Contemplify NonRequired Reading List for May 31, 2020
May NonRequired Reading List
Contemplative Friend,
A moth is perched on the head of Mother Mary, a four-inch tin icon that leans against the windowsill above our kitchen sink. Resting against the counter, I am pondering moths. A pseudo-Jungian idea pops into my mind that moths are merely the shadows torn from butterflies. The moth's sooty streaks are the tell of their origins and the reason they clammer for the light. Annie Dillard once wrote about a moth and a flame being consummated into a union undividable (as I wrote that sentence I watched the title of the Dillard book walk further away from my memory as I begged it to come back). I do recall the charge I felt from reading about the homecoming between moth and flame. That ache for becoming one comes at a cost unknown. Dillard's book was nonrequired reading in a theology course in graduate school and it set me ablaze. Her were words bursting with poetic and theological perspectives that demanded I fall prostrate in devotional awe. After finishing the book (title, come back please!) and showing up early for class that day I remember asking evocative questions, raising wild ideas, and then dumbly waiting for my classmates to share their own lusty experiences with the text. This boldness was not my normal classroom behavior, but this was not the usual academic fodder. In time, many in the class admitted to not reading the book and those who had, found it dangerously slow. That moment left a bookmark in my education.
I awakened to the truth that a graduate course is nothing but an expensive book club. I have no regrets for the dimes it took to get me in the front door of that regal book club, but it is worth noting that every book club I have belonged to since has been free, animated, and often accompanied by a sumptuous meal and paired with hoppy beverages. This is something to consider before tossing a costly line of credit into open and predatory educational waters. Fees and degrees dangle before you, get tangled, and ultimately distract all but the most vigilant from the education that transforms the mind, body, and spirit.
Expertise too readily hides behind office walls. There are still sages left in the ivory towers exercising their intellectual freedom and opening mystical doors for students lost in beige corridors. I consider myself in that lucky lot who stumbled into conversations with wise old owls who showed me the way. These divine appointments were like firecrackers dropped down the back of my shorts. They woke me up and taught me to pay attention to the present. Always leaving a mark on my education.
Over time a firecracker down the pants is not needed as often to wake you up. I take most of my cues from the grandeur of mundanity. A shift in sunlight can do it. The lazy sweep of a tree branch. The clap of a child. A glance at a moth contemplating the image of the God-Bearer....and may this moth's direct union with Light be swift (Holy the Firm, the Dillard title came back just in time!).
These subtle noticings are enough of an education to stir me, to entice me, to call me further in.
This month I’ve been reading authors who were no stranger to the quagmires of education. The conditions of their lives could not be more diverse, their pursuits in freedom were risky, and each one lit the proverbial firecracker to jar me awake. My intention was to do them justice by reflecting on each one this month. After pecking away at the keys for some time I decided to stick to just one for this list. It felt more human to do so.
So the May NonRequired Reading List went from three down to one with the flick of a keystroke. The other books certainly deserve recommendation and their day will come. Overall, the reason for my singular choice was that I could not get over how timely this memoir was about a plucky young man’s pondview experiences within a fractured society. So I pared back, tightened up, and opened this tiny window into my experience of Walden so you could crawl in too.
May's NonRequired Reading List
(not sure if you can call one book a list...)
Walden: Or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau (Get it at the Public Library or IndieBound)
During this pandemic I wondered aloud to the clouds streaming above - what would happen if this was a wake up call for the masses? What if those famous for being famous could no longer attract eyeballs because everyone was tending their own garden? What if folks began to shovel their own walk? A man can dream such questions in his imagination and make room for allowances that the answers he was pining for will not come to pass. I do not begrudge anyone. The best way to avoid suffering is to look elsewhere and the United States has become the master creator, consumer, and exporter of distractions. Life is hard, why not avert your eyes until you die?
Henry David Thoreau recognized this problem of humanity in 1845. He began to set up a home near Walden Pond to live more deliberately and become an immersive student in Nature’s classroom. Shedding the norms of polite company to enter a way of life calling to you but foreign to most will ensure snickering behind your back. I see it as a sign of good health. In my attempt to refresh your perspective of Thoreau I will skip over some of the catchy lyrics from his greatest hits. They have been dulled by campy overuse. This man of letters was prolific with a pencil so one does not have to look far to discover new verses to sing-a-long.
When Thoreau first went to Walden he would spend the mornings in stillness watching the shadows bend and make room for his natural neighbors to grow accustomed to him. He was attuning to his place by being present to its rhythms.
“We should be blessed if we live in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring.” (p. 294)
“We loiter in winter while it is already spring” was a line that grabbed my cheeks and stared into my eyes. The pandemic clustercuss we are blindly sorting our way through as I type this demands our full attention in the present. But have you noticed that when attention has slowed to focus and shifted to matters of life and death we sustain our gaze longer? By our attention we unflinchingly witness the cracks of inequitable systems get wider. Data points raise questions. Entitlement is worn bare. Positional power suffocates life. A match is set that burns back the brush in revealing a rotting society banking on unquestioning allegiance to a televised dream.
In Thoreau’s time much was the same as now but with less of a disguise. After Thoreau took leave of Walden Pond “for as good a reason” as he went there he felt freer to live up to his values; to support unpopular protests and to prophetically speak to the lies and atrocities committed from positions of power and entitlement over enslaved Black bodies. Thoreau had fled to the woods like St. Anthony had to the desert 1600 years earlier; to be entangled in a Mystery that doesn’t cough at reality, but allows its ugliness to be the invocation and its beauty the benediction. Thoreau followed his path with a full cup while denying the system its curtsy, its powerful any admiration, and its wealthy their pity.
That was his road to walk, what is yours?
“Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” (p.305)
This inspiring language sounds ad ready for selling blue jeans as self-expression in the purchasing revolution. Your inner drummer can feel special (and look good!) in the latest uniform while reaching for your wallet in your back pocket. In truth, Thoreau's notion of finding the rhythm of a different drummer is costly. It begins with you pulling out your Webster's dictionary to scratch out the definition of success and mark your own. Then when you move your sun-soaked target away from the standard empirical goals of fame, money, and power you get pegged a misfit. Thoreau walked out of social incarceration by not playing its monetizing and dehumanizing function. The ache for abundant life called him to risk leaping to new definitions.
And so I ask you, what is a full cup of life to you? Your community? Your species? How wide can you pan out your vision? Thoreau went to the woods to live a certain kind of life for a season of his life. But it changed him forever. I hope you pick up Walden and put yourself in his leaky shoes. And may you begin by asking yourself, how free am I to dance to the beat of the rhythm I faintly hear?
Walden is for any contemplative who wishes to reorient their life towards the values they aspire.
NOTE: I’ve been sending out a weekly email during this pandemic. It has been a privilege to be a steady companion with you on the weekly check-ins. I am going to step that back to every other week or so. My intent is to spend more time watching the garden grow and our drying rack tip over in the wind. And like most friendly company, hopefully you’ll enjoy our conversation even more when the frequency decreases.
Arts, Articles, & Practices
SCREEN DOORS. Friend of Contemplify, Cal Newport, shares his informed view on thoughtless practices of technological consumption and how to define one’s own relationship with technology. This is an important read for any of you (like me) who are in quarantine and are examining your personal devotion to technology.
MEISTER ECKHART. Once the kids went down easy, I was found watching Bernard McGinn schooling me about Meister Eckhart. A masterful communicator and robust writer of medieval mystics, McGinn opening up his lucid brain for the whole public to hear his take on Meister Eckhart. Watch here.
MOTHER JONES. “Through story and song, Vivian Nesbitt (Breaking Bad, The Night Shift, Longmire, Law & Order SVU) portrays Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, with musical accompaniment by John Dillon, in Si Kahn‘s one-woman musical about the infamous labor organizer famed for her tireless efforts on behalf of the rights of the working class.” You can watch here.
Contemplify Update
The three most recent episodes on Contemplify…
These episodes are available from Contemplify through these fine outlets: iTunes, Stitcher, Podbean, or Overcast
May you march to the drummer that you hear,
May you find the path that is yours to walk.
“Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship's wake on the sea.”
(“[Traveler, Your Footprints]” by Antonio Machado)
In the ship's wake,
Paul
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P.P.S. For the time being the daily postings to kindle the examined life in a quarantined world are still being afixed to fridge at Quarantined Qontemplative just between the magnet you got from that one place that one time.