Contemplify Nonrequired Reading List Email for October 31, 2017 (plus 1 day)
Contemplify Nonrequired Reading List Email for October 31, 2017 (plus 1 day)
The October NonRequired Reading List
Contemplative friends,
October ducked, dodged and scurried it’s way to the end point before I was ready....and I woke up on the morning of November 1 and remembered - Egad, the October NonRequired Reading List! So to that end, I’ll save all of my words for the NonRequired Readings for October.
The Green Stick: A Memoir by Reg van Cuylenburg (Get it at the Public Library or Amazon)
The Green Stick is a cinematic memoir that sucked me in from the moment I cracked it open. The book runs on the typical theme of memoirs these days, the passage from childhood to adulthood. Yet what makes this one remarkable is that the centerpiece of this story is the relationship between Reg and his Grandfather and their shared life in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Peppered between stories are photographs of the landscape and people who called Ceylon home. All senses are enlivened as you walk with Reg during the formative years of his life. I could feel the embodied sense of gratitude for the loving tutelage and presence of his Grandfather. Artfully guided by his Grandfather, Reg is introduced to an array of opportunities (painting, poetry, boxing, karate, track and field) and relationships (poets, storytellers, artists, Buddhist monks, soldiers). These opportunities and relationships are what cultivate Reg’s unique perspective on being, serving and giving to the community one finds themselves on the shoulders of those who have gone before. Young Reg writes this in his senior thesis:
We have dedicated our efforts, through long years of colonial bureaucracy, to creating a world governed and controlled by the wisdom of the average man. This is an amiable thing but it is not the same as the wisdom of men who are not average. We are afraid of revolt, of dissension, of equal rights, and the freedom of the human spirit. We are fast creating an environment where birds will sing only by request and plants will seed only in the humid over-stuffed air of hothouses. Animals will mate as on a stud farm, and men will be spiritually dead. Such a world will be one to flee from, perhaps in one of our much-vaunted rocket ships, to another planet, new and wild, and there trust to whatever gods breathe its thin airs. This is the price we have paid for civilization based on lazy indifference and carelessness of uncontrolled technology. (p. 153)
This memoir records the specific experience of a time and place of a boy becoming a man with a wise elder as his north star. The generative nature of Reg’s Grandfather planted the seeds of the man who would live wild and free and in solidarity with the suffering of the world.
This World by Teddy Macker (Get it at the Public Library or Amazon)
I stumbled upon one of Macker’s poems and it lead me to the rusty gates of life and death. Macker’s poetry invokes a sense of sacred companionship between all of the internal and external landscapes of our existence (one example here). His mentor Barry Spacks captures the tenor of Macker’s work on the book jacket, “Who touches this touches a man. Incredibly moving, risk-taking, original, and deep. I was in tears a number of times while reading it. Magnificent.”
As an orchardist and college lecturer, Macker feels the pulse of the land and the aches for meaning by those he teaches.This World covers all arenas of life while unveiling the depth concretely; dripping sorrow, glimpses of beauty, nostalgia, injustice and the wakeful joy of family to name but a few. Readers will intuit the wisdom that runs through Macker’s veins, to his pen, to the paper. As a reader of this work, I called upon all of the resources available to me to see, hear, and fling open these poetic gates. This book now rests on a shelf in my kitchen, always at the ready, to be pulled down and read aloud to bless and bear witness to this messy beautiful world.
Keep a lookout in the coming month for a conversation with Teddy Macker on Contemplify...
Midlife: A Philosophical Guide by Kieran Setiya (Get it at the Public Library or Amazon)
Did you know that the ‘age of thirty-seven, or thereabouts, brings either creative silence or transformation’ (p.8)? As a newly minted 37-year old that line stuck with me. Funnily enough, I first misread that line in the book that age 37 is the beginning of the downward spiral into midlife crisis (that says more about me than I’d like to admit). Setiya offers a pathway of walking the corridors of midlife with thoughtful questions, cutting and pasting from the sages’ pages, letting go of the lives you did not live, and learning to include all of the shadowy aspects of your life. The internal questions will bloom as you make your way through this read much more than any concrete answers. And Setiya will gently remind you of that throughout,
To wish for a life without loss is to wish for a profound impoverishment in the world or in your capacity to engage with it, a drastic limiting of horizons...Embrace your losses as fair payment for the surplus of being alive. (p.62)
What makes this book sing is Setiya’s curiosity and succinct wordsmithing that gleefully ushers you along through the difficult internal terrain. This book is for any of you in the early stages, the thrush, or retrospect of the midlife years. Midlife creates a framework for the dizzying existential questions that arrive from new angles as the years accumulate.
Contemplify Update
The three most recent episodes of Contemplify…
Episode 041: Cal Newport on Kindling an Examined Life Through Deep Work (author of Deep Work)
(Bonus Episode!) Dr. Barbara Holmes from 2016 in Celebration of the Revised Edition of Her Book, Joy Unspeakable
Episode 040: Mindfulness in the Christian Tradition with Dr. Amy Oden (author of Right Here, Right Now: The Practice of Christian Mindfulness)
(Available at iTunes, Stitcher, Podbean, Overcast, Google Play or Contemplify.com)
Thank you for your eyes and ears around the Contemplify basecamp, whether you are seeking new reads via the NonRequired Reading List or reflecting on the conversations from recent guests on kindling the examined life. You energize this salty dog to keep my own conversation with mystery alive and well.
Listen well + read often,
Paul
P.S. Couple of bonus readings, to get a taste of Kieran Setiya’s work, check out his piece “The Problem of ‘Living in the Present’” and to hear a powerful reimagining of the Psalms set to music go here.
P.P.S. Just so you are aware, Contemplify is now (mostly) leaving social media. As the adage of old states, energy flows where attention goes. Contemplify’s Twitter account is now fast asleep, Instagram and Facebook will still be awakened from time to time when new episodes go out. For my own tastes, there are too many fascinating books and people to meet for social media to occupy my attention. I blame Cal Newport.