as the curses: remarks that a man repeated to his wife that night with pride, and that he never forgot.  He made them feel needed. (358)

In that same paragraph, Caro writes:

Mary Henderson recalls watching him in a crisis, when he was "absolutely frantic with worry." And she recalls that when the crisis was over, "he said: 'I have never been in need of people, or been in trouble, without looking around and finding your face.' And he put his arm around me. And I was nobody. Oh, you wanted to please him more than anything." (359)

Henderson later recounts:

I find it hard to understand when I talk about it now. But he had what they call now a charisma. He was dynamic, and he had this piercing look, and he knew exactly where he was going, and what he was going to do next, and he had you sold down the river on whatever he was telling you.  And you had no doubts that he was going to do what he said - no doubts at all..... Working for him was very exciting. Fascinating. History was being made. The country was being turned around. And Lyndon was one of the turners -- one of the makers and the doers and the shovers.

So much matters!

 From Oliver Burkeman's newsletter The Imperfectionist titled "Urgency Doesn't Exist," this part about the notion of how "urgent tasks" rule our day.  Very often things are "urgent" because of someone else's priorities.  That's not unimportant... but it shouldn't rule our day.

The way through this muddle begins, I think, by seeing that what we call “urgency” is actually just another kind of importance – not some separate, stress-inducing quality that attaches itself to certain tasks, demanding their immediate completion. And definitely, time-sensitivity is one of the factors that can make a task worth prioritising. Deadlines do matter, whether you’re paying a bill, launching a product, buying a birthday present or leaving for the school run. But time-sensitivity is one factor among many. There’s no need to think of urgency as some uniquely powerful force that gets to muscle its way in front of everything else.

If this strikes you as a purely conceptual distinction, I can only respond that, for me, it’s been transformative. It helps me see the truth of my situation, which is that every day, when I wake up, there are thousands upon thousands of genuinely important ways I could spend my day – certainly incalculably more than I’ll have time for. So much matters! Meaningful work matters. My relationships with my wife and son and friends matter. Paying the bills matters. Cleaning the house matters. Rest matters. Fun matters.

And somehow, the sheer overwhelming number of things that matter has the effect of cutting “urgency” down to size. Because I’m finite, my task for the day can only possibly be to do a few things that matter. Inevitably, a far greater number of things that matter will fall by the wayside – doubtless including a few that derived their importance from their time-sensitivity.

Oh well: such is the human condition.

De La Soul is Dead by Kevin Young

 

Four Poem that are part of a sonnet cycle called "De La Soul is Dead."  Each poem ends with an image/phrase that the next poem picks up immediately.  (Gone too soon...My mother silent in the car). The next poem picks it up in a different sense... different tone completely.  Each poem is a song that's important to him.  All poems about "college years."

Middle Season #33

I saw a hawk swoop down driveway and land in pine tree across street; I got close to him and saw feathery ruffles in the wind and silhoutte of very big creature... 2 feet for sure.

this is the week that puddles frozen, thawed, froze again; the day when strong winds from north made 27 degrees feel like 17

Stop searching for a mediocre adult

 Lyndon Johnson was behind in the final stretch of his first campaign for Congress.  He made two improvements, according to Robert Caro.  He doubled down on referring to General Burleson's support (workers of his campaign scattered through the audience would should "General Burleson is right."  Another would should back "Let's send a young man to Congress."  A third would should "Let's do what Burleson says!"

The other improvement was provided by his father.  

There was a tactic, Sam Johnson said, that could make the leaders' opposition work for him, instead of against him. The same tactic, Sam said, could make the adverse newspaperpolls work for him, instead of against him.  It could even make the youth issue work for him.  If the leaders were against him, he told his son, stop trying to conceal that fact; emphasize it -- in a dramatic fashion. If he was behind in the race, emphasize that -- in a dramatic fashion.  If he was younger than the other candidates, emphasize that.  

If no leader would introduce Lyndon [at a speech], Sam said, he should stop searching for mediocre adults as substitutes, but instead should be introduced by a young child, an outstanding young child.And the child should introduce him not as an adult would introduce him, but with a poem, a very special poem.

And that's what Johnson did, to great effect.

Habit Tracking 2.0

After seeing this example of a habit tracker on Twitter, I built my own in Google Sheets.

New things I learned: ARRAYFORMULA, SPARKLINE, and making a curved line graph of % of goals done each day and embedding it exactly where I want it in the sheet.  

I had to rewatch the GIFs a number of times (without glasses, squinting at the screen) to see the formulas, then read more about the formula, then trial and error.

I had already built this paper version of a habit tracker that is, itself, a pretty revised version of something I've been doing... since I was 10.  

Merely tolerated or accepted

 

Earth, photographed by Apollo astronauts (NASA)

From Twitter person @chenchenwrites

i do not want to be merely tolerated or accepted. what miserably low standards. i want to be celebrated. i wanted to be asked serious questions. i want to be asked about my dreams and desires, my sorrows and my favorite trees. i want to be wanted. actively. abundantly. today.

Celeste Ng and Adam Grant

 Adam Grant's podcast "Re:thinking" had a segment on Celeste Ng whose new book is "Our Missing Hearts." Here's the transcript.

On Noticing & Lowering the Filters

I think that's right though. One of the things that I love just is noticing stuff, and it's for better or for worse, it's, it's one of my, my quirks. And if you go on a walk with me, or you spend any time with me, you will probably be treated to a plethora of just little things that I notice that are really not relevant to whatever it is that we're actually doing. But that's sort of how my brain works.

If you walk around with a toddler, and I am, I realize as I dive into this, comparing myself to a toddler, but the toddler toddlers are always like, “Oh my God, look at that. Wow, look at this. Hey, look at that. Hey, there's a crack in the sidewalk. Oh, look at this. Hey, that grass is really tall. Did you know grass could get that tall? I think it's taller than me.” You know, this constant stream of observations that I think for, for most of us as adults, we learn to, um, tamp down for, for lack of a better term. You, you can't be commenting on that all the time. And one of the joys of being a writer is that I get to indulge that noticing aspect. I get to write it down and then ideally I get to take some of those things that I notice and try and find a little bit of meaning in them. Um, it's rare for adults, I think, to get a moment to slow down and notice. We’re, we have to move faster because there are things we have to do. And I like it when any kind of art, music, visual art, poetry, novels can stop you and go, “Hey, look at this for a minute.”

On Lowering the Filters

Adam Grant:  One of the things that I think is unusual about you, compared to other people who have that noticing skill, is they have a hard time raising their attentional filters. Like I know a lot of people who are very good at noticing, who can't stop noticing. They can't turn it off. And they end up being incredibly creative, curious minds, uh, with less to show for their time than they hoped in a lot of cases, right? And here you are kind of lowering the filters, noticing these things, but then raising them and saying, “I'm gonna write a story and it's gonna move people.” Do you have habits or strategies for navigating that tension? Is there a tension there?

On Writing as a process for crystalizing ideas

Adam Grant: I think it is and it isn't. So on the one hand, I, I strongly agree. I think that a lot of people see writing as a vehicle for communicating ideas. But it's also a tool for crystallizing ideas.So often I find that what's fuzzy in my head becomes clear on the page. And that when I try to write down, you know, an inkling, it could become an insight, or in some cases, I'll see the gap in my knowledge or my logic, or when I'm trying to spell something out in writing, I have to articulate my assumptions. I have to address counterarguments, and I guess I think a lot about the observation of how can I know what I think until I see what I say.

Advance the plot or reveal character

Grant: Vonnegut said that every sentence should advance plot or reveal character.  Ng: I think he's right, but I think those categories are very broad, and so sometimes, you know, you have a sentence that is there kind of just for decoration and beauty, but in a way that's, that's telling you something about the plot and the character.

On Learn to Write/Tracing

Grant: What surprised you that you learned being trained in the formal skill of writing that you didn't know going in?

Celeste Ng: I think one of the things that surprised me, related to what we were talking about, is that how much of writing is reading. And that writing, you know, it wasn't just that I needed to be sat down and made to write a lot of stories, although I was, and that helped a lot, but I learned so much from reading things that I wouldn't ordinarily have picked up. You know, books that I was assigned, or books that my friends or people in my cohort recommended and I went, “I've never heard of that. Let me go read it.”

Um, that was as much of the educational experience as being in the class, and that is said with no disrespect to my amazing teachers in the classes where I really learned a lot, but that I learned so much from other writers and I learned partly by imitating and then partly by shaping myself against other people. Not to say, you know, I don't like what you do, but I was like, “Oh, you're writing about that, but that's, that's not what's drawing me. What is drawing me?” And I had to figure that out.

And I really started to think of writing as something almost collaborative in that way. You don't always work with someone else on the page, but you're almost always in conversation with something when you're writing, or someone. And in that sense, it is a collaboration. You're speaking to someone or you're trying to explain someone to someone else. There's always another party in there that's, that's kind of part of that circuitry.

Adam Grant: When you talk about imitating, I think about, uh, Malcolm Gladwell literally learning to write by typing out William F. Buckley novels and getting a feel for the, the arc of a, a story. I, I imagine you didn't do it that literally, did you?

Celeste Ng: I didn't do it that literally. No. But I know a lot of writers who do that, who, um, you know, Malcolm Gladwell's not alone in kind of typing sentences that he loves and admires. I, I know a lot of writers who have done that, um, in one way or another. Even as simple as there's a poem you love or a passage you love and you copied into your notebook to keep it for later.

There is something about retracing the rhythm of those words that you know, this, this will be fodder for future neuroscientists, but I don't know if you are kind of engraving a neural pathway. I don't know what it is that you're doing. But, something about the act of going over those words again, whether you're rereading them over, whether you're copying them, whether you're typing them out, um, it kind of teaches, you almost like the rhythm. It, like it's learning how to improvise on the piano, kind of like that. Um, so for me, when I was imitating. It was more that I would read a book or a story that kind of blew my mind and I would go, “Well, I didn't know you were allowed to do that. I wanna do that.” You know, and then I would try to do that. And of course, what came out even when I was trying to imitate, would be very different. But it was my way of kind of feeling out what I wanted to do.

Adam Grant: It's fascinating how you called that tracing, because it, it makes me think immediately of learning to draw: where the first thing that you do, if you're trying to learn a new technique as an artist, is to trace someone else's work. And that's part of building your skill. We're not taught to do that as writers.

Celeste Ng: No, and I, you know, when you said tracing, it reminded me also of being taught to write cursive. 

I remember, in I would say about second or third grade, having to trace. Here's the letter A. Trace these, and then it would go to just dots and it would go to just the lines, and you'd have to kind of create them on your own. And we're, I, I don't think most kids are taught to do that. At least my son is not.

So you're right. There is something about, again, just kind of following in the footsteps or in the pen marks of someone else that I think is an important part of figuring out. You're like, “I don't want my line to go there. I wanted to go a different way.” But that's, you've learned something there too.

Adam Grant: So tracing seems like a beginner skill in a way. If you move to the intermediate level I think the next phase, at least for me as a writer, and I'm not the kind of writer that you are in any way, shape, or form, but, one of the things that, that I found enormously helpful was to internalize the style and taste of other writers, and then think through how would they tell this story? Where would they begin? What would the reveal be for them?

And you know, that, that gave me, it felt like it gave me more degrees of freedom. To say, “Oh, now I could think of telling the same story seven different ways.” Or “Maybe now I'm actually not focusing on the right character at all or the right story at all because I've internalized the point of view of a particular writer I admire. Um, and now I can imagine a possibility I wouldn't have seen before.” Did, did you go through a phase like that as well?

Celeste Ng:Yeah, I think I did and thought of it as almost reverse engineering what writers that I loved were doing. So, for example, um, when I started writing, um, when I was writing my first novel, Everything I Never Told You, I eventually realized that I wanted to tell it in this omniscient point of view because I realized that this book was gonna be about secrets and nobody in the family knew everything. But somebody had to know these things and that person was gonna be the narrator. That was gonna be the person who was gonna help the reader put it together. And I was really scared because I did not know how to do that.

And so what I did was I went to my bookshelf and I pulled down some books that I love. So I pulled down Oliver Twist by Dickens. I pulled down the God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I pulled down Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. You know, all these books that were told in that point of view. And I looked at their first few pages to go, “Okay, how did they do this? How did they create that voice? How did they structure the book? How did you know-- just can I look at all of these examples and distill from that any kind of guideline about how to put it together?”

And that's been, I feel like one of, one of the ways that I learn from other writers now very concretely, is I go, “Ooh, you're doing something cool. How did you do that? Let me study it.” And then maybe I can start to use those principles that this other writer has taught me for my own purposes.

On Being a Critic and a Fan

Celeste Ng: It's hard to turn off the writer part of my brain and just be a reader. In fact, I know that a book has really hooked me if I'm not thinking at all about any of the stylistic choices that the writer has made. Um, and it's rare, but it's a huge compliment. Like, "Oh, this book is doing something.” And I'll tell my husband, like, “I was not thinking about any of the writer stuff at all.” And he'll immediately take the book from me and go read it. 

I'm getting better at sort of just seeing how books are put together. And so when I'm reading, there's a little part of my mind that's always registering that people that I know and love who really get music, my, my son is one of them they can kind of hear things in music that I can't. And I imagine this might be what the experience of listening to music might be like for them. They're appreciating it and enjoying it in similar ways that I am with my no musical knowledge, but there might maybe also be hearing ike, “Ooh, there's an interesting chord progression.” Or “Ooh, it changed to a minor key.” Or, “Oh, you modulated, you know?” Or, “Ooh, the rhythm changed here.”

You know, things that I can't hear, but they're aware of, and I imagine, I hope for them, it adds a different level of understanding to the piece, and that's sort of what reading is for me. Ideally, those two things are running in parallel. I'm enjoying it on the story level and the readerly level, but then I'm also enjoying it on a writerly level as I'm going, “Ooh, interesting move that you made here. Ooh, we've switched into the second person.” Or, “Oh, I didn't even notice. When did you do that?” I'll go back and look and then I start kind of reverse engineering again and figuring out how they did it.

Adam Grant: This actually speaks to some recent research. I think the paper was called “Emotionally Numb,” and it was about the trade-offs between expertise and enjoyment. Hmm. It turned out that the more you learned about movies or photography or wine, the less you enjoyed them. Because they started to become critics instead of fans. it sounds like you've learned to avoid that.

Celeste Ng:And I feel like maybe one of the keys is to try and hold onto that joy and that discovery. And one nice thing about being a writer is that people are always doing new stuff. There's always new ideas and there's always sort of new things out there that are gonna catch you. And so you can always, there's always space to be surprised and I feel like when you were surprised, that's when you learn something. Um, and that's one of the joys for me. I mean, that's why I still read. Even as I have become a writer, because there's cool new stuff out there, and I, I kind of wanna see it. So I'm, I'm gonna keep that in mind and, and keep trying to hold onto that, that toddler excitement. Oh my God, there's a crack in the sidewalk. I've never seen a crack in the sidewalk before. Right? But that's--

Right? Why is there a crack in the sidewalk? Like, who put it there? Will it ever be there? Right. All the questions that toddlers ask you, where you're like, “I, I don't know, honey, let's go. It's a crack in the sidewalk.” In some ways, like, I get to indulge myself as a writer and say, “That's part of my job is to get to linger in these very small kind of unimportant details.” To keep the curiosity alive

Thanksgiving Practice

From @jhalifax 

A practice: Gratefulness

Gladdening the heart with a deep inhale and relaxed exhale.

May I be grateful for this life.

May I be grateful for all those in my life.

May I be grateful for the lessons given to me.

May I be grateful that I have the heart to serve.

The mob within the heart - Meditation phrases

The mob within the heart (1745)

The mob within the heart

Police cannot suppress

The riot given at the first

Is authorized as peace

Uncertified of scene

Or signified of sound

But growing like a hurricane

In a congenial ground. 

                    -Emily Dickinson 

One of the things I like about meditation/Buddhist practices is the metaphoric nature of the teaching: "Naming the dragon," "unfinished business of the heart"

Calls forth your best

 It is key to keep company with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.

-Epictetus

Ode to Ol Dirty Bastard by Kevin Brown

 Kevin Young reads "Ode to Ol Dirty Bastard."  Here is an actual ode to him at Salon.com.

Middle Season #32

 

The first sustained snow... and a crime scene.  All these cranberries (or crabapples?) dropped seemingly at once at Hinsdale South HS front drive. Trout lily blooms more... but weakly.  My new hydrangea with beautiful wine colors.

Make less difficult

 What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

-George Eliot

You're Working. You're Trying

(found in Kleon Twitter)

“Writing or making anything — a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake — has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.”

—Sharon Olds

How can I help?

Philip Glass feeding pigeons with his kids.

Parents, teachers, and managers often intervene by offering either a directive or an evaluation (i.e., judgment), apparently assuming that the only alternative is to stand by silently. But what if they asked simply, "How can I help?" - Alfie Kohn Tweet

Works by Difficulty

 This website has a list of all of Domenico Scarlatti's piano pieces, ranged by playing difficulty.  I like this concept.  Here's a subpage about my favorite piece, the one I'm working on on guitar.

And this page has a few thousand works by a variety of composers.

And this page talks about the describes the different elements that are considered in the difficulty scale. This page also has an example snippet from each of the levels of the scale - 1 to 5 (going up by .5)

The Breath is Not One Thing

American photographer William Smith 

 

Some recent meditation instruction that seems worth recording

Joseph Goldstein - 

• opens up new possibilities of discernment and choice
• whatever arises will also pass away
• the breath is not one thing
• reconnect with the flows of sensations of the breath

Jon Kabat-Zinn - (#45)

• recognizing our own capacity to heal rather than harm that starts with every one of us
• taking responsibility for aligning ourselves with wisdom, compassion, kindness, open-hearted wakefulness and instantiating that in how we conduct ourselves, what we don't turn away from
• can we welcome...
• be free from inner and outer harm
• can they recognize their own beauty

Patrick Briody

• build awareness: tune into your own sounds, thoughts, emotions
• sounds are like any other experience
• allow your attention to rest with sound
• let go of judgment and labelling
• have gentle curiosity
• foucs on pitch, tone, volume, duration

Don't Take Your Partner for Granted

 1. Greet your partner with a kiss, kind words, and a conversation

2. Two minutes of undistracted conversation. two minutes of undistracted communication can be more important than spending a whole unfocused week together as a couple.

3. Practice an appreciation ritual.  Tell your partner what you love about them, and why. It’s important to find ways to genuinely communicate affection and appreciation toward your partner. Not only does this make your partner feel valued, but it also enables you to see the positive traits of your partner, instead of focusing on the negative.  

4. Create more positive interactions.  Dr. John Gottman terms this the “magic ratio” or “the 5:1 ratio” and uses a banking metaphor to describe it. If you have five or more positive interactions for every one negative interaction, then you’re making regular deposits into your emotional bank account, which keeps your relationship in the green.

5. Date your partner. Regularly dating your partner allows you to stay close and knowledgeable about each other’s lives. It reminds you why you love your partner! You can never stop learning about one another, and dating your partner allows you to share more about your family histories, spiritual beliefs, financial practices, and sexual preferences.Doing little things for your partner and surprising them with new experiences makes your partner feel loved and appreciated. Why wouldn’t you want to make your partner feel loved? Regularly dating your partner at every stage of your relationship can lead to more intimacy and romance! Spending intentional time together leads to better communication and gives you something to talk to your partner about. 

Farewell, Heavens

 

a Gregorian calendar via Alamy

This fascinating article in the NY Times by Alanna Mitchell called "Fine-Tuning Time" is about a proposal to abandon the "leap second."  

Roughly every four years, an extra day gets tacked onto the end of February, a time-keeping convention known as the leap year. The practice of adjusting the calendar with an extra day was established by Julius Caesar more than 2,000 years ago and modified in the 16th century by Pope Gregory XIII, bequeathing us the Julian and Gregorian calendars.

That extra day is a way of aligning the calendar year of 365 days with how long it actually takes Earth to make a trip around the sun, which is nearly one-quarter of a day longer. The added day ensures that the seasons stay put rather than shifting around the year as the mismatch lengthens.

Humanity struggles to impose order on the small end of the time scale, too. Lately the second is running into trouble. Traditionally the unit was defined in astronomical terms, as one-86,400th of the mean solar day (the time it takes Earth to rotate once on its axis). In 1967 the world’s metrologists instead began measuring time from the ground up, with atomic clocks. The official length of the basic unit, the second, was fixed at 9,192,631,770 vibrations of an atom of cesium 133. Eighty-six thousand four hundred such seconds compose one day.

But Earth’s rotation slows ever so slightly from year to year, and the astronomical second (like the astronomical day) has gradually grown longer than the atomic one. To compensate, starting in 1972, metrologists began occasionally inserting an extra second — a leap second — to the end of an atomic day. In effect, whenever atomic time is a full second ahead, it stops for a second to allow Earth to catch up. Ten leap seconds were added to the atomic time scale in 1972, and 27 more have been added since.

----- 

“What was before just a way of measuring the flow of time is today essential for transportation, location, defense, finance, space competition,” said Felicitas Arias, former director of the time department of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, known as B.I.P.M. from its French name and based outside Paris. “Time is ruling the world.” 

---- 

The resolution severs the timekeeping of atoms from the timekeeping of the heavens, probably for generations to come.  

Hive by Kevin Brown

 Hive by Kevin Brown

Spring by Mary Oliver

Spring 

by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her -—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

I found this poem through Twitter, specifically, through the lines: "There is only one question//How to love this world."

That's it.  The single question.

I also love the second highlighted part; that we share in the wildness of the world, alongside the poetry, music, and glass cities.

Middle Season #31

 

The witch hazel blooms; the orange fronds of x tree

Mapping Emotions in the Body

 (Source)

One such study from 2013 led by a team of biomedical engineers in Finland sought to explain where emotions are felt in the body.

They mapped bodily reactions to emotions in about 700 individuals by asking them to color in regions where they felt reactions increasing or decreasing due to various stimuli.

The team showed the volunteers two blank silhouettes of person on a screen and then told the subjects to think about one of 14 emotions: love, disgust, anger, pride, etc. The volunteers then painted areas of the body that felt stimulated by that emotion. On the second silhouette, they painted areas of the body that get deactivated during that emotion.

Not everybody painted each emotion in the same way. But when the team averaged the maps together, signature patterns emerged for each emotion. The team published these sensation maps Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Additionally, the same researchers conducted a follow-up study that found the intensity of a feeling directly correlated with the intensity of physical and mental sensations.

They categorized feelings into five groups:

• negative, such as stress, anger, and shame
• positive, such as happiness, love, and pride
• cognition, such as attention and perception
• homeostatic states, or a balanced, regulated internal state
• illnesses and somatic states

Feelings are ever-changing, and this research may be helpful for those who have trouble understanding their emotions.

Ever feel like you need to cry, scream, laugh, punch a pillow, or dance it out?

We’re often taught to bury our pain and soldier on. Over time, this can lead to repressed emotions, also known as unconscious avoidance.

Research from 2019 linked emotional repression with decreased immune system function.

Here are a few ways to release repressed emotions:

• acknowledging your feelings
• working through trauma
• trying shadow work
• making intentional movement
• practicing stillness