Middle Season #3

 

The bottom two pictures were from about January 20.  The second half of this middle season turned cold and wintery.  A couple nights below zero.  Some small snow coverage for several days in a row.  The tree was from Palos on a walk with HDL.  The bottom left is bee balm from the back yard.  The bottom right is from the house in Old Town on Maple (and Grand?) that has those very early-blooming spring flowers.

That is your teacher

Teruhide Kato

I think we can expand who we think is our teacher.  Who (or what) can help you understand, realize, adapt, change.

1. I've noticed that many of the writers about meditation I've read speak about PEOPLE who have taught them things.  

2. “Anything which is troubling you, anything which is irritating you, that is your teacher.” ~ Ajahn Chah 

3. Jon Kabat Zinn talks about "life is your curriculum"... which is pretty close to being a teacher.

4. Also:

moons

and flowers

are the true masters

Basho

Do each job with all your attention

Gyokudo Kawai

 “Don’t do any task in order to get it over with. Resolve to do each job in a relaxed way, with all your attention. Enjoy and be one with your work.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

This is related to James Clear's idea about building habits in his Tim Ferriss podcast.  He suggests we ask ourselves:

what would this look like if it was easy? Or, what would it look like to be the kind of person who looks forward to writing or looks forward to meditating or looks forward to working out? That’s a question worth taking seriously, because you can usually design the habit to feel like, hey, this isn’t a chore. This is something, this is how I want to be spending my days. And that’s really where you want to get to because for a habit to last, it’s got to be part of your normal lifestyle. It has to be something that, like you want to show up and do this each day. And so you’re trying to find the version of it that benefits you the most.

James Clear Atomic Habits

 James Clear

I think it’s worth asking yourself what habits are upstream from other things that I want to do or other things that set me up for a good day. What you’re describing is that a workout habit, at least for you, and I would say for me, is upstream from a lot of other good things that happen. I get the benefits of the workout, sure, but also, I tend to have that post-workout high for an hour or two where I get this good period of concentration. I tend to eat better when I’m training, it’s like I don’t want to waste it. It’s actually when I’m not training that I get lazy and start eating whatever I want. I tend to sleep better at night because I’m tired from the workout, which means I wake up the next day and I have better energy. At no point was I trying to actively build better sleep habits or nutrition habits or whatever, but it just came as a natural byproduct of getting that one habit of a good workout in.

I think it just comes down to asking yourself, when I’m living a good day, when I’m on, what are some of the key habits that are part of that? Then maybe rather than worrying about everything and trying to hit every little domino along the way, what’s the lead domino? What’s that first action that’s upstream from the other productive things? Can I just pour my energy into making sure I do that today and trust that the momentum will carry me forward?

I asked ChatGPT do to a summary of his book Atomic Habits:

James Clear's book "Atomic Habits" is a guide to building better habits and breaking bad ones. The book is based on the idea that small changes can lead to big results. Here are the five most important ideas from the book:

1. The power of small changes: Clear argues that small changes in behavior can have a big impact on our lives. He suggests that we focus on making small improvements in our habits rather than trying to make big changes all at once.
2. The importance of identity: Clear argues that our habits are a reflection of our identity. To change our habits, we need to change the way we see ourselves. He suggests that we focus on becoming the type of person who has the habits we want to have.
3. The 1% rule: Clear suggests that we focus on making small improvements in our habits. He argues that if we can improve our habits by just 1% each day, we will see significant results over time.
4. The four laws of behavior change: Clear outlines four laws of behavior change: cue, craving, response, and reward. He argues that to change our habits, we need to understand the triggers that lead to our bad habits and find ways to change the cues, cravings, responses, and rewards associated with them.
5. The importance of environment: Clear argues that our environment plays a big role in shaping our habits. He suggests that we create an environment that supports our good habits and makes it harder to engage in bad habits.

What could I do?

 From Dan Pink Tweet:

When faced with a tough problem, don't ask, "What should I do?"

Instead, ask, "What could I do?"

"Should" narrows your options.  "Could" widens your possibilities.

This fits Susan Langer's Mindfulness concept of thinking of several possibilities first. 

Light Through the Trees

 

Peter Vagt

Noticed the book Light Through the Trees by Peter Vagt while strolling through Barnes and Noble recently.  It's a book of photographs taken at The Morton Arboretum.  I'll buy it the next time I'm at the Arboretum.

Couple things: 

Vagt's website has a variety of his photo projects, with titles like "Morton Arboretum, 1997-2018" or "Radnor Lake, 2017-present."  He is a retired guy who for fun takes photos of a few places that he loves.  He goes back again and again to capture the places.

The photo above is titled Cathedral Pines, September.  On the website it's paired with Cathedral pines, October... which is taken from the exact same vantage point.  Lovely.  It shows the variety of beauty of one place through the year.

Something to be enthusiastic about

 

Koson Ohara

Priest and novelist Charles Kingsley on what makes us happy:

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

(from James Clear newsletter)

Being grateful daily

Koukei Kojima

I've had a number of different plans/structures for writing a "grateful daily" list, which I've been doing for several years.

• It began with Panda Planner, I think.  PP asks you to reflect daily on 3 "I'm grateful for..." and 3 "I'm excited about."  For many many months, that's how I started my daily morning writing.
• I think I learned from Steven Dubner (maybe) to reflect on "3 things that went well."
• Recently, I followed the formula: 1. a person you're grateful for, 2. a thing you're grateful for, 3. something about yourself that you're grateful for.
• At one point in 2022 I thought that "grateful" could be "notice, praise, savor, celebrate"

Clearing the forest undergrowth

 

A section of the forest not cleared yet

Cleared forest

In Bemis Forest Preserve workers have been clearing the choked undergrowth (and many trees) from large swaths of forest area.  These before and after pictures demonstrate how much has been removed.  Last week there were huge bonfire piles still smoldering.

Recipes on Repeat: Crispy Chickpea Stew with greens and lemons

 

This recipe took awhile to put together because of the pre-crisping 2/3 of the chickpeas first.  Those "toppers" were very yummy.  The lemon and garlic stood out.  I used chickpeas that I made myself in the Instantpot.

Love is Not All - Sonnet XXX - Edna St. Vincent Millay

 Sonnet XXX

      Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; 
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink 
And rise and sink and rise and sink again; 
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, 
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; 
Yet many a man is making friends with death 
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. 
It well may be that in a difficult hour, 
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, 
Or nagged by want past resolution's power, 
I might be driven to sell your love for peace, 
Or trade the memory of this night for food. 
It well may be. I do not think I would. 

Middle Season #2

 

(Unfocused) raindrops bead in the forest on all the blackberry bushes; Are these magnolias?  They are resting through the winter.

The Empathy Diaries - Sherry Turkle

 

I read this through January.  I notes dozens of pages that I wanted to go back to.  It is a memoir that focuses on her intellectual development at Radcliffe, Paris, and MIT.  It is also a psychologically-focused narrative of her coming to terms with having a missing father (her mother kept him away from her)... and what short and long term effects that had.  While she's at university, she learns about (and begins to focus on) Lacan whose pychological theories focus on fathers.  I'm making notes about the intellectual ideas she finds transforming. and her insights into other people.  It's also a relatively fast read.  There's nothing that I'm yawning at or wanting to skip over.

I spent 3 years alone building my log cabin

 This montage video, almost 90 minutes, shows this young man build a log cabin from scratch by himself.  He fells and skins trees, he lifts logs up the wall, digs a basement, catches and smokes his own fish, makes his own sled, metalsmiths, etc.  It's inspirational!  Who knew that actual human beings could still do things like this. And he's like 17 or 18 when it starts.  The video montage is interspliced with scenes from nature -- owls, moose, snowfall, rain, grand vistas.  There's also a friendly dog that keeps him company.  

Felling a Tree

 Forest Preserve workers (actually a company called "Tall Grass") is thinning groves of trees in Bemis Forest Preserve.  All of the stumps (cut very close to the ground) look something like this.  In this photo, I had found (on the forest floor nearby) the tall triangle of wood balanced on the stump on the left and put it back where it belonged.

Here seem to be the steps.

1. long horizontal cut (on the right) They cut through 3/4 of the tree.
2. short horizontal cut (on the left).  BELOW cut #1, they cut 1/4 of the the tree in the opposite direction
3. sharp diagnal cut.  At a very steep angle, they cut down from the "short cut" side starting well above either cut. The angle intersects with cut #2.

Recipes on Repeat: Winter Beet and Orange Salad

 

We recently took a trip to New Buffalo and ate at Bentwood Tavern.  There were two recipes I wanted to rereate - a Beet, pomegranate salad (and a Tavern Stew that felt like a cassoulet).  It features roasted beets, oranges, chickpeas, walnuts.

The restaurant is now under construction and the menu is gone.  I found two similar recipes.  Mostly, this is the first recipe with the addition of walnuts and goat cheese.  The second recipe, from Half-Baked Harvest, is related.

Recipe #1

Recipe #2

Breads of 2023 - 100% Wheat

 

Here's King Arthur's 100% Whole Wheat Bread Recipe.  This recipe was not devoured in the house.  There was a slightly off taste.  The first 2 hour rise was good.  The second was not so strong.  It never crowned above the 1# (4"x8") pan.

New, good version on the left; yucky one from last week on the right.

I retried the 100% Whole Wheat bread on January 22.  There were really only two changes -- I used brand new vegetable oil and I followed the instruction to used 1/4 cup orange juice for some of the water.  It turned out much better.  Jennie ate 3 slices during dinner.  She prefers it not toasted.

To be peace. To be joy. To be happiness.

Koitsu Tsuchiya 

“There are two things, to be and to do. Don’t think too much about to do – to be is first. To be peace. To be joy. To be happiness. And then to do joy, to do happiness – on the basis of being.” 

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Life Review Questions

 James Clear, Year-End-Review, from the Tim Ferriss Podcast:

(first, he used to publish his own annual review, that answered just three Qs: What went well? What didn't go well? What did you learn?   Here's 2019.)

On the podcast, he references "20 or so I go through" and lists these four.

“Just what am I optimizing for?” Sometimes people optimize for money, sometimes they optimize for free time, sometimes they optimize for creative output or being able to choose the projects they work on, all kinds of stuff, but that answer probably changes over time. What I’m optimizing for today is different than what I was optimizing for five years ago or 10 years ago. I think it’s a helpful question to keep revisiting. You need to decide what it is for you, otherwise it’s easy to slide into this status signaling or just doing the things that you feel like you’re encouraged to do by society or by your friends or peers or your parents or whatever. What am I optimizing for? Another way of phrasing that is maybe, “What’s the real objective here? What am I actually trying to achieve?” Some version of that question.

“Does this activity fill me with energy or drain me of energy?”

“Can my current habits carry me to my desired future?” That’s really about figuring out what kind of trajectory you’re on. If they can, then maybe all you need is patience, but if they can’t, something needs to change, you need to develop or build some new habits.Another question I love, and this is actually at the core of a lot of what I talk about in Atomic Habits, is “How can I create an environment that will naturally bring about my desired change?” Rather than trying to fight this and force my way through, rather than trying to grit my teeth and make it happen even if the circumstances aren’t ideal, how can I look around and structure my physical environment, my social environment and the tribes I’m a part of and my strategy for what I’m trying to achieve so that it’s almost natural that I’m moving in that direction?

Waiting for our senses to grow sharper

Alain Etchepare

 "The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."

W.B. Yeats

Middle Season #1 - 2023

 

Two pretty bad pics for the first middle season:  in the forest, the blackberries/raspberries canes seem to be perfect for collecting beads/globes of water.  And pussy willows are already furry, almost mammalian already.  Reminds me of the posts I did on the solstice about buds already ready and 12/21 as a sort of first day of summer.

Creating and Receiving

 

Oliva Herrick Designs

From Atomic Habits, James Clear:

Eliminate. Focus. Close yourself to the world and ask, “What can I create today?”

Relax. Breathe. Open yourself to the world and ask, “What can I receive today?”

Admire as much as you can

 Admire as much as you can, most people don't admire enough.

-Vincent Van Gogh

Knowledge should lead to new questions

 

Koson Ohara

Wisława Szymborska, poet and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature: 

“Any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.”

A Vote for the Type of Person You Wish to Become

 

Odilon Redon Vase of poppies

From James Clear of Atomic Habits:

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.

A longer version of this is from Clear in his Tim Ferriss podcast:

one of the core ideas in Atomic Habits, which is your habits are how you embody a particular identity. So the aspects, the behaviors that you perform each day are reinforcing or shaping the story that you have about yourself. I think it’s important to ask yourself: who is the type of person I wish to become? What’s the type of identity I want to be reinforcing? And your habits are not the only things that influence that in life. Every experience is part of who you are, but by virtue of the fact that they get repeated again and again, they have an outsized influence on your story. And so the phrase I like to keep in mind is: every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. 

Here's more, about building habits by starting with thinking of your (desired) identity:

It’s kind of a two-step process. Decide the type of person you want to be, and then you prove it to yourself with small wins. And the more small wins, the more small habits that you perform, the more votes that you cast for that identity, the more you build up evidence of being that kind of person. And eventually you start to take pride in that aspect of your identity. And man, once we start to take pride in a part of our story, it’s much easier to stick with those habits. If you take pride in the size of your biceps, you’ll never skip arm day at the gym. If you take pride in how your hair looks, you have this long haircare routine, all these haircare habits, and you do them every day.

 ...

“I’m the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts,” or “I’m the type of person who shows up on time,” or “I’m the type of person who finishes what they start.” Whatever aspect of your identity that you’re trying to reinforce, that’s kind of the story. You can also phrase it as a question. So for example, rather than saying, “I’m the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts,” you could have this question that’s related to the identity you want to build, and you kind of carry it around with you all day. And in this example, maybe the question is, “What would a healthy person do?” And so you’re just kind of walking around all day asking yourself, “What should I get for lunch? Well, what would a healthy person do?” Or, “Should I take an Uber, or should I walk to the next meeting? Well, what would a healthy person do?” And you just kind of go around your day and try to make decisions that you feel support that identity.

But I think you start with “Who is the type of person I wish to become?” So let’s say I’m the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. And then the second step is prove it to yourself with small wins. So which small actions, what little habits cast votes for being the kind of person who doesn’t miss workouts? Well, maybe one thing is, rather than doing a 45-minute workout when I only have 10 minutes, I reduce the scope and stick to the schedule and I do a couple sprints, or I do five sets of pushups or whatever it is. And so you find ways to reinforce your desired identity, even if it’s small, especially in the beginning.

Because if you can show up consistently, if you kind of master the art of showing up and performing these small habits, you build up this sense of momentum, you kind of start to reinforce and shape that new identity and the more evidence that you have for it, at some point you kind of cross this invisible threshold where you’re like, “Oh, I guess I am that kind of person.” If you go out and shoot a basketball for five minutes, you don’t think, “Oh, I’m a basketball player.” But if you do it every day for six months or a year or two years, at some point you cross this invisible line. You’re like, “I guess playing basketball is kind of part of who I am.” So I think you’re trying to accumulate actions that support your desired identity

On beginning to build habits:

Make it easy. So rather than doing 15 or 20 minutes or 30 minutes of meditation, which hey, that sounds great because your favorite guru does it. But listen, why not just do 60 seconds? Because if you can master the art of showing up, if you can just do it for a minute and actually stick to that day in and day out, then you’re starting to build the habit and now you have something, you’ve like gained a foothold and you can advance the next level. One of the things I recommend in the book is called the two-minute rule. And it says, just take whatever habit you’re trying to build and you scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. So read 30 books a year becomes read one page or meditate five days a week for 30 minutes, becomes meditate for 60 seconds and you’re just trying to master the art of showing up. A habit must be established before it can be improved.  

A Collection of Quotes on Achieving Success

 

1. People overestimate what they can accomplish in a day and underestimate what they can accomplishment in a year, let alone a decade.

Progress is non-linear. It includes peaks, valleys, and plateaus.

This is why consistency and patience are crucial.    (Brad Stulberg @ Twitter)

2. “If you get tired, learn to rest, not quit.”  (Mindfulness Meditation Institute)

3.  90 percent of success is not getting distracted.  (Shane Parrish)

4. Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity (James Clear)

Stop talking when a concert is about to begin

 

Kiyoshi Saito

From Alan Watts on Twitter:

We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names & numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions & ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal & symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.

An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine

 

64 - My half brother, like so many men and boys, have the impatience of the entitled.

74

91/92

96-99

109

113

116

127

Sebald

147

157

159*

160

166

168

187

Pessoa (188)

202

206-9

222

254

256

284

286

Hey owl! Is the year's end funny to you?

 

Rokuro Taniuchi

hey owl! is the year's end funny to you?

Issa Kobayashi

On New Year's Day Each thought a loneliness

 

Kiyoshi Saito

On New Year's Day each thought a loneliness as winter dusk descends

-Basho Matsuo

(also...

"New Year's morning: the ducks on the pond quack and quack." Issa Kobayashi

(also...

a New Year blessed with new poems and songs Ogawa

(also...

"New Year's Day - everything is in blossom! I feel about average." ― Issa Kobayashi (tr. Richard Haas)