July NonRequired Reading List
Contemplify / NRR #113
“We must regard our created essence as a wild, waste desert, where God, who rules us, lives. And in this desert we must wander, stripped of our own modes and manners.”
- Jan Ruusbroec
I mishear song lyrics all of the time. The slip of the ear infiltrates my being and scores my heart. When I return to the song, and I find the lyrics to be a pale imitation of my memory and I am elated. Six months ago, I heard an interview with Brian Eno, the grandaddy of ambient music. I could have sworn I heard him label himself a gardener in an architecture firm. And that sentiment struck me in the green thumb. I began to apply that metaphorical descriptor to myself and kindred friends who fell into the same camp. My hunch is that many of those reading here might be donning gardening gloves in the architecture firms of their own life. When I returned to the interview recently, that is not at all what Eno said. But it is no matter, this is how ideas spring.
I am a gardener in an architecture firm. Best laid plans of architects are clean and two-dimensional on paper. Any dirt on paper gets brushed aside. Three dimensional models get built to model what the intentions could be, but the feel of the sun swaying over the sky or the smell of glistening rain on the grounds is forgotten. Bless the architects, I honor them with my knees on the soil, eye to the earthworm. Gardeners are not better, just different perspectives on what makes things grow.
My attention on gardeners in the architecture firms of life and religion triggered a conversation with my old pals Meister Eckhart and Hadewijch. These wild ones, these true ones, who wrapped themselves in poetic language to speak of what cannot be built with certainty. Daring to speak of things unspeakable. A faith in the unseen, the hidden, the voids. A faith in what mysteriously overflows from the biome. There is this gem of a book titled, Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete edited by Bernard McGinn. I read this book one spring under the shade of a tree while my eldest ran free with her pals. I cannot separate my reading of this text from the image of my daughter running without a why.
I will approach love gladly
if I have the power to reach the heart.
But no one will sing there with me
Who mingles with creatures.Naked love who spares nothing
In her wild death
Stripped of all accident
Recovers her simple unity.In love’s pure abandon
No created good can subsist:
For Love strips of all form
Those she receives in her simplicity.Free from all modes,
Strangers to every image,
This is the true life
Of the poor in spirit.True poverty is not simply
Exile and begging for bread.
The poor in spirit must live
Without notions in vast simplicity.Without end or beginning,
Without form, modality, reason or sense,
Neither opinion, thought, attention, nor knowing,
One that is boundless and without limit.In this wild wide simplicity
Live the poor in spirit in unity
Nothing is there except silent emptiness
Ever answering to eternity.I’ve had my say in a short poem,
But the way is long as I well know,
And those who want to finish the course
Endure much suffering.(Mengeldicht 26)1
I want to fall into the stride of running without a why. To embrace the Love that births an inner authority. Love that allures the gardener in an architecture firm to gain by emptying to a simple unity with the ground of being. Plans, designs, personas must all drop away, or as Wendell Berry states, “Take all that you have and be poor.” It is a recovery of the eternal, springing up out of boundless emptiness. This simplicity is free, but it requires a surrender by the gardener, an endurance heated by counting the cost and consenting to the wild silence. Eventually, even the gardener has to drop their spade and seeds to “stray in a wild desert” as Hadewijch pens elsewhere. Reckless abandonment in Love.
We are all architects and gardeners. We pickup the lingo of each, employing techniques to be seen and celebrated as such in this life. But naked “Love strips of all form” and we can dare to consent to the simplicity of the desert wanderer to live “without notions in a vast simplicity.”
July NonRequired Reading List
(I have been on a documentary kick, probably had something to do with being laid up in bed sick at the top of the month.)
Henry David Thoreau directed by Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers (Watch it on PBS)
Henry David Thoreau continues to peek through the weeds of time and instruct me. Thoreau received the Ken Burns treatment with this majestic PBS documentary series. Thoreau is my favorite kind of saint, imperfect and trued, seeded in the walkable way of life. This is a three-part docu-series that pours in as much of Thoreau’s multidimensional life into three hours as possible. The film pulls out some of his most tattoo worthy quotes while raising some of his most glaring inconsistencies, celebrating the Concord transcendentals and examining the relational fractures, ultimately holding up a most unlikely man who has been embedded into American mythology.
It is the details of the film that charmed me. The lingering reference to Thoreau reflecting on his morning dip in Walden Pond as a baptism of renewal, a daily ritual that would at times set him free to teeter away the rest of the day in contemplative gazing. Or the way these insights rippled out from Concord to meet the greatest liberatory minds of the 20th century well after Henry’s death. His place-making was the grounds of his flowering spirit. Thoreau’s ideas were carried by the gusts of time to reach fertile hearts to contextualize and translate into the movements of their lives.
Henry David Thoreau is for any contemplative curious about the unbounded spirit of man bound to a particular place and time.
Love + War directed by Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Watch it on National Geographic)
This is not an easy documentary. Love + War follows Pulitzer Prize-winning Lynsey Addario through some of the riskiest conflicts on the planet while also firmly holding her role as a parent and spouse. Addario has been kidnapped twice while out on assignment and has birthed two children into this world. The film trails Addario through harrowing shellings of civilians in the Ukraine and travelling home to make it in time for her child’s concert. Every parent feels the rip between the safety of their family and the unrelenting brashness of the world, Addario experiences both with the volume turned all of the way up.
I cried throughout the film bearing witness to Addario’s pursuit of truth by documenting conflict areas. The burden of her witness to share ground level truth while doing right by those who have no choice on the violence they must endure. There is a courage in Addario that I admire and cannot fully comprehend. The familial connection of being present and being pulled away. What do you do when your vocational call puts you and your beloved at continual risk?
Love + War is for those who can bear brutality of the questions that suround love and war.
A Love Letter To Handsome John directed by Otis Gibbs (Watch it on YouTube)
We lost Todd Snider last year. A wordsmithy in story and song, a craftsman of truth and fibs whose performances dazzled with infectious charm. Snider had a unique relationship to the late John Prine, who took the junior songwriter under his wing. Prine proffered advice and older brotherly teasing that Snider welcomed with open laughter and as winnowing to art. There are a thousand tall tales around both men, but to get the chance to hear Snider relay his encounters with Prine are priceless.
You often hear, “don’t meet your heroes”, John Prine seems to be a counterexample to that easily dispensed truism. For a music fan of my nature, I love learning about artists who are so attuned to their art that the trappings of success (or hoped for success) don’t stick as easily. There is nothing perfect about this film or these two men, but I was smiling earlobe to earlobe for the fifty-five minutes.
A Love Letter To Handsome John is for anyone who loves the unconventional artistry of John Prine and Todd Snider.
Contemplify Update
Season Seven is out climbing trees, one per month. As always you can find the complete list of Contemplify episodes here and below are all the available episodes of Season Seven.
Sasha Waters on Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (Season 7, Ep 6)
Beverly Lanzetta on Birthing a New Mysticism (Season 7, Ep 5)
Dr. Liza J. Rankow on Soul Medicine for a Fractured World (Season 7, Ep 4)
Philip Connors on The Mountain Knows the Mountain: A Fire Watch Diary (Season 7, Ep 3)
Anna Tivel on Animal Poem, Short Stories, and Checking Your Shoes (Season 7, Ep 2)
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
AT 88, HE BUILD AN ADOBE LABYRINTH BY HAND. NOW VISITORS, COME TO PRAY, GRIEVE AND WANDER (KRCC) by Hayley Sanchez: There is a Field of Dreams element to this story. Cannot wait to drop in on this labyrinth someday. (h/t to Travis)
GETTING OFF WITH THE LUDDITES (N+1) by Sarah Thankam Mathews: There is a long lineage of folks resisting what is not of service to their communities or their values. Mathews drops in a new iteration of resistors and likes what she finds. (h/t to Downtown)
LOST BOYS (The Tonight Show) by Phoebe Bridgers: A song that has evoked some wonder on its lyrical meaning. Best to wander inside the song for a stretch before making any guesses. In this performance, Dan Reeder, friend of Contemplify, is playing with Bridgers.
Gardeners in the firm
judge not
the conditions of plans,
or,
the planned conditions.
Everything wilts in the desert.
In the garden,
Paul
All Bookshop purchase links give a kickback to a local and independent New Mexico bookstore and to Contemplify. Big thanks.
Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete edited by Bernard McGinn, p34