Find myself leaning into a favorite phrase of Bill Schmidt’s, “See what you’re looking at.” It’s a mantra now as I drive in the mountains, trying to see their essence. What about their shape, their altitude, their rock, their trees tell me, this is a mountain? Close looking is a skill, a hard to develop one since distractions of all kinds, a key this-moment-in-time issue, lead us away from direct experience to mediated experience. Close looking, like the close reading of poetry, opens up the unseen, the unexpected.
As I continue to develop my sumi-e skills, I’ve decided I want to focus on only a few things: mountains, Hebrew letters, Tarot major arcana, and objects I’ve used and love like chain-saws and axes, garden tools, bee equipment, maybe dogs, too. I plan to seek what I understand is the central objective of sumi-e painting, expressing the essence, the soul of an object rather than aiming for a Western representational rendering. Good thing, since I don’t have the patience to attend an atelier like my friends Lonnie and Stefan Helgeson.
Paths. The trait of watchfulness, of being aware, is not only about self-awareness. It is, in itself, a tool, one to use to notice which direction you’re headed. Did this action, that motivation, move me in a positive direction in my life or a negative one? Did it move me toward selfishness or toward being of service?
The last couple of days I’ve found exercising hard. Wednesday was my resistance day and I felt too tired. I almost left it entirely, but instead did my high intensity workout plus 80 minutes of treadmill. That seemed easier and I had not been able to work out Tuesday, my normal aerobics day. But. Then on Thursday I encountered the same feeling and didn’t workout at all except for 15 minutes of aerobics. I was aware of struggling with myself, but let the feeling of tiredness win. Exercise is a habit, one I could lose, yet one I value. A matter to pay attention to.
Mussar, at least as it’s been presented so far this year, focuses on the interpersonal and the inner. At least until yesterday. Yesterday introduced a concept of caring for the generation into which you are born, not only the nation of Israel. Caring for the generation requires action for peace and justice.
It also requires, very interestingly, prayers for God to forgive the wicked, or the unjust. It’s not up to us to forgive them, but we must plead with God to do it. As I took it, this means that we stand against Trump and the white supremacists, for example, opposing them in the streets, in conversation, at the ballot box, in whatever way we can, and it’s up to God to forgive them for what they’re doing. Not us. I interpret God here, the Great Other as Rabbi Jamie sometimes says, as the collective us, our generation perhaps, or history. Or, perhaps, the very sensibility that inspires us to move into the breach on behalf of the vulnerable other.
It also made me wonder if prayer might not be marching against the alt-right, showing up beside African-Americans, LGBT folks, fighting to change unjust economic structures. Tactile prayer, political prayer. Action guided not by anger against individuals like Trump and his minions, but action for the other. So in our action we offer a way out for those with their thumb on the others neck. We ask Pharaoh to let them go. We ask, in other words, that others act as agents of peace and justice, caring for our generation-including the oppressor-but we don’t rely on hope alone, we become hope itself.
I guess it’s time to admit it. I’m a deeply religious guy, whatever that means. It means at least that I find religion and religions fascinating, personally transformative. I have approached religion since high school with a mixture of deep skepticism and a willingness, no, a need to rethink, refeel, reexperience what I’m told.
J. Harry Cotton, professor of philosophy at Wabash College, introduced the radical skepticism to my journey. In my senior year of high school I had grown dissatisfied with the Methodist version of Christianity, so I asked the local Roman Catholic priest to give me instructions in the Catholic faith. He introduced me to the traditional Aquinian arguments for the existence of God. Since I had not, at that time, fully recognized the relentlessly logical bent to my mind, I found these arguments profound and felt like the Methodists had hidden them from me.
Then, that fall, J. Harry systematically dismantled each one of them. It’s not hard to do with the proper philosophical tools. Take God as the Aristotelian prime mover of the universe. God put the whole shebang in motion, otherwise how would things have gotten started? Well, like many similar arguments, this one suffers from the problem of infinite regression. So, if the universe required a prime mover, then who or what moved the prime mover?
When I left J. Harry’s class that afternoon, walking across the great lawn with brick academic buildings on every side, my world had been shaken at a foundational level. Out went the whole Christian project in my life, right then. Later, I would find Camus and his version of existentialism, which still informs me, but then, there was nothing.
Since that day until now my ancientrail has always wound its circuitous path back to the big questions. I’ve explored Christianity, Islam, now Judaism, Taoism, existentialism, various spiritual disciplines like lectio divina, meditation, morning and evening prayers, contemplative prayer, even some modest peaks into Tibetan buddhism occasioned by my friendship with Gyatsho Tshering. Though I am now and have been for a while an idiosyncratic version of Taoist/pagan, I’m finding the Reconstructionist path in Judaism a surprisingly familiar one.
Reconstructionist thought, begun by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, is radical. Very radical. He asserted that the Torah is not divinely inspired. He went on to say that God as a supernatural intervener makes no sense. He rewrote Jewish rituals and insisted on a reexamination of the whole tradition, reconstructing it where it made sense. I love a key line of his, “The past gets a voice, but not a veto.” Yes. Very Emersonian.
Maybe my reimagining faith project is not so far out as I have sometimes thought. Perhaps it’s the work I’ve been in training for most of my adult life. What if I knuckled down and got at it with a reconstructionist bent in mind? Might be interesting.
People out here call it Colorado weather. I call it mountain weather. The shifts are often extreme, from snow and ice to balmy, springlike. But today. Well, today will be a transition like none I’ve seen since I got here. We have a red flag warning in effect from noon today until 6 pm. That means low humidity, high winds, warm temps and plenty of dried out fuel. At 6 pm though we switch to a winter storm watch. The prediction is for up to a foot of snow tomorrow, more over the next week. If we can avoid fire through this afternoon, we should be fine for a while.
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.
In the Nix (see post below) the author Nathan Hill takes a side excursion into the difficult, thorny problem of the self. The idea he presents helped me, gave me a middle ground beyond the no-self notions of the Buddha and several contemporary psychologists and philosophers and the Western view of one true self.
The dialectic between no-self and one true self has always found me much closer to the one true self pole. It’s the one that I accept intuitively. In fact, it was the unquestioned truth until mid-college, so unquestioned that any other idea seemed literally absurd.
“Oh, that’s her true self.” We might say this when we see someone angry, apparently peeling back the onion, layers of false selves, to reveal the enduring self located, well, somewhere; or, when some other extreme behavior allows us, or so we think, to peer into the interior of another. This is the radical western reductionist view of the self, perhaps linked to the notion of soul, the essence of a person.
The Buddhist notion, which I don’t pretend to understand well, posits no I, no we, only a consciousness that responds to whatever shows up in the present moment, our self a narrative, a story we tell ourselves, but having no “real” existence.
In Hill’s notion there is a third, perhaps a middle way, between these two poles. A character says, oh, her true self has been hidden by false selves. No, Hill’s other character says, not by a false self but by another of her true selves. Ah. Not split personality or multiple personality, not that idea, rather the idea that we each have more than one “true” self.
This makes so much sense to me. The self that writes this blog is the writing me, the self that wants somehow to turn my inside out so others can see in. I have a husband self who acts in relation to Kate and to the history of relationships I’ve had. There is a grandparent self brought into existence by Ruth and Gabe. A Woolly self. A friend self, perhaps as many friend selves as I have friends. There is an art lover self, a physical self focused on the body, a reading self, too, who willingly opens all these selves to influence by another. Each of these true selves, and many others, have their own history, their own agenda. You might call these selves the specific wanderer on each of my several ancientrails.
Given the quote above from Whitman, I’ll call this the Whitman theory of self. It is, for now, the one to which I adhere.