May NonRequired Reading List
Contemplify / NRR #111
“Let’s fall in love with our telephones off”
Twenty years ago a painting in an art show gave me the shivers. The painting read, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by virtual reality.” Struck by the allusion to Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” opener, I was shook by the declaration of the dawning infestation of digital life overtaking the material. The future cost still unimaginable. A quiet desperation had been unknowingly seeded in western culture. This proclamation ripples through my veins two decades on.
I am digitally over served.
There is no tender of the digital bar to cut me off.
There is no closing time.
The onus is on each person to gauge their intake with care.
Our lives serf in the digital overlord territory. Alternatives are dwindling. Necessary daily tasks, from city parking to school activities, require digital hookups. These mundane submissions add up and chip away at free range attention. Knowing thyself, place-making, and community life gets increasingly co-opted by brightened apps that step in to seize your attention promising deeper connection. Take Meta’s mission statement (who owns Facebook and Instagram) to “Build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.” The claim in there is that Meta sees itself as the bearer of responsibility to be both the architect and builder of human connection. They offer this for “free” and earn revenue by targeted ads to its users. Meta reports, “Substantially all of our revenue is currently generated from advertising on Facebook and Instagram. We rely on targeting and measurement tools that incorporate data signals from user activity on websites and services that we do not control in order to deliver relevant and effective ads to our users.” (emphasis mine)1 Targeted advertising via uncontrolled access to the highest bidders on you attention is being mined from users online activity. Are these the architects and builders of human connection that you desire?
The search for connection, meaning, and place is becoming more digital than incarnational, more commodified than shared, and a dimmer version of life—an overly digitized one—seeks you out instead.
Have you read Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again? It is a structural analysis of the cultural adoption of all things digital that are tearing down the walls of attention and encouraging zombification. One story really sucker punched me. Johann Hari interviewed one of the leading researchers on the diminishment of attention. During a break from the interview the researcher whipped out his smartphone to play Candy Crush, confessing his own addiction to the video game. I sling no shame at this researcher for this impulsive act. My highlight of his addiction here is that even those leading the studies of the mortifying effect from the blitzkrieg of digital bombardment also struggle to resist the warm glow of the dopamine rush. There is no solution if we play the digital purity game. There is always a more a disciplined Luddite than you and there will always be someone who spends more time wasting away in digital Margaritaville. Digital infractions, we all got them. A quick check of the email, a scroll down social media lane, and on and on the examples go. I am weary of the endless digitization of life, and the predatory commodification that trails it with ease, the pale faced hideouts scripting and dividing us from self, place, and neighbor.
THERE ARE THOSE WHO LOVE TO GET DIRTY
by Gary Snyder
There are those who love to get dirty
and fix things.
They drink coffee at dawn,
beer after work,
And those who stay clean,
just appreciate things,
At breakfast they have milk
and juice at night.
There are those who do both,
they drink tea.
Rant
Have you ever been on a Zoom call with dozens of people when the chat is buckshot with memes, gifs, witticisms, and emojis? Overstimulation runs riot and attention is fractured. In moments of clarity in these curated cloud-based meetings with fellow dispersed human participants, I pause, step back, and look at myself. I am alone in a room with a computer. The digital information ricocheting my way without forethought or filter is coming from other human beings alone in similar rooms who are also being serviced and shielded by their computers. The intermediaries are only digital representations of real people looking for connection in all the wrong memes. Breathing in I remember my own personhood, breathing out I remember theirs.
How odd that so many interactions are brokered by a screen. Pixelated images sharpened to appear as a pal, or a colleague, or whoever is just beyond the dark mirror in their distant domain appearing to hold your gaze. The onslaught of, and resistance to, the digital commons is a part of my daily life. With a smile I readily admit that there is a magic to this when applied rightly with conscious thought. Otherwise, I find it disenchanting.
Excuse the rant, I am not lining up a firing squad for digital execution. This is not an anti-technology parade. What I am naming is this…the coffee has gone cold. Tools and applications are meant to serve the flourishing of life. Right tool, right time can lift spirits and amplify truth, beauty, and goodness. The coffee runs cold when the mind is unable to drop into the heart, when spirited eyes are being worn out, when the texture of life gets sanded down by bytes and pacified by swipes. A life unspooled begins with a separation, then a divorce, from the reality of our bodies, our neighbors, and work that appreciates.
Interrogating the qualitative additives of what digital life offers (and diminishes) in distinct contexts is what I am curious about. I notice little self-reflective effort by adults on the drugging digitalization of life.2 It is true that digital fasts and sabbaths are gaining in popularity, but what about the general over reliance of digital tools to entertain, transport, and communicate? Taking countless photos to memorialize the present? It is no longer an excused absence to miss an event or meeting because you are physically elsewhere. You can pipe in from a device or watch the recording later. What happens to community when we are divorced from the limitations of our enfleshment and location because we can always be “present” elsewhere?
I am watching some of the best minds of my generation being destroyed by virtual reality.
Digital tycoons are putting their hands all over our lives. Instead of raising a stink, we casually put them in our pocket. We joke about our collective addiction to digital malfeasance, a signal that we are at least minimally aware of digital overreach. There are plenty of folks waving the flag about what we are losing, and I salute and support them while I wonder, what is the right balance for me to strike?3 We live in the reality we are given, not the utopia we dream. Less is becoming more for me. Minimizing my digital interactions as much as possible within the generous limitations of my life is my direction. The real work of resistance is falling further in love with this world.
The Actual World
While walking my dog Charliey I come across a dozen or so people I only see out of doors. I know the gate of their walk, their drooping or straight posture, and the nicknames they put upon their dogs. In inclement weather and with bodily distortions, I watch them pick up dog shit. I know them only by my witness to their daily walkabouts in the world. No digital borders frame them, I strictly see them in fleshy human shapes. These brief moments of witness and interaction have become earthy sustenance that got me thinking.
The work of contemplation pays attention to the dominant modes and values of an unwell culture and discerns how they square with the internal compass swinging in the skeletal chassis, in embodied spirit, and in the communities they call home. Contemplative practice is more than sitting on a cushion to commune with God, it is resistance to the unreal, a pause from being mediated. It is openness to direct contact with the Real.
“Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?”
- Henry David Thoreau
The contemplative and poetic life draws musical notes in dust and silence. It demands contact with the real. I still have a lot of detoxing of the unreal to go. I do not always catch myself cramming in one more inconsequential email before dinner with my family. The attention raiders relentlessly chip away at my attention, for they are not interested in my offscreen commitments. In the recent olden days telemarketers would call during the dinner hour. A predictable intrusion I remember from my youth. My dad would pick up the phone and politely ask the telemarketer what time they ate dinner so he could call them back then.4 Now we join the tech overlords in the telemarketing post (without off hours), putting our attention under the influence whenever we are “connected”, training us to hold our cup out for digital inebriation.
Praisemaker of the Ponderosas
Contact with the real counters digital malpractice. This past weekend I went camping in the Jemez Mountains. My youngest child was desperate to sleep under the stars in their hammock. They are prone to tossing and turning, occasional night terrors, and the odd bout of sleepwalking. With these possibilities in mind I said, I will join you in sleeping outside. They protested. They wanted to sleep alone in their hammock. I insisted in a fatherly voice, what kind of parent would I be if I let you sleep outside all alone at age seven? I set up my sleeping bag on the other side of the ponderosa pine anchoring their hammock. Laid out as long and quiet as a bull snake, I snuggled into my bag. It struck me how thrilled I was to sleep out in open too. A suspicious parental thought creeped in; in about two minutes fear will set in and I will be carrying a spooked kid into the tent. Ten minutes passed and only the offbeat cicada and grasshoppers cackled. Not a peep from the hammock. I fell into a deep sleep.
Waking at 2am, I craned my neck to see the hammock shaped by my seven-year old’s body. Filling my lungs with the dry night air, I searched for any stars beyond the inky clouds only to find the winking half-moon hanging between two silhouetted ponderosas. I winked back. A shapeless prayer moved around me. Ahh, that’s right, its the creek just a stone’s throw away. Fear for my sleeping child suspended in air was noticeably absent and I drifted back to sleep.
Awake again at 4am, too early to rise, but nature called. Glancing around the pine, I see the hammock in good form with a sleeping bag tail hung over the edge. With an empty bladder and a full heart I crept back in my sleeping bag to chase more sleep.
At 530am, I hear the cries of a child (not my own) up the bend. Morning wafted and I am fully awake now. Stepping barefoot on a blanket of dry pine needles I check on my young one. My apple cheeked progeny is fast asleep, nestled in their suspended bed. Perfectly held between two pines. Crawling back into my sleeping bag, I watch the sun spill its morning breakfast across the treeline, orange marmalade and pink lemonade streak the sky. God and I spoke of divine things like snakes, marriage and children, destruction of cultures, hunger, and learning how to love running again. When the conversation got stale, God suggested silence. With my back flat on the earth my gaze reached the tips of the ponderosa pine needles brindled by sunlight. I was swaddled in silence.
After a time, my little praisemaker pressed pause on universal silence, sat up in their hammock and said to the woods, I did it. I slept outside all by myself.
Make praise for this world even if you feel alone. For we are never alone. The instructions are getting clearer on resistance to the global digital intoxication. Drink tea. Sleep under ponderosas. Welcome the morning light that weaves through branches while the creek prays for us. Dipping in, get lulled, awed, and mum. Direct contact! The mountains stand watch. The digital waves are no match for the perseverance of mountains. The mountains walk at their own pace, so apprentice to these fresh ancient friends. Mountains do not sprout in singularities but slowly form a range that stretches, fortifying the unspeakable.
How to Support Contemplify
It is a gift to create and share freely Contemplify this past decade. Each offering of Contemplify is free (podcasts, NonRequired Readings, Lo-Fi & Hushed Contemplative Practices), but like all worthwhile endeavors it takes discipline, 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 of 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. Good, clean contemplative fun.
Again, a deep bow to all who are quietly supporting this contemplative work over this past decade.
How to Practice with Contemplify
If you want to join 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.5
May NonRequired Reading List
Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen—An Authorized Biography by Brendan Greaves (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)
Terry Allen is a renaissance man. A revered artist, songwriter, and performer who cut an imitable path in the music and avant-garde art world. Allen had a preternatural confidence to fulfill his visionary contributions in artistic communities who were unsure on how to bridge his music and art. Truckload of Art tells the whole story with high flying yarns and creative cheer that left me shaking my head in disbelief. My own fascination with Terry Allen was sparked by my interview with Scott Ballew back in 2021 (Ballew has made a few documentaries about Allen, Everything For All Reasons and The Midnight Hour).
Biographer Brendan Greaves conducted hundreds of interviews to masterfully craft the most complete picture possible of this uncaptureable artist. To give you a small taste of Terry Allen’s expansive body of work, I want to run you by a few of his pieces and stories that live in me. Terry Allen has been commissioned to create several pieces of public art, surrealist and punny, Shaking Man and Corporate Head are two of my favorites. His Juarez album and its coinciding art has set a feverishly high bar for concept albums and multi-hypenate artists. There is much that sets Terry Allen apart from his contemporaries. David Byrne says the finest example is Allen’s commitment to his marriage despite all the hurdles set before him (some placed by his own hand).
I love learning from artists who follow a north star that only they can see, those who are impossible to track or predict, but they keep tugging on an invisible thread. Anchored in art and family, Allen follows the muse he hears. Those inclined to ride with him on his uncompromising journey are better for it.
Truckload of Art is for the artistically drawn contemplatives who know“Today’s rainbow is tomorrow’s tamale” (one of my favorite Allen-isms).
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)
The Hour of the Star is a novella by the celebrated Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector who wields a most original pen. Surprising and sharp as a saber tooth, there is a renegade quality to each page. Elizabeth Bishop said Lispector is “the most non-literary writer I’ve ever known…a ‘self-taught’ writer”. Now that I have splashed all this praise from the keys, let me underwhelm you with a briefing on the plot. The Hour of the Star follows the story of an impoverished and interiorly free typist Macabéa through the eyes of the reluctant narrator Rodrigo S.M.
Easy to explain, impossible to describe.
The thematic layers grapple with the invisibility of those living in poverty, the work of fiction, self-realization, morality, and innocence. The narrator Rodrigo anguishes over what will become of Macabéa as he writes her into existence, desperate to keep her alive as her temperament, conditions, and health (her diet consists of eating only hot dogs) skids towards her own demise. But Rodrigo is a writer, he must write on. Macabéa is radiant in innocent freedom protecting her from the world’s inflictions even while bearing them. Upon hearing a piece of music that moves her, Macabéa cries for the first time.
“She wasn’t crying because of the life she led: because, never having led any other, she’d accepted that with her that was just the way things were. But I also think she was crying because, through the music, she might have guessed there were other ways of feeling, there were more delicate existences and even a certain luxury of soul. She knew that there were lot of thing she didn’t know how to understand.”6
What Macabéa receives from music is why Rodrigo knows he must finish the story and what Lispector gifts to the reader, an open portal to other ways of feeling, being, and experiencing the soul beyond your understanding. And it is absolutely worth dedicating your craft to this end.
The Hour of the Star zips with steady existential conundrums that vex the sensitive reader to labor over their own creativity in an limping world while filling them to the brim. (h/t to Gail for recommending)
The Last Voyage by Brian McLaren(Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)
With the few minutes I had available I meant to read only the first chapter. But the first chapter ended shrouded in mystery. Surely I could push back my next commitment a stitch, right? I read on. The Last Voyage is a barnburner, page turner, humdinger of a thriller. A brief overview. The novel takes place in 2056, in a time where oligarchs puppeteer international systems and their controlling grip squeezes everything out of life on planet earth. An underground resistance is at work to escape the hands of the oligarchs to risk the continuation of the best of humanity on Mars. I dare not say more, the thrill is in the discovery.
Brian McLaren might be best known for his spiritual teachings and writings, but in The Last Voyage readers witness him exercise his creative powers in the bounds of science fiction (admittedly, not my usual genre). The ripest philosophical questions get explored in a heart pounding adventure story. With collapse approaching, the narrative invites pointed questions sharpened through the banter and bickering of a cast of characters yearning to carry the best of human culture forward. In a discussion on religion, one character offers this,
“I would say religion is an essential evolutionary survival strategy by which we seek meaning, belonging, and purpose to sustain and enhance both our individual and social lives, and usually this coherence is conveyed through a cosmic story.”7
The richness of perspectives held in the story quickens the soul. When I finished the The Last Voyage, I wanted more. Questions of meaning and sacrifice in the text compelled me to self-reflection. And the journey of these characters was not complete, but there is good news, the next two installment of the trilogy are coming.
The Last Voyage is for contemplatives who want to wrestle with core existential questions, in all too real fictionalized setting, that requires characters to imperfectly risk living their answers.
Contemplify Update
Season Seven is hanging out in hammock, swaying with the new rhythm, one episode a month (although the June episode came early to coincide with Beverly Lanzetta’s resonant new book). As always you can find the complete list of Contemplify episodes here and below are all the available episodes of Season Seven.
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
LO-FI & HUSHED SUMMER SOLSTICE PRACTICE SESSION (Contemplify): The Summer Solstice Lo-Fi & Hushed Contemplative Practice Session is coming up on Wednesday, June 23 at 6:30am MT. This is a free online and public contemplative practice of poetry, lectio divina, self-examination, and group reflection. Gorgeous yet unglamorous. Wild poetic stillness in seasonal transitions. Learn more here and an invitation will go out to all Contemplify subscribers the night before, Tuesday, June 22nd. Practitioners join via a Zoom link.
MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS (Vatican) by Pope Leo XIV: Pope Leo on the moral imperative of humanity in relationship with technology, the dignity of humanity, a sneaky Gandalf quote, and profundity of Mystery present and presencing. (h/t to Carmen)
AMERICAN GOSPEL (Front Porch Republic) by Teddy Macker: In another banger article Teddy Macker brings the contagious heat of my favorite monastic rascal, Thomas Merton. A teaser to whet the appetite, “These are words that touch the rim of the mystery. These are words that mere reason has no sway over. These are words that renounce the ego’s habit of fear and calculation. These are words that disturb the complacency of settled ideas. These are words that dig down to the foundations.” Jump in, the water is fine. Also check out and support Macker’s Whole Harvest Farm giving away their whole harvest for free to children in need in Santa Barbara County. You can donate here to support the goodness.
A CATTLE RANCH IS DOING WHAT THE IVY LEAGUE CAN’T (NYT) by Michal Leibowitz: Deep Springs College is a living educational experiment with a hundred year history. Students are empowered with responsibility to care, cook, clean, and set curriculum for one another while making decisions that impact the school’s future. Deep Springs puts no emphasis on the passive reception of ideas, but full participation in the collective life of an ongoing education.
HIP-HOP MEDITATION - LONDON (Center for Spiritual Imagination) by Center for Spiritual Imagination: Any Londoners out there seeking to dip into a meditation with hip-hop? I can’t recommend this experience enough. The one and only Guesnerth Josué Perea will be creating a space with favorite beats and lyrics for reflection and connection with attendees and the Divine. It will take place on June 11th at Saint Paul's Church, Newington. Check out all of the details in the link.
The coffee has gone cold.
The beer is flat.
The juice is spoiled.
The milk has soured.
Contact!
Swinging in the hammock,
Paul
All Bookshop purchase links give a kickback to a local and independent New Mexico bookstore and to Contemplify. Big thanks.
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “Meta Platforms, Inc.: Form 10-K for the Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2023,” Page 61 of PDF.
There is much more conversation on the impacts of kids and technology (rightly so), but technology use in adult lives and work for those in my context seem to more unexamined.
The little outfit of Contemplify uses the tools of technology to kindle the examined life for contemplatives in the world all through digital means. This paradox has not escaped my scrutiny. I am grateful for the way that technology has made such a project possible, and I hope it offers a light touch on the digital landscape that encourages more incarnational risk in this blue skied world. If you were to unsubscribe to Contemplify to lessen your digital load, I would applaud your choice!
I still snicker at that.
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.
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star, trans. Benjamin Moser (New York: New Directions, 2011), 42.
Brian D. McLaren, The Last Voyage (London: Hodder Faith, 2025), 212.
A beautiful and hearty “long, loving look at the real”. Thank you 🌱
Wow! Thankyou