Middle Season 24

 Late summer forest flowers. Poison oak(?) in my back yard. Low sun nice light vista at Fullersburg woods. 

Optimizing at the fringes.

 On Twitter. Brad Stulberg says:

I am always shocked at the number of bizarre things people do to "optimize" their health and longevity and yet they don't exercise regularly, sleep 7-9 hours, eat fruits and veggies, build intimate bonds and community, or ever relax.

They obsess over the 0.1% but not the 99.9%.

Every word has consequences

 “Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Drifting in clear water

 drifting 

in clear water 

fallen willow leaves  

Buson

One Good Idea

 

This has been a summer of getting back into running. I’m only running 3x per week and doing 3 miles. Each one ends with a resting place - a public bench within walking distance. 

Not always but pretty often I’ll get a one good idea while sitting there. It just appears. Often that’s more than on a typical day  

On a recent day I saw this sign and liked the spotlight. I thought that it could be an idea for school. Each day of class there could be an OBJECTIVE… but there could also be a spotlight. 

The objective is to practice writing a sonnet. The spotlight is that modern authors like Edna St Vincent Millay uses the sonnet - an ancient form - in new ways. 

if you didn’t know?

 What if you hadn’t looked at the weather and didn’t know it was going to rain?  

Or get really hot?

What if younger to rely on your senses and … be ready to be wrong?

Maybe the need to know is a symptom of unease. 

Middle Season #22

 

Directions for Tonglen

 

Paulownias and Chrysanthemums, by Sakai Hōitsu, late 18th-early 19th century

This summer I came across, via Pema Chodron and Insight Timer, the idea of Tonglen Practice, which seems a cousin to Lovingkindness. Here are instructions from Lion's Roar.

How to Practice Tonglen Meditation

When you do tonglen as a formal meditation practice, it has four stages:

1. FLASH ON BODHICHITTA

Rest your mind for a second or two in a state of openness or stillness. This stage is traditionally called flashing on absolute bodhichitta, awakened heart-mind, or opening to basic spaciousness and clarity.

2. BEGIN THE VISUALIZATION

Work with texture. Breathe in feelings of heat, darkness, and heaviness—a sense of claustrophobia—and breathe out feelings of coolness, brightness, and light—a sense of freshness. Breathe in completely, taking in negative energy through all the pores of your body. When you breathe out, radiate positive energy completely, through all the pores of your body. Do this until your visualization is synchronized with your in- and out-breaths.

3. FOCUS ON A PERSONAL SITUATION

Focus on any painful situation that’s real to you. Traditionally you begin by doing tonglen for someone you care about and wish to help. However, if you are stuck, you can do the practice for the pain you are feeling yourself, and simultaneously for all those who feel the same kind of suffering. For instance, if you are feeling inadequate, breathe that in for yourself and all the others in the same boat and send out confidence, adequacy, and relief in any form you wish.

4. EXPAND YOUR COMPASSION

Finally, make the taking in and sending out bigger. If you are doing tonglen for someone you love, extend it out to all those who are in the same situation. If you are doing tonglen for someone you see on television or on the street, do it for all the others in the same boat. Make it bigger than just that one person. You can do tonglen for people you consider to be your enemies—those who hurt you or hurt others. Do tonglen for them, thinking of them as having the same confusion and stuckness as your friend or yourself. Breathe in their pain and send them relief.

Tonglen can extend infinitely. As you do the practice, your compassion naturally expands over time, and so does your realization that things are not as solid as you thought, which is a glimpse of emptiness. As you do this practice, gradually at your own pace, you will be surprised to find yourself more and more able to be there for others, even in what used to seem like impossible situations.

Menus, Not Lists

 From Burkeman's Imperfectionist newsletter:

These menus also help clarify a critical way a menu differs from a to-do list: picking just one or two items from a menu is something you get to do, not something you have to do. The myriad things you could order – so far in excess of your capacity to consume them – don’t constitute a problem. It isn’t the case that in an ideal world, you’d eat them all, but because you’re a bit rubbish at eating, you must settle for just one or two, and feel like a failure. That would be ridiculous. The abundance is the point; and the joy is in getting to eat at the restaurant at all.

I take it you can see where this is going when it comes to to-do lists.

***

Increasingly, I find myself treating my list of work projects as a menu, too. The contents of the menu is constrained by various goals and long-term deadlines, to be sure. But the daily practice is to pick something appetising from the menu, instead of grinding through a list. (It’s true that some menu items are dependent on my completing other items first, which is where the restaurant metaphor breaks down, but there’s usually a good number I can pick from.)

***

One great benefit of doing this more consciously, though – of facing the fact that lists are menus – is that it shifts the source of gratification. The reward of pleasure, or a sense of meaning, no longer gets doled out stingily, in morsels, en route to some hypothetical moment of future fulfillment when the list is finally complete. Instead, it comes from getting to pick something from the menu – from getting to dive in to one of the vast range of possibilities the world has to offer, without any expectation of getting through them all. Which also means you get to have the reward right now.

Altruistic August

 

Andy Warhol’s Sunsets

 Warhol made Sunset, a commission by the architecture firm Johnson & Burgee, to decorate the landmark Hotel Marquette in Minneapolis. Four hundred seventy-two of the prints were used in the hotel, while 160 were assembled into forty unique portfolios of four prints, one of which is on view here. Warhol made all the prints using three screens—one to apply the background bands of color, one for the sun itself, and one with a single-color dot pattern. He inked the screens in various color combinations and printed them with varying registration to create 632 unique screenprints  

Eagle Poem by Joy Harjo

 Eagle Poem 

by Joy Harjo

To pray you open your whole self

To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

To one whole voice that is you.

And know there is more

That you can’t see, can’t hear;

Can’t know except in moments

Steadily growing, and in languages

That aren’t always sound but other

Circles of motion.

Like eagle that Sunday morning

Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky

In wind, swept our hearts clean

With sacred wings.

We see you, see ourselves and know

That we must take the utmost care

And kindness in all things.

Breathe in, knowing we are made of

All this, and breathe, knowing

We are truly blessed because we

Were born, and die soon within a

True circle of motion,

Like eagle rounding out the morning

Inside us.

We pray that it will be done

In beauty.

In beauty.

Praise the Rain by Joy Harjo

 Praise the Rain

BY JOY HARJO

Praise the rain; the seagull dive

The curl of plant, the raven talk—

Praise the hurt, the house slack

The stand of trees, the dignity—

Praise the dark, the moon cradle

The sky fall, the bear sleep—

Praise the mist, the warrior name

The earth eclipse, the fired leap—

Praise the backwards, upward sky

The baby cry, the spirit food—

Praise canoe, the fish rush

The hole for frog, the upside-down—

Praise the day, the cloud cup

The mind flat, forget it all—

Praise crazy. Praise sad.

Praise the path on which we're led.

Praise the roads on earth and water.

Praise the eater and the eaten.

Praise beginnings; praise the end.

Praise the song and praise the singer.

Praise the rain; it brings more rain.

Praise the rain; it brings more rain

Sundown Walks to the Edge of the Story by Joy Harjo

 In the lands of forgotten memories,

I hear a woman singing.

A dog runs in circles, barking.

Then children laugh as they run through,

The sashes of one girl’s dress are dragging

On the ground from playing horse.

In this story is a woman with a husband she adores.

He is the color of warm brown earth, tall,

With kind eyes that shine with love for her.

When he loves, it is with every part of his body,

From his planted feet to his head good with numbers.

When she first lay down with him, their love made roots

That dove into the ground, caressed the stones.

These roots find water where water is needed.

Those nights of early love, he spoke to her when she was sleeping.

His words were the vision of an architect of dreams.

He told her how he would treasure her, how they would walk

Through this life to the next with each other, no matter

The tests and disappointments that befall a human

On this earthly road.

Those words blossomed into flowers, waters, and sunrises.

She wears each day as a river pearl in a necklace. Though the pearls

Darken with age, they never let up their glow.

Time is nothing in those lands.

It has been years.

They lay down together to sleep, in their grown old bones,

Their weathered skins.

She is a woman made of words.

He is a man now impatient with words.

They hold hands in the dark and fall asleep together.

I find them, as sundown walks to the edge of the story

To wait for sunrise. I find them in a song about a woman

Weeping with joy, about a man whose love for her

Does not need words but contains every color

That love has ever worn.

Published originally in the New Yorker

The Call Away by Robert Bly