Contemplify NonRequired Reading List for March 31, 2021
March NonRequired Reading List
Contemplative friend,
Holy crow it is Holy Week. In my home tradition the seven days of this week are wrapped in holiness around the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. If Lent were a meal, Holy Week would be the nuts to Ash Wednesday’s soup. At the time of the ashy soup, I was coming to terms with my drive for success. Not suit-and-tie success or make-it-rain success, but accomplishment through accumulation of completed tasks. Burning through a to-do list success. Productivity and efficiency even look righteous if held up to the light in a certain way. Dissociation from the moment was the grease to keep my efficient machine humming. My own success fever broke when my eyes shuttered in protest from the strain of staring into the light, looking for that righteous angle.
I realized (again) my predilection for getting things done over being present to the Mystery at hand. This recycled epiphany served as the compost that would grow my Lenten meal. Will I ever learn to be present to the Mystery of God in whatever shape it arrives in without running down a prescribed "successful" outcome? This question slipped past my persona and my intention for Lent was seeded. I was going to welcome the present moment before me--a moonrise, a run, a wee dram of whisky, the zillionth reading of Dragons Love Tacos--to the chagrin of my internal whimpers for more productivity.
My practice of presence was to pick up each moment as if Christ had whimsically kicked it across the room to me and said, “hey kid, this one is for you.” That was my pipe dream. In withering fashion, I narrowed in on the tasty side of this practice without the forethought of the mercurial moments. It sounds delicious, like counting the licks to the center of a Tootsie Pop, but the stony task of counting licks and a rawhide tongue tell a different story.
This season of Lent turned out to be a series of repetitive scissor pokes to my belly button. Death of a dear friend. Then a neighbor. Trauma. Loss. Anger. Ignorance. Maybe dissociation from the day wasn’t such a bad thing after all? Yet, I had committed myself to unwrap each day as if Christ had wrapped it for me. So I did. Was my practice a success or a failure? That dichotomy is a sneeze into a headwind. A filthy move in the wrong direction. I can say this: I have been present for Lent and I am as knackered as the ass Jesus rode into Jerusalem on.
Tilting my posture towards humble acceptance of the moments before me was a subtle sacrament. I embraced reality and nodded to the presenting shadowy elements far removed from the glow of productivity and efficiency.
Good Lord, isn’t that what Holy Week instructs? Transformation via the rugged path of love. This is the path that sustains one across these ghastly universal terrains (not in spite of but because of!). I don’t own the terrains of death, trauma, loss, and the rest. Nobody does. But I am obliged to be present to them for the sake of love. So I write this not feeling particularly spirited about Holy Week. But I am here sweeping along its edges.
I bow to what Holy Week holds while nesting my own experiences, waiting for their own eventual transformation.
March NonRequired Reading List
All the Fierce Tether by Lia Purpura
(Get it at the Public Library or IndieBound)
While reading All the Fierce Tethers I felt myself under the open sky, lounging about with photos albums of my soul. I was reading and feeling the folds of where interior and exterior landscapes meet. Lia Purpura is a tour guide of natural and metaphorical topographies in her essays while zesting the reader's interior life. I want to live in Purpura’s lexicon, she draws from a deep closet of words and dresses them exquisitely in her essays. Purpura practices the discipline of honing in. She has the attentive acumen of a scientist on the specificity of a word, object, or experience and then pans out so the details of attention can congregate freely in everyday life. I was moved by many of the essays, but I was tickled by “Brief Treatise Against Irony” and found myself cheering it on. Curiosity wins in the work of Lia Purpura. Deeply satisfying.
All the Fierce Tethers is for the reader who finds the lush poetics of human articulation of awe and wonder worthwhile. Be on the lookout in the coming days for my conversation with Lia Purpura.
Deadstock: Uncollected Recordings 2005 - 2020 by Jeffrey Foucault
(Get it at Jeffrey Foucault's store)
Music has occupied my ears more than words have my eyes these Lenten days. And Deadstock is an album that has been on repeat. Jeffrey Foucault is a top shelf writer walking the songline of confidence and vulnerability. Foucault has a slew of albums worth your collection and Deadstock showcases his writing chops over the last decade and a half. Foucault’s music makes a grown man like me swoon, sway, and slyly sing his lyrics to myself. This is the type of music that keeps me sane and washes my heart in communion wine. “Real Love”, “Mesa, Arizona”, and “Ghost Repeater” are the three songs resetting my bones these days. You can hear my conversation with Jeffrey Foucault here.
Deadstock is for the listener who gravitates to soulful lyrics that build a worthy song and songs that build a complete album.
Crossing Open Ground by Barry Lopez
(Get it the Public Library or IndieBound)
Longtime readers know of my affinity for Barry Lopez. I think he should be required reading for every American. If you are looking for a place to start, read this conversation between Barry Lopez and Fred Bahnson (friend of Contemplify). We lost Barry Lopez this past Christmas. His work feels immortal even as it charts the passing of culture, people, and species. In Crossing Open Ground I was entranced by Lopez the storyteller. Pulling the curtain back far enough on a story to glimpse its spiritual face, but dropping the curtain back as you try to memorize the features. You have to explore the terrain yourself. Lopez makes me feel like an honored guest on this planet, and as such, implores me to give reverence to my host and warmly welcome my fellow guests; winged, two-legged, four-legged, or finned. I was particularly moved by the essay “Grown Men” about a trio of men who guided the trajectory of Lopez’s life. Barry Lopez has had that impact on so many of us.
Crossing Open Ground is for the reader who dips into the depth dimension of the sacred connection between people and land.
Contemplify Update
The three most recent episodes on Contemplify…
These episodes are available from Contemplify through these fine outlets: iTunes, Stitcher, Podbean, or Overcast
Arts & Articles
Daily Office Plainsong (Podcast): My new favorite podcast is a piece of handmade spiritual harmonics paired perfectly with Holy Week. A well worn practice with wrinkles that dates back a couple millennium at a minimum. The podcast is called Plainsong Daily Office. I join digital forces each morning and evening to chant, pray, and participate in the Daily Office.
“Imagining Burial” by Lia Purpura (Emergence Magazine): Holy Week is a ripe time to think of burials, funerals, wakes, and all death related rites. Last month I recommended Lia Purpura’s poetry and the loose lips of her poetry tipped me off about her essays (see above).
“Keeping the World in Being: Meditations on Longing” by Fred Bahnson (Emergence Magazine): Fred Bahnson has dropped the mic again. This time inside his soul to amplify the stirrings of his heart. Bahnson writes poetically, without acid gush sentimentality, on the desert practice of building a hermitage in your heart. Fred Bahnson is a contemplative wizard.
May the prayers of your morning
loop about your heart.
May the prayers of your evening
drizzle gratitude for what was and what is.
May this Holy Week compost the complexity and distress of your own days
and nourish your tomorrows.
Holy Weeking,
Paul
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P.P.S. The postings to kindle the examined life in a quarantined world are still flitting about under Quarantined Qontemplative at the Contemplify basecamp.