Contemplify NonRequired Reading List Email for September 29, 2018
The September NonRequired Reading List
Contemplative Friends,
A fresh pour of coffee signals the slowness to my weekend roll. The sun is not up, though my little one just was. She awoke screaming about something being taken away. I scurried over to her room, sleepy-eyed but alert, to the mystery of my daughter’s dreamy terror. After momentary solace in my arms, she welcomed sleep’s return. I didn’t fare as well. Instead, the fog that divides slumber and waking flooded my consciousness with these lines,
“The realizing of the possibility of a living faith rests, like faith of all ages, on three pillars--experience, insight, and practice. Our task today is to help the man who has come to the end of his tether, by revealing to him the latent content of his deepest and most essential experiences, by opening the door to the basic truths and laws of life, and above all by showing him a way to achieve by practice a lasting attitude in consonance with them, without which there can be no progress in faith and no inner ripening.” (Hara, p. 2, italics mine)
This night’s waking was a spontaneous liturgy. The invocation of my daughter’s tears led me into a practice of loving attention at the cost of a sacred tithe--sleep. This is no pious play. I’m damn tired and as far as liturgies go, I’d rather be bored stiff in a Sunday pew. I feel the weight of night covering me now. I predict that later in the day my body will drag a half beat behind the other ‘essential experiences’ that call upon me to further my practice. Is this the inner ripening occuring in the context of my life? Yes. I pay homage to it. For my revelations are found in couch cushions and squirrely toddlers.
With a measured ripening of my mind, I offer this month’s collection of NonRequired Reading. May this be a month of touching the deepest and most essential experiences of your life.
Here is this month’s NonRequired Reading List...
Hara: The Vital Center of Man by Karlfried Graf Dürckheim (Get it at the Public Library or Indiebound)
Hara came into my orbit back in 2015 when noted contemplative teacher James Finley mentioned it in passing. Whenever James Finley mentions a book, I track it down. This habit has filled an entire shelf with ‘Uncle Finley’s Recommendations’. Hara is a book I wouldn’t have been ready for ten years ago as the meat of it speaks to embodying wisdom. See ‘hara’ is a Japanese term defined as ‘an all-inclusive general attitude which enables a [human] to open [themselves] to the power and wholeness of the original life-force and to testify to it by the fulfillment, the meaningfulness, and the mastery displayed in [their] own life’ (p.2). You ever wonder why the Buddha has a big belly in all of those statues? It represents hara.
Hara is one part history, a smidge of translating Eastern philosophy into Western thought, and a whole practical toolkit for your everyday life. Dürckheim explains right posture, practice, breathing, tension-relaxation, retrospect and outlook:
“When man lifts himself from the earth-center of his human nature to the heaven-center of his spirit and when, in his heart-center he joyfully accepts the obligation to actualize the Original Unity and its inherent order within his existence in this world, then will his insight and practice flow out in one stream of true creative activity on earth. For the Kingdom of Heaven on earth is our true heritage and only within it will the real “circulation of light” be established.” (p. 157)
I most heartedly recommend Hara to those within the Christian tradition seeking to live from their vital center, one’s wholeness of being cultivated by embodied practice and attention within daily life.
Behind My Eyes by Li-Young Lee (Get it at the Public Library or Indiebound)
When a person I admire recommends a poet, I hop to it. Chad Wriglesworth, a recent guest on Contemplify, did just that when he spoke of the poet Li-Young Lee. I began reading a book of interviews with Lee, Breaking the Alabaster Jar. The depth of his being and the work flowing from his identity as an immigrant is so nuanced, vulnerable, and subtle in its particularity and yet connects universally. Li-Young Lee is a seer. He talks about not being a poet, but continually ‘becoming a poet’. The poem of his that most recently broke through for me was ‘Virtues of the Boring Husband’. It starts off with tender care and humor and then opens up into the mystical (if you want to hear him read it, go to this public reading and jump to minute 32).
Reading Behind My Eyes is akin to bearing witness to an ever ripening fruit tree whose bounty hangs heavy on the branches, all you dare to mutter after picking each piece is amen. Just this morning I was struck by ‘In His Own Shadow’ and ‘Immigrant Blues’ and oh yeah, don’t miss ‘Dying Stupid’. I could go on with a few more not to overlook, but the splendor is in its fullness. Li-Young Lee is the type of poet I imagine I’ll be walking alongside until my path hits the horizon.
The Great Re-Imagining: Spirituality in an Age of Apocalypse by Theodore Richards (Get it at the Public Library or Indiebound)
‘The apocalyptic nature of this moment lies largely in this fact--that the cosmology of consumption is ending’ (p.104). Theodore Richards has written a book that is calling humanity to look into the mirror, take stock of what it sees and change our course so we will hopefully shoulder the work to become the esteemed ancestors that future generations need us to be. Richards is talking about apocalypse as an ‘end that is cosmic’ (p.9). The current cosmological narrative has lost its plot and the major characters are tired. The pursuit of endless growth and wealth has divorced humanity from the planet, leaving us in peril, and hoping the technocrats will offer a salvation with no side effects. Richards invites the reader to be honest about the current standing of our species and shared planet. This is no gloomy read, but ultimately a hopeful revelation of what could be if we journey ‘from abstraction to embeddedness’ (p.220). It will take a new cosmology--‘intersection of human being, Universe and psyche’ (p.16)--based on humility, community, and whole-seeking. It will ask us to sacrifice easy comforts for good work and textured lives.
I walked away from this reading with the embodied reminder that although I am not you, I am not other than you. My participation in this world impacts yours. Now when I put my daughter on my shoulders to bid goodnight to the moon each evening, I exhale a new doxology - We are all in this together. May it be so.
Contemplify Update
The three most recent episodes of Contemplify…
Wild Mystic Folk for Lovers, Gamblers, and Rovers Alike | Luke Redfield
Wendell Berry & Gary Snyder are Distant Neighbors | Chad Wriglesworth
Contemplative Happy Hour | Tessa Bielecki
(Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, Podbean, Overcast, or Contemplify.com)
May the journey of becoming turn a new leaf this Autumn day, steadying your hara and emboldening your full participation in this wild world of ours.
Listen Well & Read Often,
Paul
P.S. A song from Justin Vernon that requires good hara.