Raven and Sparrow

The Sabbath

 
     I usually find Ezra Klein's podcasts for the New York Times interesting, but every now and then he talks about something that really draws me in. The recent one with Judith Shulevitz about the Sabbath prompted me to purchase her book The Sabbath World and the book that they referred to many times, The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel. I read Heschel in a couple of hours and am halfway through Shulevitz. On the podcast Ezra worries about the creeping hold technology is exerting on our lives and wonders if returning to the old "day of rest" practiced by the Jews forever and many Christian sects as well (remember the blue laws?) would help us re-assert our humanity in the face of ever the escalating badgering of phones, computers, texts, emails, and social media and the demands of commerce. Taking a day off from technology and endless striving might be a way for us all to remember that we are not just what we produce and give us time to bolster connections with the people we care most about. That was the purpose of the original Jewish Sabbath...one day out of seven that was dedicated to being rather than doing. This reminds me of the current emphasis on mindfulness and presence in the moment. It seems like working out the balance between one's interior life and the demands of the world is an ancient problem. Reading these books about the Sabbath have prompted me to think about the purposes of religion and the ways that people have tried to incorporate sacredness into their lives. There are a lot threads to pull here and I feel like I have just begun.

     So many of the descriptions of Jewish Shabbat....the preparation, the attention to beauty, the abrupt cut-off to all fussing when the time has come, the gathering, the meal, the feeling of complete immersion in the experience of community....remind me of throwing a dinner party. I do work hard to prepare most of the food ahead of time and of course I always try to make the setting as beautiful as I can, but once everyone has arrived (I don't have a sunset cut-off but it is usually about that time of day) all cleaning, cooking and tweaking stops and the event...the gathering...becomes the essential focus. The emphasis shifts from the ratcheting pressure to provide things (food, clean bathroom, pretty table) to the interaction between people and the dynamics of the group. No matter how good the food is a party is never successful unless the people around the table are joining together wholeheartedly. Their interactions can never be controlled but outside interruptions (checking cell-phones) can definitely de-rail the flow of the party. Sitting face to face around a table makes it possible to tune-in completely to your companions and I think this interaction is holy. Merriam Webster defines holy as: exalted or worthy of complete devotion.  Making space and taking time for extended interpersonal exchange is the kernel of holiness that links a secular dinner gathering with historical religious practice. Setting a whole day aside for personal concerns, including sitting down for lengthy meals, can seem impossible for many of us, nor do we wish anymore to be required to conform to religious requirements, but in our ever more secularized world some of the essential connections are being lost. It seems to me that the dinner table can step in to hold some of the essence the Sabbath used to offer as we rush into our future.

Continuing conversation

In my last post I described the effect of Japanese aesthetics on my own understanding of beauty. Some of the responses (thank you to my thoughtful commenters) sparked a lot of rumination on the politically fraught issues of cultural appropriation and political correctness and this is my response.

When I first encountered the House Beautiful article Download House Beautiful article (written in the '60s but seen by me in the '90s) describing the Japanese aesthetic concepts of shibusa and wabi sabi I felt an immediate thrill of recognition. It was as though my innermost inchoate feelings about beauty were captured, consolidated and displayed....for me. I clearly saw the "Japaneseness" of the ideas and knew from reading and observation that they arose from a long history of which I had only superficial appreciation, but their underlying power struck me very personally. I never thought that they could only be true for Japanese people and my adoption of those ideas was heartfelt and sincere. I have used them ever since as a guide and touchstone for my own work, which is not Japanese.

Now we are in a time of bewildering change and cultural shift in which  many previously marginalized groups are proudly claiming their own histories and expressing dismay at the denigrating use of their cultural symbols, ceremonies and motifs by the dominant, Eurocentric, Christian mainstream culture which reduces them to cliches and jokes. The newly vociferous minority groups complain that they have been undermined and demeaned by the superficial and patronizing way they have been portrayed and demand the right to control their own symbols. Anything else is deemed "cultural appropriation", that is, theft, by people who have been insulated to the point of unconsciousness and have no idea of the meaning and the sometimes extremely painful experiences behind the motifs they use for their own amusement and commercial exploitation. 

Meanwhile, the ubiquity of dominant white culture has made that exploitation of minority cultures, whether ethnic, religious, sexual or gender-related, invisible to most people. It is simply the way in which they have always lived and so they respond to these new criticisms with astonishment and defensiveness. What is the big fuss about blackface when minstrel shows have been an entertainment genre forever? Why can't sports teams use the Native American mascots by which they have always been known? Why must they suddenly be so careful about how they refer to other ethnicities or sexual identities or any of a seemingly endless list of people ready to take offense at what previously passed without comment? "Political correctness" is the derisive and frightened cry of people who feel like their understanding of and place in the world is under attack.

I think we are at a critical crossroad in our evolution. The old order is breaking down and everyone who identified with it is bereft and afraid, while those whom that order excluded feel newly and angrily self-aware. The divisions between people are magnified, sharp and dangerous. We have proved many times in our history how cruel and violent we can be when we are attacked, as every side feels it is. What must we do to navigate this perilous transition?

A pause here, while I evaluate my ability to pronounce sensibly on these weighty and terrifying matters. As someone immersed in my time and culture, I have no confidence in the clarity of my own perceptions, but I do think it boils down to who we can accept as "us". Will we be trapped in our old divisions or will we be able to expand our sense of self to include all humanity, and eventually, all creation? Will we jealously guard our own entitlements, or alternatively, our embattled identities against the entitlement of others? What if all of our contributions are sacred expressions of life and spirit? Can we release enough fear and resentment to allow the cross-pollination of ideas that has always been the key to human advancement and cultural enrichment? I feel sure that our greatest chance for our own continuation and flowering resides in the combined efforts and mutual appreciation of every human being, and our willlingness to imagine what another life might be like. We all have things to teach and learn; we don't have to disown our heritage to accept other ways of being, nor insist defensively that we alone know best and that knowledge can't be shared. We are many, but we are also one, and that is where I place my hope.

P.S. This illustration comes from a 2014 show at Seattle's Frye Art Museum displaying the work that  American sculptor Isamu Noguchi produced after a six-month apprenticeship with Chinese painting master Qi Baishe in 1930. Qi Baishe did not try to indoctrinate Noguchi in the classic Chinese motifs, but allowed him to do Western style figure studies using Chinese brush work.

Japanese influences

When Dee (www.deemallon.wordpress.com) posted on her blog about visiting the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston I was reminded of my unsuccessful effort to visit there on a day when it was closed. I wanted to go because I had read The Book of Tea, written in 1906 by Kakuzo Okakura to explain Japanese ways to Mrs. Gardner and her Western friends. Thinking of that prompted me to read it again and this is what came of it:

I have never been to Japan or studied the Japanese language. I have never attended a tea ceremony. My house and garden have no overtly Japanese decorative items and I only rarely use their motifs in my textile work. Still, there is something about Japanese aesthetics that calls to me strongly and I now recognize their influence on my tablesettings and general appreciation of beauty.

To even say this much is to call down derision from true adepts who would say that my appreciation comes from a shallow and ignorant place. The Japanese have been honing their aesthetic arts for centuries to an exquisite refinement that takes a lifetime to master. I am certainly missing a whole world of technical expertise, symbolic meaning and historical reference when I admire a beautiful kimono, graceful calligraphy or serene garden. Nonetheless, in my Western fashion I maintain the right to be moved by whatever appeals to me and take what I can from my own experience.

There are several things I especially like about Japanese art. One of the most important is their appreciation of domestic forms and daily life. Flower arrangements, gardens, ceramics and textiles are treated as artistic outlets as important and valuable as painting, sculpture and architecture. No facet of life is unworthy of consideration and care. They allow the sacred to shine through every moment, even the most mundane, and celebrate beauty in every endeavor.

Another touchstone is the Japanese affinity to nature. They refer to it constantly in art and ceremony, keeping natural motifs and themes in the forefront of their artistic vocabulary. The seasons are especially resonant for them and figure prominently in their poetry and symbolism, playing innumerable variations on the universal experience of change, death and renewal. Their acute appreciation of the power of the seasonal round always strikes a feeling of melancholy gratitude in me for the ephemeral, reliable gifts of earth. We all participate in the eternal becoming and dissolution of life, and the use of seasons as shorthand for that experience takes us straight into the heart of our own being.

A third appealing element of Japanese culture is the Zen-based concept of mindfulness. To me that means heightening my awareness of the moment and all that it entails. I don't think I will ever be able or want to lay aside past and future completely, but stopping as often as I can to savor what is happening now helps me connect to my own existence in a deeper way. Also, when I tune into the details around me I am motivated to make that moment as beautiful and satisfying as I can, although accepting what is no matter how messy is satisfying too and probably more Zen.

Table setting helps me translate these Japanese gleanings into my own life. As our culture becomes unmoored from traditional forms of community I think we need to pause occasionally, step out of our rush into the future and join with each other for the time it takes to eat a meal. This is a small, domestic act within the power of most people, not monumental but worthy of such attention as we can bring. Making an oasis for this to occur, invoking the natural world from which we and our sustenance come and concentrating our attention upon being together is the easiest formula I know to make people (including myself) feel secure, valuable and loved. Thanks Japan.

P.S. Marti's comment reminds me of an old article about the Japanese aesthetic of shibusa, published in House Beautiful magazine many years ago. There was no attribution to any author, but it is taken from an interview with the famous father of the Japanese craft movement, Soetsu Yanagi. I copied it and offer it here for you. Download House Beautiful article

 

 

Ken Wilber...again

When I went to college in 1970 I was looking forward to studying philosophy. I had lots of inchoate questions about Big Things that religion didn't seem to answer. It turned out that philosophy didn't answer them either. In fact, religion and philosophy were similar in that both tended to waft upward into dry intellectual blah blah blah that didn't have anything to do with the beauty and pain of real life.... Plato's Ideals, the Baltimore Catechism, whether we could ever be sure that what we see exists, the ranking of angels in the Great Chain of Being...Catholicism came down to earth only to point out my faults and philosophy spurned earth completely. It had no interest in me, and so I returned the compliment. I could never remember the vocabulary...words like a priori and heuristic slid off my brain like ice cream melting in the sun. I still have to look them up every time I encounter them. I decided I was too dumb to get it and turned away, searching elsewhere for my answers. I read tons of literature, dabbled in New Age stuff, studied Buddhism, Hinduism and Native American shamanism, got therapy, returned to the Church and left it again. It was Joseph Campbell who finally tapped into some of my internal angst by stepping back from the fray and seeing the human search for meaning in all the stories that we had ever told. ( I thought the dogma of the Church was the most important thing about it...what it believed. Campbell said no, the most important thing was its ceremonial forms that linked the material world with the unseen.) Mystery is the secret sauce and myth, miracle, metaphor and paradox are how we approach the Big Thing(s) whose presence we intuit, but find elusive in our daily lives. This gave me a trail to follow, and I am still on it, more content now to Not Know and just witness the unfolding of the power and beauty of life.

Okay, mostly I am content, but sometimes I still wish to understand what the hell is going on. This brings me to my love/hate relationship with Ken Wilber...He Who is More Evolved than You. This is probably sour grapes on my part because I don't like to be made to feel stupid and Ken Wilber's books always do, harking back to every philosopher I ever struggled with.  Still I keep returning to his stuff because he also steps back from the human comedy without losing all connection to it. Thus it was that I found myself purchasing (really? are you kidding me?) his latest work: Trump and a Post-Truth World. I thought it was unusual for him to address something as current and immediate as Donald Trump and suspected a wish to reap more financial rewards than philosophy books usually offer by invoking the Trump trigger. That was unworthy of me because actually he offered a different way to think about our current mess that has helped me and so I am grateful. 

Let's see...can I sum this up coherently? Ken says that just as individuals go through a series of growth stages, each broader and more encompassing than the last (the complete self absorption of babyhood giving way to ever greater abilities to imagine and empathize with the feelings of others as a person matures), so does human society as a whole. We started as small family groups, then gathered into larger super tribes based on ethnicity, religion, or nations...the us versus them stage that viewed "others" as less than human (Crusades, wide-spread slavery etc.). The transition to a vision of all humans as equals started in the Renaissance and moved through the Enlightenment, when reason and science gave birth to the modern world. Reflection on the sometimes destructive effects of modern rationality led to the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the ever-more inclusive post modernism that we find ourselves in now.

Ken reminds us that even as we make these neat distinctions of cultural evolution, all stages are still present. Each successive wave of growth in people or cultures does not obliterate the level before it, it transcends and includes it. Just as individuals can become stuck in their childhood or adolescence, so societies will not proceed smoothly or evenly through the levels and at any time most people in any group are not on what he calls the leading edge. That brings us to what he sees as the problem we are facing now. He says the leading edge of evolution has turned back on itself because post-modernism let pluralism and relativism erode the truth. A well-intentioned emphasis on equality and resistance to oppression led philosophers and academics to say (and teach) that all truth is relative...that what is true for me is true for me and that what is true for you is true for you. That means there is no objective and universal truth, only narcissism and finally nihilism.. a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless. If there is no truth we are each thrown back into what we individually perceive and fear and collective action degrades into factionalism and division. This seems to be what is happening now. We are turning back into a more racist and exclusionary society because we can't build a more open one without an agreement about what is true and therefore what is valuable. The leading edge that used to be about ever greater inclusion has turned itself into warring camps that clutch their identities very tightly and deny the ability of any "others" to understand them. Both the right and the left are involved in this...the right reverting to the racism that has been there under the surface all along, the left devolving into identity politics ever on the alert for micro aggression and latent oppression....both spewing hatred at each other.

I'm afraid that by trying to condense a whole book into a couple of paragraphs I am not doing justice to the argument. The main point I have taken from it is that we must agree that truth exists outside of our own feelings and wishes. Ken says that one of Trump's silver linings is that no one is seriously advancing the theory that there is no truth since he was elected. We are all pretty clear that there is truth and he isn't telling it. There is a hierarchy of values; some paths are more life-giving than others and those should be encouraged without reservation, including the promotion of the truth. No more false equivocation. The most important change is overcoming the mutual hatred. We need to remember that we grow by transcending and including the stage we were in before, not by erasing it. All of our stages combine to make us what we are and hating immature parts of ourselves does not help us overcome them, it just makes us stuck. I don't know how this might play out on a larger scale, but every change must begin inside. Hating racism (for example) without hating racists is hard but I am sure that contempt and hatred won't help them to change. If I were honest and introspective I might recognize the remnants of racism in myself and thereby cultivate more compassion for those caught in the fear of the other. 

Our eventual goal, I think, is the ability of the culture to value and care for all beings, the planet as a whole, and perhaps eventually, worlds beyond. That would be growth worth working for. 

Imagine peace

Ever since Liz (imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com) sent me her two "imagine peace" pins I have been trying to do it. Imagine peace.

First I think of no more war and try to envision what that would be like....everyone lucky enough to have a life like mine, untouched by the devastation and horror of war. Wait a minute. Wasn't that my grade school class crouched under our desks practicing what to do when nuclear fire might rain down upon us? Okay, my life except for that. And what about that Adam Smith quote from his "Theory of Moral Sentiments" my brother included in his history of the local WWI fortresses scattered about our islands, Love and Forts?

"Instruments of war are agreeable, although their immediate effect may seem to be pain and suffering. But then it is the pain and suffering of our enemies, with whom we have no sympathies. With regard to us, they are immediately connected with the agreeable ideas of courage, victory, and honour."

Tim goes on to say:

"Weapons are an unfortunate necessity, and I am spellbound when I consider the terrible nature of war. Yet the male attraction to military arms and honor is a fact of our cultural development, part of our natures, and thus beyond any one national perspective."

So there is a part of us that thrills to a weapon and the danger and mayhem it represents.  Courage, strength and valor, those classic male qualities, are most clearly tested in combat. War is also an ultra experience. Veterans of wars have reported never again achieving the same pitch of awareness and the sense of being alive, or the same satisfaction and sense of belonging that fighting with their comrades gave them in spite of the horrors that they also witnessed as soldiers.

Where is the peace in this? Maybe we don't want to be peaceful. Maybe it is too boring. Nothing perks our interest like a little conflict. Yet the news brings us unending photos of dead Syrian children and those who might as well be dead while their grieving families wail. Other pictures of war, like mushroom clouds, settle like a toxic chill around my heart. Our shiny weapons, so evocative of power, can devastate millions of lives in an instant and the planet too. As Adam Smith says: if its our enemies its okay, but I don't think humans can afford their tribal affinities anymore. Its too awful and we are all bound so much more closely than we realized. 

What can we do if our urge to war is baked in? Creating as many outlets for the expression of courage, strength and valor as possible is the only thing I can think of. Sports, and maybe reality TV (yeah, ick, but...) Taking up a cause, as long as it isn't white supremacy. Standing up for someone who can't stand up for themselves. Litigation (not recommended). Devising and executing a large project that has meaning for everyone, like war, but constructive, beautiful and awe-inspiring. Bravely exposing the true self hiding behind the mask.

Here's another favorite poem of mine that is clamoring to be included now:

 

Ekla Chalore (Walk Alone) by Gurudev Rabindraneth Tagore:

 

If they answer not to thy call,

             Walk Alone.

If they tremble and cower mutely,

            Facing the Wall,

            O thou of evil luck,

Open thy mind and speak out alone.

 

If, when crossing the wilderness,

            They turn away and desert you,

            O thou of evil luck,

Trample the thorns under thy tread,

            And along the blood-strewn path,

            Walk Alone.

 

If when the night is troubled

            With storm,

They do not hold up the light,

            O thou of evil luck,

With the thunder flame of pain,

            Ignite thine own heart, 

            And let it burn alone.

Om.

 

Talk about courage and valor.

If world peace is hard to imagine, maybe inner peace is easier. Ah, but the inside is as conflict-ridden as the outside. I have been meditating for a while now, and find that I can calm my inner waters for a while, reaching for the still center that underlies all like Jude Hill"s "thing that runs through it" (spiritcloth.typepad.com), but holding that equibrium is dicey. As I consider inner peace I wonder how to maintain it in the face of life's sometimes brutal upheavals. One path that helps me is from Philip Shepherd's book, New Self, New World. He expounds on the concept of wild peace:

"...the present is always doing; the present is always just being. It is a perfect generative unity of male and female, the same generative unity that moves the Tao, the Logos, the artist, the mother and the hero. If we were to describe that dynamic unity, we might say that the precise nature of the present is that of a wild peace. Despite all our efforts to subdue the world's energy or harness it or impose order on its subtle chaos, the world remains wild because the present flows on unstoppably and unpredictably on every scale: from subatomic to galactic, it is a dance of burgeoning transformations of the utmost sensitivity, utterly beyond the reach of any structures of control- an improvised celebration that no one can tame, and to which we all belong. But similarly, and despite all our consternations about the unknown, the wild present is also completely at peace: the One Mind rests in perfect wholeness even as it moves through every trembling leaf, burning star and floating snowflake......The paradox of wild peace, then is the fundamental nature of the world in which we live. You cannot liberate yourself into the dynamic of wholeness-the present cannot live in you and through you- until you liberate yourself to its spirit of wild peace, such that you know that wild peace as a unity and ultimately discover that unity in yourself. To feel peace within is one thing; to feel wildness within is another; to feel your own spirit of wild peace within is to open your heart to the unity of self and world. And then you can celebrate the present in all you do."

Peace as a wild river sounds more like my life than peace as a tranquil pond, although I can go to the pond sometimes. Peace is not boring when we expand our definition to include wild peace. Receptivity to all that is is the key (here's to you Grace (windthread.typepad.com), and you, Michelle (mscomfortzone.blogspot.com)). Keeping my heart open no matter what happens feels like a true act of valor sometimes, but the present must be seen with all the attention we can muster so we will know where to train our work and love and save ourselves from conflict. I can imagine a world where everyone is valued, where children are safe, where work has meaning, and there are no enemies.

So, peace. If it can be imagined, it can be done.

 

Losing and gaining

Some purges are undertaken voluntarily, some are forced upon you. When I was moving furniture around to wash the recently flooded studio floor I found my old portfolio of design work. I hadn't remembered that it was there. It had been sitting wet for over a month, next to the box of printed examples from which I had made it in the first place. Every single thing in box and folder was damaged at least, most were ruined.... All the evidence of my career in graphic design was glommed together in a pulpy mass, or delaminating from the boards it was mounted on, discolored and moldy. I have to admit, I just fell apart when I saw it. It was as if all those years and all that work had come to nothing, that everything had been lost.

After the storm was over, I realized that nothing I really needed was gone at all. Although I worked as a graphic designer as recently as two years ago, this is not really what I am interested in anymore. I have received the education I was meant to glean from designing printed stuff for other people and now I am trying to apply it in a different direction, for myself. The portfolio is really just a memento of a time now passed...it wasn't even useful when I looked for work. (Portfolios are in electronic form now and to even show one like this is to brand yourself a design dinosaur.) There was more than one embarrassing project that I was glad to get rid of...it was garbage when I made it, but I always felt I should hang on to it to remind myself of past errors and point the way to future improvement...a sort of penance for bad design. It is great to release myself from that obligation and chuck that crap, as I should have done years ago.

To step back even further, none of this was going to last anyway. Printed materials like posters and newsletters are ephemera, meant for the moment. (That is one of the reasons I switched to textiles...they have longer lives and deeper engagement in their construction and use.) I myself am not going to last and no one but me cares about this pile of paper. 

The final service my ruined portfolio performs is to remind me to make, and live right now. We activate and energize our world moment by moment, stitch by stitch, kiss by kiss. Hanging on just holds us back.

On a roll

Before

After

Continuing with my cleaning rampage, I have now tackled my book collection. Although it doesn't really look like it I got rid of almost a hundred books. I've always been an avid reader and an accumulator of books. I feel safer and more at home with books around. I like the way they look. I need to have them at hand. That said, I've also come to the conclusion that I am using them as a shield and an ego prop, so that makes some of them joyless.

I remember from my youngest days hating to be ignorant. Somehow, I figured out early on that knowledge was power, the only kind of power that was in my reach. Ever since then I have gathered up information, with books being the outward sign of what I hoped was in my head. Of course, there is never enough time or brain for everything, and it turned out that my true interests were creative more than intellectual. Creativity has to be practiced, not read about (although I tried that too). Many of my books are a false front, meant to be seen in my bookcase, but not read more than once. Those are the ones that need to be released and I think I have. I took every one out of the case, roughly sorted them by subject, and then put back the ones I love. The Lord of the Rings, the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen leaped back without hesitation. Only about a third of my garden books returned and about half of my books about home and space. Lots of self-help books hit the road, leaving Joseph Campbell and Christoper Alexander with more room to breathe. I had six (six?!!) books by Ken Wilbur, who always made feel like I wasn't quite up to his level of enlightenment. They are gone. The category that I'm surprised I kept is the literature books from my early years in college. I thought they would be show off items, but when I took them in my hand I remembered so clearly the excitement I felt at being able to delve into them and discuss them with others...it was great, so I still have Shakespeare, Dante, Blake, Marlowe, Homer, Petronius, etc. living here at home with me, although all old philosophy and history books hit the bricks. I found Middlemarch, which I thought I would have to re-buy. I love Willa Cather, but I dumped her novel My Mortal Enemy, which was unpleasant, and her collected letters, which was more a marketing ploy of the publishers than an insight into her writing. I could go on and on.

The cleaning of my closet brought out all kinds issues I have struggled with about body image, appearance and femininity. Cleaning my bookcase has exposed my intellectual conceits. I wonder what pocket of inner demons my kitchen utensils will release.

Pattern recognition

I used to buy books on organization and clutter control in the hopes that one of them would help me keep my world in order, but I finally gave up when none of them ever did... ...until this one, maybe: the life-changing magic of tidying up by Marie Kondo. Its a funny little book...the writing shows its Japanese origins...but it has an animistic attitude that I've never encountered in other how-to-clean-up advice. It is the first to use feelings as a basis for choosing what to keep and what to throw, and to describe the energy that belongings can hold. Most treatises on organization evoke the burdensome weight of too much stuff and try to deal with it logically, which leaves me floundering with ever more finely drawn distinctions between this thing and that until decision making becomes the biggest burden of all. Marie is the most ruthless culler of any of them, but her only criteria for keeping or throwing is whether an object, when touched, gives you a feeling of joy. That is, its the thing itself, not the idea of it, that should transmit its necessity in your life. She also advocates gratitude to objects, including the ones that do not transmit joy. Discarded things have played their part in showing you what you don't like or no longer want, or just by being chosen or given have satisfied someone's emotional need. They should be honored for that, without necessarily needing to be kept because of it. Every single thing you do keep, according to Marie, should be something that gives you joy, and therefore you will live surrounded by things you love and care for, whatever they may be. This, finally, makes sense to me. Christopher Alexander says that the luminous ground of being permeates everything, but not everything equally. Why should we not be able to perceive the presence of living energy in our lives and discern which things hold it most powerfully for us? Who else could make those decisions?

With some trepidation I have tried to put Marie's theory into practice. By her advice, I started with my clothes. I felt very reluctant to begin, oppressed with the fear that nothing I own would actually feel good. I remembered all the years of trying to hide behind shapeless, ugly clothes; feeling fat, inelegant, ashamed, afraid of standing out, afraid of looking cheap. Long ago I decided there wasn't much satisfaction in what I wore because I felt those things no matter what I put on, so I put my energy elsewhere and my clothes show it. If I waited for something to give me joy I might have to go naked.

So...was joy present in my closet?  I didn't feel it literally when I touched each thing, but asking the question for every garment made the choices clear. There aren't too many items left (this picture doesn't include my jeans, t-shirts, socks and underwear...they are in a drawer), and some of the ones I kept don't fit me right now, but they are, or were the ones I love. 

The color palette is instructive...I knew I liked blue and gray...here is proof. The styles are equally similar...all supremely simple and undecorated, hardly even patterned, with nothing stretchy or clingy in sight. High quality construction and natural fiber fabric mean a lot to me, touching did transmit those qualities immediately. This row of clothes is a self portrait, a view within and a guide for the future. The feelings that were elicited by the process needed some air and I am holding and considering what they told me. My closet is clean, I no longer have an ironing basket, I feel I might like to go shopping. Okay.

Christopher Alexander holds my hand

We are two weeks into the new year, so any resolutions I might have thought of making have had plenty of time to disappear, but I have been trying to formulate and articulate some goals for myself. At least I am making lists of things to do and things I think are important. The clarity of goal making has always appealed to me, but usually when I try to do it, the words I come up with don't hold the feelings and I slip off the whole enterprise like jelly off a doughnut. Well, hope springs eternal, and sometimes even the inadequate words are helpful, so again I'm making lists. Where am I going with my work? What small steps can be taken daily to get me there? What other things need attention? WHAT DO I WANT?

At this point I always think of the architect Christopher Alexander, who says that the only way to be whole and create a wholesome world is to truly please yourself. In his four volume work The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and The Nature of the Universe he says that there is an underlying luminous ground to the universe from which everything arises including ourselves. By making things that make us happy we access this life force, this I-stuff within and make it visible in the world, where it works to heal both us and our environment and society. 

    "It is amazing to fully grasp the impact of making something beautiful. Have you experienced the fact that when you make a beautiful thing, you feel happy for days?...And the reverse is true, also. When you make something ugly, you may be depressed for days....I believe what happens is something like this. When you make a beautiful thing, the depth of the person within becomes more vivid, lives more intensely for a moment...The connection between the life of a made thing and the healing effect it has on the maker is, I believe, very succinctly put just as simply as this: People are deeply nourished by the process of creating wholeness...There is a direct connection between the living structure of the world and the achieved person-ness we experience in ourselves... Somehow, a person's own self is mobilized, liberated, made more strong by that person's success in making life in the world."_¹

    "It is not so easy to please yourself. Why? Because pleasing yourself is not just having fun or following your whim. Truly pleasing yourself means, in the deepest sense, giving pleasure to yourself, making yourself truly pleased. This is only another way of reaching the I, substantially reaching the eternal self, reaching what Zen calls No Mind, reaching what the sufis call drunk in God...To have a hope of reaching the I, you must make each thing, shape each thing so that you really like it, so that it pleases you."_²

I have been reading and re-reading these books since 2004, trying to follow and integrate what he says...leaving them for months and years and then coming back. I keep coming back because of the feeling they always give me that the veil between me and what matters is thinning. I think their genesis in architecture and design helps. I love his assertion that beauty is essential, and a literal presence in our world, not just a subjective fancy that must fall before every other consideration of cost or convenience. Everyone draws from and participates in the luminous ground of being and making things beautiful helps that ground shine out and heal us all. 

I could go on and on about this, but as I attempt to deepen my work and my life I find re-reading Christopher Alexander inspires me to articulate my goals more completely, and so they are more likely to be at least partially accomplished.

¹ Alexander, Christopher. The Nature of Order, Book Four, The Luminous Ground. Center for     Environmental Structure. Berkeley. 2004. Pages 262-264

² Ibid. Page 275.

Santa Fe

The only time I've ever been to New Mexico was to celebrate my fortieth birthday. I wanted to go there because Willa Cather's novel Death Comes for the Archbishop (written in 1927) describes it so movingly. I thought from her writing that Santa Fe, and the surrounding country must have a true presence that would be apparent even to an outsider like me. I was right. That trip was a real high point in my life. New Mexico does indeed exude a sense of place, of itself. I just loved it.

Mike and I went with four other friends...a highly congenial travelling group. We flew into Albuquerque and drove north from there, taking the backroads because what-the-hell we were on vacation and in no hurry. Our first stop was in Madrid, where we had lunch and the first of many marguaritas at the Mineshaft Tavern. It was the middle of the day in the middle of the week, but there was a woman playing guitar and singing so beautifully. It may have been the freedom of vacation, or maybe the tequila, but I felt a bubble of pure happiness growing in me that never dissipated while we were in New Mexico. It seemed magical. We stayed for four days in Sante Fe, close to the cathedral built by the archbishop from whom Miss Cather modelled her fictional character, Father Latour.  We took day trips to Nambe, Chimayo, Taos, Bandolier and other nearby sites, always on the lookout for the perfect marguarita. Every morning I woke very early and walked out alone in the neighborhoods of Santa Fe, looking in every church and courtyard that was open to me. The air always smelled of pinon pine smoke. As Father Latour says in the book, "At our meanest tasks we have a perpetual odour of incense about us." The regulations in Sante Fe have limited the kind of buildings that may be constructed there to two or three stories and require that they harmonize with the adobe style of its oldest structures (which are indeed old, rare in North America). That may be artificial, but it makes Sante Fe look very different than most American cities of its size...more like the smaller villages surrounding it. There is a lot more money in Santa Fe than in those towns, and also lots of beans. We like beans but after facing them in three straight breakfasts, Mike declared himself a frijole-free zone. Beans or not, it was such a memorable trip. It often comes up amongst the six of us who went as the best ever.

The photographs on Grace's blog often remind me of that week in Sante Fe and her recent memories of her time in Madrid brought the Mineshaft Tavern back like a blow. Liz has also just written a moving post about New Mexico that makes me think my experience wasn't so singular, and has prompted this post. In thanks I am going to try to attach the section of Death Comes for the Archbishop that never fails to bring tears to my eyes. Its short, but so strong. I typed it myself from the 1930 Windmill Press edition. Any mistakes are mine.

                    Download DeathComesfor

PS: I can't get Liz's link to work....a common problem for me. She is at: www.imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com. Look for her post entitled Impressions of New Mexico.