Teeth cleaning a.m. Kate and I now schedule teeth cleaning and annual physicals together. I call it medical entertainment. Just like going to the Tallgrass Spa together. Almost.
Mussar afternoon. Soul cleaning together, too. I’m learning a lot about Judaism with her. And, I’m impressed with what I’m learning. Here’s the key new insight: Judaism has, from a long time ago, insisted that abstract ideas like mercy, compassion, judgment, faith have embodied reality. That’s what all those laws are about, how to make the faith work in daily life.
This is very different from the Christianity in which I was trained. Christianity unhitched this very earthy, practical religion from the notion of embodied abstractions, letting the abstractions become dominant. This led to a growing gap between dogma and actual practice. Of course, many Christians work at making their faith inform their lives, but the tools are not as good the ones in Judaism. It’s not the laws themselves, but the spirit of actively grappling, every day, every moment with what it means to show mercy, to judge, to practice loving kindness, to exhibit patience that gives Judaism its lived flavor.
Rabbie Jamie and congregant
Still don’t want to be a Jew, no interest in converting, but I have a lot of interest in learning how to live from the community of Beth Evergreen. Probably the best religious experience of my life.
It was with sadness that I read of the fight at the MIA last week. No matter the apportionment of blame between the two groups, this kind of violence within the museum shocked me. It also underscores the danger of cynics and demagogues setting the tone for our national conversation. Fists and physical confrontations are a means of dialogue, a blunt means, but one nonetheless. When the Whitehouse itself makes racism, anti-semitism, misogyny, xenophobia, terraism (violence against mother earth) not only acceptable, but for some normative, then this country will descend into further acts of violence, often one on one or many on one.
When I first started volunteering at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 2000, continuing education events for docents and guides (I was a guide at the time.) were held on Mondays in the morning. An excellent speaker on some aspect of art, art history or museology would give us an hour to an hour and a half presentation. I have a three inch thick notebook filled with notes from those events.
After the lecture the museum was open, but closed to the public. That meant we could take as long as we wanted to wander the galleries, taking time with this work, then that one. No interference, no one walking in front of you or talking loudly. It was my favorite meditation, of all the ones I’ve tried.
Study for Improvisation V-Kandinsky
I had certain favorites: the Bonnard with its wonderful colors, Dr. Arrieta by Francisco Goya, the Rug Merchant by Gerome, the tryptych Blind Man’s Buff by Beckman, Kandinsky’s wonderful painting in the same room, the Doryphoros. I also loved the ball game yoke, the Olmec jade mask once owned by John Huston, but the Asian art always occupied most of my time. The tea house, the tea bowls and implements, the tatami room with its beautiful screen of the Taoist Immortals, the seated Buddha, the Scholar’s room, the ferragana stallion in metal, the Song dynasty ceramics, pieces carved from jade, the Wu family reception hall, the sand mandala, I couldn’t spend enough time with them.
On those quiet Mondays these works all became my great friends, friends that stay with me now, even 17 years later and 900 miles away. Also, on those quiet Mondays I found an alternative spirituality, one not rooted in the earth nor in the world’s great religions, but in the inside out nature of creativity. All of these works, some in overt ways, some in the covert way of working within a certain tradition, reveal the inner worlds of the artist. Reverting to the language of the post below the art allowed me-and you-to dive into another’s holy well, to see their inner life. This is a rare and privileged thing which explains to my satisfaction the enduring power of all art.
It is also the diametric opposite of Trumpism/Bannonism. The museum is a place to see what a world without these men can be.
While writing the pendulum piece yesterday, I began to consider my inner life in a way I hadn’t before. It occurred to me, probably obvious to you, but not to me, that the inner world is timeless. It’s not part of the body (I’m not sure what I mean by this.) and does not participate in the changes of aging. That world, one we each carry within us (or about us, or as us), is quiet relative to the constantly moving, pulsing, buzzing blooming nature of reality beyond it. (Thanks to William James.)
chalice well, Glastonbury
Perhaps this is what the New Testament means when Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is within you.” Not only is the within timeless, it’s also boundaryless, extending into an infinite realm, not all known, at most partially. That’s not to say it’s static, not at all, just ask your dream life.
This is exciting to me, considering the world within. The weird part, the somewhat new part for me, lies in the metaphysics of the within. As I consider it, feel its reality, my inner world seems separate from the physical realm altogether. I know, in terms of contemporary neuroscience, that this could be challenged; but, in spite of that, this private place seems untethered from both the outer realm and my body and, oddly, my mind.
The mind, in my use of it here, is a tool, a way of managing the interface between my body and my current concerns in the world. It does have a Janus faced quality in that it can look out to the world as the dasein of Heidegger suggests; but, it can also look inward, into my inner world. Using the mind as a point of reference, it becomes a mediator between inside and outside, but, in a manner similar to the inner world, a part of neither.
So, when I say the inner world is not part of my mind, I say that because the mind is the tool I use to know that world, as it is the tool I use to know and interact with the outer world.
Therefore, we can ask, what is the ontological character of the inner world? Does it have being in the way of, say, a rock, a tree, a dog, another person? I don’t know the answer to this question. It is, in the sense of isness, real since it can be perceived as Bishop Berkeley put it, but its isness seems different qualitatively from my body or the world in which it moves and lives and has its being.
This inner world is the homeworld of the imagination, of the interplay between ideas and intuition. It is the realm of memory and the alteration of memory, of the creation of memory. It is the place of fairy tales, of myth, of legend, of gods and goddesses. It can be explored with some difficulty. It often manifests after it has done its own work, throwing up a new way of seeing. In fact, my understanding of it as timeless and spatially infinite is just such a new of way of seeing for me.
Canto 3
I’m not saying this well. What is amazing to me, what is pushing me to explore this idea is the vastness of the inner world and its unique nature for each human being. Maybe for each dog and cat, wombat and shark for all we know. In other words in a room full of people we see them in this familiar world as distinct entities, yes, but still in this world. Yet, each person is a holy well that, like the holy wells of Ireland and Wales, provides entrance to another world, a world sui generis.
So, in fact, that room full of people is not only what it appears to be, but is also a collection of unique worlds, worlds unseen by any eye but each person’s inner eye.
I confess the pendulum powering my inner life has begun to move in eccentric ways since the emergence of the Trump. It swings in its plane, as it always has, tick tocking its energy into the engine of my inner world. Yet the rotating sphere of my inner life, which processes around the poles of birth and death, as the earth rotates around its north and south poles, normally keeping me from stasis in a place where time and space have no purchase, seems to have altered.
This is, for me, a dramatic change and one I have not yet learned to accommodate. The whole circle which the pendulum scribes moves through these points: love, family, nature, writing, reading, travel, dogs, house, mountains, politics, art, science, friends, sleep, body, mind. In its completeness, as its plane touches the ancientrails of my soul/self, I experience those aspects of my inner me that are my unique identity.
Wrinkleberry Lane, North Devon, England
But now, there is some magnetic pull when the plane of the pendulum finds underneath it the ancientrail of politics. The silver ball wobbles slightly, pulled out of its determined arc across the rotation beneath it. It has, so far, always righted itself, the dynamics of its swing returning it to its usual course, but it feels as if the ancientrail of politics has been altered in some dramatic way, as if its path no longer relates to the world in the ways to which I’m accustomed.
In that place, the place of the political, something new has emerged. It is part fear, a new feeling for me relative to the political; it is part anguish, not new, but intensified; it is part disorientation, definitely new; it is part earthquake, the terra firma of the political moving under my feet, all new feeling. The combination of these changes is trying to alter me, to change the rotation which is, really, my life.
bdesham’s mother
In this extended metaphor my life is the rotation of my Self as it processes around the poles. It does not, in other words, move forward or backward, but in a repeating circle which might from the outside look like a spiral moving from Duncan, Oklahoma, where I was born, to that unknown point where, as far as I know, the sphere implodes and the pendulum stills.
It’s been a month plus a little now. Little doubt about the direction of Trump’s administration in general terms: chaos and bluster. As to its direction over the long term? Impossible to tell. Neither markets nor foreign countries like an unpredictable U.S. Nor do I.
The only reliable impression I have about the future under Trump/Bannon is that it will be heavy weather. Those of us who view communal responsibility as a given, those of us who view the planet as one place important to all, those of us who see government as an instrument of support rather than the enemy, those of us who see taxes as a shared obligation will find much displeasure in that future, as we already have in the short, terrible time that has passed so far.
How much can he do? Unfortunately, far more than any of us would like. The bigger question is whether he can sink our experiment in self-governance. Admittedly, he’s only brought into obvious relief the oligarchic stranglehold that has dominated post-war U.S. policy, but he’s also trying to discredit critical pieces of our checks and balances: the press, the courts, even knowledge itself. If he can strengthen these attacks, then our nation will be in serious trouble.
And, no, we may not finish the struggle, but we are not at liberty to stop either. Tarfon.
From my growing up and adult years in the Midwest mountains had a rocky, bare faced majesty, perhaps covered in swirling fog or partially covered in new snow, but always jagged and austere. Yes, I’d been to the Smoky’s and driven the Blue Ridge Highway, even seen the Appalachians in Pennsylvania and New York, not to mention the ancient Sawtooths along the North Shore in Minnesota, but somehow they didn’t change my archetypal image of what it meant to be a mountain.
Now, though, having lived in the Rockies for over two years, I know that mountains are diverse, even in the same range. Some are bare and austere like the Tetons, but most of the mountains I encounter on a daily basis have hair, above 8,000 feet lodgepole pine and aspen, below that ponderosa, blue spruce, some oak. Of course, above the tree line, there are no trees, but at the treeline, krummholz trees predominate. They are, as the German word makes clear, stunted and windblown, crooked, bent and twisted.
Even after some reading and a lot of observation I’ve still not figured out how to tell where one mountain begins and another ends. Of course, this is not a mountain’s problem; it’s a problem of the human need to analyze and dissect. A peak of Black Mountain, for example, is visible through my loft window as I write. I photograph its beautiful changes as the sun rises and posted some of those below. But Conifer Mountain begins somewhere to the south of Black Mountain. They’re connected, joined at the granitic hip, so they’re not really distinct entities, but inventions of the mind.
This move has had many implications for our lives, none more constant and enthralling than this chance to know the mountains.
Last Wednesday evening at Beth Evergreen Rich Levine asked what is the sound of a pure soul. Kate gave an answer that resonated with the group and has stayed with me: “When I would walk into the nursery and other sounds were muted, I could hear the susurration of infant’s breathing and moving. That’s pure potential.” Her comment was heartfelt and it moved everyone. It’s beautiful to me to see Kate opening herself up like this.
The framework of mussar, this was an evening, once a month potluck session, provides the opportunity for deep exploration of our inner world, its motivations and its possibilities. It does this through a long tradition of written helps, guides like Mesillat Yesharim, that limn a subtle and very nuanced spiritual psychology gathered from Jewish practice and scripture. Mussar’s purpose is to develop ethical behavior (musar=ethics) through learning middots, or character traits.
I feel lucky that Kate and I have found this together. Mussar gives us a common language for deep matters and a community of other folks who have the same yearnings, the same desire to probe their inner world and grow in their character.
