A Well-Exercised Ground | Contemplfiy Quarantine Edition #9
A Well-Exercised Ground | Contemplify Quarantine Edition #9
Contemplative Friend,
I am knackered from another day of emotional labor. When the clock strikes 5, my inner Fred Flintstone kicks in. I drop my work tools, surf down a dinosaur’s tail, and foot petal my way home. In quarantined reality, this looks like closing my laptop and opening the bedroom door to the rest of the house (my end of work mantra is, "the door is open, the workday is done, yabba dabba do"). In this transitional hour, I watch neighbors return from their jobs at auto shops, hospitals, or running deliveries. My body is out of Covid's way during the workday while their bodies blindly duck his sloppy kisses. This is savagely unfair and my privilege fits like a lead life jacket. Our species is aching from this virus and our culture is found wanting in care of all bodies. How do we respond to the vapid culture rolling over the complexities of justice, oppression, and disparity?
Recollection is a heavy pot. The stewing is slow below the vessel's waterline. I dip the ladle to bottom, retrieving the seasoned words with care. A small taste from the poet Maurice Manning on culture is more than enough. Back in 2016 when his students inquired how they might respond to the election of our current president, Manning took a breath and said, “I am not sure how you should respond in the short-term, but over the next 4 years I recommend you learn to recognize 25 birds by their song, and 25 trees by their leaf."* I collect these words and stew on them often. Humanity’s relationship to their place within nature builds culture. Culture produces the arts, philosophy, industry, and politics. Culture is created by our dirty-handed relationship with the planet. No wonder Jesus tells us to behold the birds of air and wrote only with his fingers in the dust.
The contemplatives in our midst hear Maurice Manning's invitation with both ears. Lefty discerns the call for more generous attention to our world. Righty hears it as a cooperative act rooted in relationship to the Ground of our Being. Both are true. Meister Eckhart called this “living out of a well-exercised ground”^. Tilling the Ground of Being prepares a person for the work of love, in the work of love one tills the Ground of Being. The attentive and cooperative work of love are one.
My day is tethered by penciled-in rituals held between two meditative saunters that serve as bookends; morning walks in quiet prayers of attention and evening walks in mouthy prayers of creative play. With the workday complete I fill up water bottles, rub in sunscreen, grab face masks, and take my children on a walk to the park. I point out birds we need to look up (Western Kingbird was the latest), a fragrance we need to chase down (wild plum miniature roses are blooming on my street), and search out the cycle of la luna in the sky above (waxing crescent). We are rewriting our family's cultural cache and because of this...we are usually late for supper. Ripping ourselves away from the park is an impossible ask. Pleas to stay a few more minutes are granted after faux deliberation; there are soccer balls to be punted, kites that need to catch a tree, and one of our crew has taken the challenge upon herself to do a 100 somersaults in a row (Cool Hand Luke’s 50 eggs is nothing compared to my 5 year old’s feat).
The heat of the day crescendoes and then relaxes into the evening breeze. Eventually the hunger in our bellys (or an outburst of tears) drives us home. Hands washed, dinner is ready. The turning to our shared table opens a jar of steady love. At this point in our family’s evolution the unitive moment at the table lasts 2 minutes before our youngest dumps his plate on the floor and lays his head on the table in mock sleep. The bedtime rites begin again.
The practice of our earthbound rituals each morning and evening sing of our attempts at "living out of a well-exercised ground", and to me, they offer “an understanding and light which are like nothing you ever found in books or heard in sermons.”*^ In this time of social distancing and a pending culture shift, I offer again the words of Maurice Manning as one possible invitation on how to respond to this pandemic.
“I am not sure how you should respond in the short-term, but over the next 4 years I recommend you learn to recognize 25 birds by their song, and 25 trees by their leaf."
*Watch this documentary, "Matter is a Relative Matter with Maurice Manning"
^p.156, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart by Bernard McGinn.
*^This quote is lifted from ‘Friday / Dusk’ p. 178, Thomas Merton: A Book of Hours, edited by Kathleen Deignan. A devotional book that marks dawn, day, dusk, dark as the hours of prayer. It has steered me right for years.
Contemplify NonRequired Practices
May these Nonrequired Practices till a well-exercised ground.
‘TIS THE GIFT. My nephew played the Shaker song “Simple Gifts” at his piano recital (viewed over Zoom) on Tuesday. The song is one verse and opens with the lines,
"’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be”
Simplicity, freedom, and ‘where we ought to be’ don’t carry the appropriate heft on our culture’s scales. Simplicity is seen as poor, freedom is the ‘right’ to do what you want, and resizing a person’s footprint within the whole of humanity is denigrating.
In this spirit, I watched the short film, Il Pescatore Completo (h/t to Brian for reminding me of it) that tracks Arturo Pugno’s way of fly-fishing that dates back to the 16th century. This art is only passed on through observation; of a hand made tools, of honing the skills of using the aforementioned tools, and a tender lifelong affair with the river. A life dedicated to the ‘simple gifts’ and mastery of a craft is as rare as a modern day Shaker.
STAY VULNERABLE. When songwriters Jason Isbell & Amanda Shires were set to exchange marriage vows they first went around asking for advice. They sought a word of salvation from couples who had walked a bog or two, climbed the highest peak and tumbled back down to sea level. Amanda asked John Prine, “What is the secret to staying together?” His response, “Stay vulnerable.” On a separate occasion he asked John’s wife, Fiona Prine, the same question and received the same advice.
I was touched by this simple response from the Prines and believe it. This season of pandemic calls for tenfold vulnerability. The hardened heart plays the cynic, the vulnerable heart embraces the wounded real. Massaging a hardened heart back to its original state can cause carpal tunnel. Best to stay vulnerable.
REMEMBER. A featherweight Black-Chinned Hummingbird laid lifeless in the gutter. Did the hummingbird’s bones suddenly grow heavy? I suspect the neighbor’s cat is looking for an alibi. Lines from the poet Jim Harrison lilt to memory,
“I once saw a bird fall out
of a tree stone dead. I nudged it surprised
at its feather lightness that allowed it to fly.
I buried it in earth where they don’t belong
any more than we do. Dead birds should be
monuments suspended forever in the air.” (“Seventy-Four“)
This is doubly true for hummingbirds. I had never seen a dead hummingbird until that moment and it scrambled my sense of reality. Memorializing the dead is a sacred act, take care to remember yours today.
May the slow work of attention be nested with the Black-headed Grosbeak's warble, cooperating in birthing a new culture right here, right now in the Ground of Being.
Learning my birds,
Paul
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P.P.S. The daily postings to kindle the examined life in a quarantined world are still being pegged under the banner Quarantined Qontemplative but over the 'No Soliciting' sign at the Contemplify basecamp.