February NonRequired Reading List
Contemplify / NRR #108
Of all that God has shown me
I can speak just the smallest word,
Not more than a honey bee
Takes on his foot
From an overspilling jar.
— Mechtild of Magdeburg
In the dark of midnight, blood spilled from my forehead. My head thrummed with pain. I applied pressure as I caught up to the situation quite literally at hand. The ichor glued my head and hands together. I laid there not knowing my next right action as streams of blood streaked across my dome.
It was but a few hours earlier that I was settling into my nightly rhythm of reflecting and releasing the day. Lying in bed I moved through my examen of consciousness. This sleepy, thirsty practice tucks my day in as I ready my eyes to shutter. Reflecting on the flow of the day, I closed the examen with a prayer, a croak really, “God, speak to me tonight while I sleep.” An earnest prayer of supplication born in the quiet cave of the heart, a last gasp as the day’s embers cooled and I hastened off to sleep.
I woke to the sound of a loud thud; parlous pain chased the din. The loud thud was my head plowing into the hardwood bedside table. Pain narrowed my attention to the small opening in my head. My hands reached the wound and were instantly inked crimson from the blood that was mapping directions to the destination they instinctively sought. I am going to bleed all over the bed. Kicking the covers off I briskly walked to the bathroom with my hands welded to my crown. I do not want to get stitches. I am not going to hospital. Don’t care if this scars. Sitting on the toilet in the dark, I whispered shouted to my wife that I needed her help. She found the bandages and I cleaned my wound and wrapped it up. In the eerie silence of the dark bathroom, I remembered my prayer, ”God, speak to me tonight while I sleep.” God, what the Sam hell are you trying to tell me? I meant a dream or an image not a gaping wound! Are there not others amid their forty winks whom are in greater need of a divine blow to the head than me? With a wily God, prayer became bloodsport.
What Issa Heard
by David Budbill
Two hundred years ago Issa heard the morning birds
singing sutras to this suffering world.
I heard them too, this morning, which must mean,
since we will always have this suffering world
we must also always have a song.
This poem companions my dog Charliey and I on our neighborhood walks under the watchful gaze of the Sandia Mountains. I scribbled this poem out on a notecard, read it aloud to the birds in the park, recite it to Charliey, and mumble it to myself under a cottonwood tree. “What Issa Heard” found a rhythm in my stride and Charliey’s intermittent squats. Repetition yielded absorption. Each reading etched the poem further into my bones, marking the entrance over the cave of my heart. Now when I hear one of these morning birds singing I listen with refreshed ears to their instructive warble. This morning the birdsong blessing echoed throughout the cave of my heart, calling to mind mysterious words from Martin Shaw, “you are a song being sung elsewhere.”
How did I know this was true before I sat with it underneath a cottonwood tree?
There is a crew of us who gather early on Wednesday mornings for the Lo-Fi and Hushed practice (lectio divina with poetry). At the start of each practice, I light a candle and then hum three times. This is not because my humming is something special to call attention to (it’s not), but the humming is a tuning fork seeking resonance with the hara, the vital center of a person. This humming tempers the nervous system and finds the song that those of us gathered are being sung into. The ancient song breaches the banks of eternity and spills over into the temporal. The hum from hara recognizes its melodic source. We become the song being sung elsewhere. Sometimes it takes more than a candle and humming to hear it. In these wearisome days the clammer of tinman noises and nonsensical fodder can break us from the hum of the song. We shriek and shake our heads and hang hopes on oppositional strawmen with rhetoric that typically dissipates once the winds change. But then the hum remerges from elsewhere. Everyday folks gather like a choir in Minneapolis to harmonize their parts and a booing baseline builds from Milan. Little additives that remind those with ears to hear that they are a song being sung elsewhere. They remind us not to break the tether, to listen for the hum underneath the racket. There is an unheard mass ready to be a song. And to sing it loud.
Last week I sat in the balcony of a Patty Griffin concert with some pals. Griffin’s voice carries an ancient newness to each song. Between songs she told the story of her rekindled relationship with her mother during the final years of her life. And her mother loved birdsong. Each morning, she would rise and shine out of doors to listen to the birds sing and call them by name as she recognized their tune. She noticed over the decades that the number of morning birds singing their songs to this suffering world was decreasing. She was not wrong. We have lost 3 billion birds since 1970.
“The rapid declines in birds signal the intensifying stressors that wildlife and people alike are experiencing around the world because of habitat loss… we need to remember that if conditions are not healthy for birds, they’re unlikely to be healthy for us.” (bold is mine, from Audubon Society)
We are losing birdsong to habitat loss. A habitat is our natural environment for the flourishing of life. The gross moral constipation of humans has degraded human habitats once porously encased in natural habitats. Red in tooth and claw in an uneasy truth of every ecosystem, but what is happening here is vastly different than a run down the food chain. Human hubris has intensified this habitat loss, especially by those in power and those with endless resources who have taken “red in tooth and claw” not in word, but in deed, as a corrective measure for policies of domination, control, and capital gain. This attack creates a further habitat of loss for the human species (not to mention our winged and four-legged friends). This is not new; our history books are stained with greed-sickened hearts peddling the machines of ‘progress’ as the disinherited are grinded by its gears. This is habitat loss. Songs being sung from elsewhere are being lost. And the machine powers on today without regard for limits, sharpening its blade and widening its reach. Sickened hearts are unable to hear a trace of the song necessary to experience and share unspeakable joy in this suffering world. They have become villains dismissing what Issa heard. As long as we walk the soft belly of this earth, suffering will not disappear. But we are capable of being songs for this suffering world, of changing our relationship to this suffering world. Unwell hearts in swollen apathetic systems need to hear songs to heal. Birds have been preaching this for eons. But we have fewer birds to sing to us, which means we must pick up the slack and raise joyful songs in grief for what is lost and for what remains. We must let the music back in again.
Ash Wednesday is here. A frightful reminder of limitations and reconciliation. When I get ashed on my forehead today it will cover up my new scar. Ash on scar is a symbolically potent image. What was busted in an instant heals with heavy steps as this mortal coil spins on. Birdsong dwindles. Habitats are lost. Suffering will continue to darken doorways and brighten screens. I am tired, bloodied, and scarred up from prayer. And I am a song being sung elsewhere for this suffering world. We all are. Many of us are waking up to our own bloody prayers. Our habitat, our home, our neighbors are crying out, desperate for restoration. What is ours to do? Do not disappear. Let the music back in again. Hear the awakening interior hum sung elsewhere. Step out into the morning light, breathe in the dawn-kissed air, and listen so closely to the songs of the remaining morning birds that you hear your own. For we must also always have a song.
Contemplify has been singing its song for ten years. It is a gift to create and share freely this past decade. Each offering of Contemplify is free (podcasts, NonRequired Readings, Lo-Fi & Hushed Contemplative Practices), but like all worthwhile endeavors it takes scratch, grit, and energy. Some folks have sought to support Contemplify through monetary means. This is a kindness that I am learning to receive as it softens the unnecessary friction to do this joyful work. Those who become paid subscribers are automatically invited to join the weekly Lo-Fi & Hushed Practice Session on Wednesday mornings. A regular communal contemplative practice that supports the rhythms of your one wild and precious life. You can practice live with me and a top shelf community of practitioners or with the recording. Rhythmic contemplative goodness. If you want to join th the Lo-Fi & Hushed Practice Sessions but don’t want to (or cannot) become a paid subscriber—no sweat—just add your name and email to this form and you will be included in the practice for free. Money should never be a barrier to contemplative practice. Practice makes practice. Always delighted to add more practitioners to the circle. Hope to see you there.1
Again, big thanks to all who are quietly supporting this contemplative work over this past decade.
February NonRequired Reading List
Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us by Martin Shaw (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)
“The mossy face of Christ.” That line alone is enough to put me in Martin Shaw’s debt for the rest of my days. But I am getting ahead of myself. Liturgies of the Wild is an easy book to summarize, but appreciably more difficult to describe the reading experience. As a start, I recommend listening to my conversation with Martin Shaw here. Martin Shaw is a mythographer, storyteller, and Christian thinker. In Liturgies of the Wild, Shaw weaves poetics, myth, story, and personal antidotes into mosaic prose on the adventure of a lifetime. Your mythic life. Because “if your story is a river, then myth is the ocean it should naturally lead to.”
The chapters are cut close to heavy bones, “On Death”, “On Dreams”, “On Limits” for example. Like any good butcher Shaw has a steady hand guiding each trim. There are sentences that will steal your breath, empty out old illusions, and infill spirit to refresh those same heavy bones.
Shaw draws upon myths to sharpen subtle points to pierce the cloudy veil of incarnational understanding. This book begs to be read during the Lenten season as Shaw suggests “a myth is robust enough to hold the tension of the soul of mud, and the spirit of breath.” Leaving you with the absolutely necessary question for living more vividly; what part of you has to die? This book beams with life, death, and resurrection. I pick at it broadly here because I do not want to ruin the discovery waiting for you in each chapter. Every page is worth with reading with fresh eyes. Liturgies of the Wild jostles stuck stories loose, helping you retrieve what you might have otherwise thrown away and discovering its hidden gold. Readers will walk muddy swamps with Shaw and learn to be praisemakers all the way through.
Liturgies of the Wild is for contemplatives willing to hold the tension of their life in the old stories, and chew on them until they break the false teeth of illusion.
Soul Medicine for a Fractured World: Healing, Justice, and the Path of Wholeness by Liza J. Rankow (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)
Soul Medicine for a Fractured World is another powerful read. A book that reads you as you read it. Soul Medicine for a Fractured World opens up portals in your mind to reflect upon life’s breaks and blessings as as a vigil of love. As Rankow closes the book she offers, “If there is one I hope you will take with you from your reading of this book it is this: You belong to life.” And with easy attention, you will walk away with this sense of belonging.
Drawing from contemplative and earthbound mystics like Howard Thurman, Dr. Barbara Holmes, Malidoma Somé among others, Rankow draws connections between restoration, healing, and belonging. Practices and reflection questions dot the end of chapters as markers to solidify the ground you are walking, otherwise you might tip into an overwhelming reckoning with reality. There are many bespoke passages in Soul Medicine for a Fractured World that had me reaching for a pen, here is one that stands out:
“Living in not-knowing is different from living in confusion. It’s a state of curiosity, presence, receptivity, adn equanimity. Of beginner’s mind. Our job—our discipline—is to get our own thinking mind out of the way and expand our availability to that Spirit within, the Knower, so it can guide us. But as long as we think we know, there is no opening for a wisdom beyond ours to get a message through.”
Soul Medicine for a Fractured World is for readers at the cross of contemplation and action in service to the healing of this suffering world.
Contemplify Update
Season Seven slipped out to look at the nightsky and its not coming back in. It is gonna be good. Trying a different rhythm of one episode a month (perhaps with a musing slipped in here and there); you can listen to the trailer which includes a poem read by Teddy Macker and then dip into my conversation with Martin Shaw. As always you can find the complete list of Contemplify episodes here and below are the two most recent episodes.
Dr. Martin Shaw on Liturgies of the Wild (Season 7, Ep 1)
Vision for a New Cabinet by Teddy Macker (Season 7, Trailer)
All episodes are available from Contemplify through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts worth their salt.
Arts & Articles
VISION FOR A NEW CABINET: A Proposal of Possibilities for the Next American President (Front Porch Republic) by Teddy Macker: A work of possibility and reverence for what matters most. Read a dozen or so times, share with friends, and then listen to Teddy read the “Vision for a New Cabinet” here.
BLACK CONTEMPLATIVE PRAYER VIRTUAL PRAYER SUMMIT (blackcontemplativesummit.com) in partnership with Awakenings, Inc (Feb 21-22): Still time to register! “Join us for the Second Black Contemplative Prayer Virtual Summit, a gathering of Black spiritual teachers and thought leaders who will guide us into deeper waters of contemplative prayer and practice. This summit is designed for everyone, led by Black voices, and dedicated to deepening the well of contemplative wisdom within community. Building on the foundation of the inaugural summit, this year turns inward and downward, into the rich wisdom of Black contemplative voices and focuses on healing, wholeness, and cultivating inner sanctuary for ourselves and our communities.”
WHAT COMMUNITY SOUNDS LIKE (The First Person with Michael Judge) by Michael Judge: Last spring I got the chance to see Dave Moore, Greg Brown, Pieta Brown, Jeffrey Foucault, and others put on a benefit concert in Decorah, Iowa. A cast of songwriters dear to my heart. Foucault kept the party going by hosting a night of the music of Dave Moore late last year. Wish I could I have been there, music that rises out of and celebrates community makes me weak in the knees.
RISE: FROM ONE ISLAND TO ANOTHER (350.org) by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna: As funding to address climate change ceases in my country, I turn to the poets as leaders and healers. This video of poets Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna call us to full attention and action. (h/t to Boots)
THE LAST OBSERVERS (YouTube) by Maja K Mikkelsen: This is visio divina, a short tale of a long (and last) stand of the keepers at the lighthouse in Falsterbo, Sweden. For 36 years this couple observed and charted weather and birds, without missing a single observance. (h/t to Mark)
KARL OVE KNAUSGÅRD: THE WRITER WHO BROKE THE RULES (YouTube) by Global BBC: One of the most fascinating writers speaks of their process, anxiety, and ceaseless work at their craft.
LOVE LETTER TO AN ICE AGENT (Kaira Jewel’s Substack) by Kaira Jewel Lingo: This tender and wise writing came across my desk last month. Kaira Jewel is a Dharma teacher who consistently brings a graceful and loving touch to the matters at hand. This piece helps the heart open and blossom.
Waking to the sound
of a bloody prayer
and birdsong.
I become
a song
sung
elsewhere.
Letting the music back in,
Paul
All Bookshop purchase links give a kickback to a local New Mexico bookstore and to Contemplify. Big thanks.
Contemplify never wants filthy lucre to be a barrier to practice. So if you want to practice weekly with this contemplative basecamp at Lo-Fi & Hushed but aren’t able to offer support (no sweat!), drop your name and email here, I will add you to the next practice. We would be delighted to have you practicing with us.
As always such beautiful writing, that begs us to stop and wonder and think deep thoughts. As a yoga teacher I know some of my students hesitate to om with the group, so instead I offer them a hum as an alternative. the first time I thought my heart would explode with joy as everyone hummed.