Sunday Song from Santiago, Spain by the Notre Dame Glee Club

The Notre Dame Glee Club did  some travelling in Spain.  Here they are singing an "impromptu concert in front of the Cathedral in Santiago, Spain (June 2013)." I'm not familiar with the song, supposedly a "traditional Galician folk song," but I am happy to see them standing in one of my favorite spots in Spain.  The glee club walked part of the camino de Santiago, from O Cerbreiro to Santiago.  Read more about it here.

Working with the Mind

I'll be leaving soon for a four-day-long meditation retreat.  No reading, talking, blogging, or emailing.  I'm both excited and nervous.  It's hard to explain why I'm doing such a thing.   Here Pema Chodron offers one explanation.

Plainsong by Kent Haruf

Plainsong—the unisonous vocal music used in the Christian church from the earliest time, a simple or unadorned melody or air.

The definition above is an introductory page to the novel Plainsong.   The words “simple or unadorned” describe the style of this novel as it jumps back and forth between a fairly large number of characters.  Events and complications are described, sometimes returned to, sometimes not.  The story starts off slowly and after finishing, it’s hard to summarize.  But I recommend it, mainly because I appreciated the hard work, likability, and goodwill of so many of the characters.  Tom Guthrie copes with his wife’s withdrawal.  Bobby and Ike, ages nine and ten, observe their mother’s withdrawal and their stern father’s preoccupation with work and relationships.  Victoria Roubideaux faces an unplanned pregnancy.  Maggie Jones cares for an ailing and confused father, and the two McPheron brothers open their doors and welcome an unexpected expansion of their small family.  Finishing the novel, I was inspired by the low-key goodness of so many of the characters.  And though I recommend the book, I felt for awhile that something was missing.  Writing about the story helped me appreciate it more and feel the conclusion was complete or complete enough.  The rest of these reflections contain spoilers and are for those who have read the book.

"All You Fascists Bound to Lose" or History Through Music

This Woody Guthrie song cracks me up and makes me sad at the same time.  This song by Leadbelly is of a similar nature:  "We're Gonna Tear Hitler Down."  And just because I'm reminded of Leadbelly, here's one of his most famous, "Goodnight Irene."

Change Happens

Exodus International, a Christian group that offered therapy to "cure" homosexuality reported this week they were ending this work.   Exodus President Alan Chambers offered this explanation and apology. 

Exodus is an institution in the conservative Christian world, but we’ve ceased to be a living, breathing organism.  For quite some time we’ve been imprisoned in a worldview that’s neither honoring toward our fellow human beings, nor biblical. From a Judeo-Christian perspective, gay, straight or otherwise, we’re all prodigal sons and daughters. Exodus International is the prodigal’s older brother, trying to impose its will on God’s promises, and make judgments on who’s worthy of His Kingdom. God is calling us to be the Father – to welcome everyone, to love unhindered. 

There were a lot of stories about this yesterday, but I read it first at The Dish by Andrew Sullivan who himself is openly gay.  I was moved by the words of both Chambers and Sullivan.  Later in the day, I was moved again when Facebook Joel Barrett friend posted this:

Equanimity

Sylvia Boorstein’s book Happiness Is an Inside Job uses Buddhist principles as a way to avoid suffering and achieve happiness.  She recommends equanimity as an emotional state that allows us to respond appropriately to life's ups, downs, and neutrals.  Equanimity she says, “is the capacity of the mind to hold a clear view of whatever is happening, both externally and internally, as well as the ability of the mind to accommodate passion without losing its balance.  It’s the mind that sees clearly, that meets experience with cordial interest.”  Below is her example of meeting an everyday experience with goodwill. 

The overnight flight from San Francisco to Paris takes more than ten hours, and in the time between midnight and morning, the hours seem longer and the space between the seats in the coach section seems shorter.  When I get up to stretch, and perhaps walk down an aisle, I see men and women, old and young, large and small, all unknown to me, some traveling with young children, all trying to figure out how to be comfortable.  I see them wrapped up in airplane blankets, scrunched up into whatever position of repose they can organize for themselves, leaning on each other if they are traveling together or tying not to lean on each other if they aren’t.  Often a man or a woman is patrolling the aisle across from me, holding an infant against his or her chest and moving in the rocking gait that often soothes a baby’s distress.  I feel a pleasant intimacy with them.  I am also trying to stay comfortable.   I’m not frightened for them, or for me, because I’m relaxed about flying ad I assume we will land successfully, but I wish them well.  I enjoy the feeling of my own good-heartedness.  In fact, in that moment of mental hand-holding, all those people look a bit more familiar than ordinary strangers.  That moment of easy, impartial, benevolent connection—meta—buoys up my mind.  I feel better as I sit back down in my seat.

This is a typical Boorstein story showing how the ordinary is beautiful.

Parenting Problems--Another Video

It's the fairy wings that made me laugh so much at this scene.

One can only be as intimate with another as one is with oneself.
- Robert Chodo Campbell + Koshin Paley Ellison 

 Tricycle: the Buddhist Review posted the quotation above on their Facebook page.  I can’t decide what I think of it.  I don’t even know for sure how intimate I am with myself.  Or others.

Honoring Our Country with Song

The "Stars Spangled Banner has been in the news lately after eleven-year-old Sebastien De La Cruz sang the   song at one of the NBA final games in San Antonio last week.

I'm not a big fan of the National Anthem, but De La Cruz's age and charm make up for the fact that it's hard to sing and has a limited perspective.

Would "This Land Is Your Land" make a better anthem?  Hard to imagine it at ball games.

My fantasy is for "This Is My Song"  to be the anthem for every country--a world anthem I guess.  (Here's another version with stained class windows in the background.)

Separated from Nothing?

A little over a year ago, I traveled to Ireland with my brother, two of my sisters, and one of my nieces.  My ancestors appear to be 100% Irish (as far as the Irish are 100% Irish), and I liked knowing that, but it wasn’t a big deal, and I wasn’t dying to go back to the old country.  But something surprising happened during that trip.  On a visceral level, I began to feel my connection to Ireland and its history.  

I practice meditation at home and with a group.  A few mornings ago, before the group began to meditate, our teacher said, “Our great delusion is that we see ourselves as separate from other people, from plants, from the universe where we live.”  On one level, I don’t know what that means, and I can’t imagine what it’s like to feel connected to the entire universe.  But things happen and all of a sudden, I know I’m part of something more than myself.  I wrote in an earlier post about watching cardinals at my bird feeder and feeling connected to their mysterious lives.  In Ireland, I was surprised by a feeling of unity with my ancestors and to all the Irish who suffered economically and politically.

Some Are Born Lucky

Sam Harris explains why no one is completely self-made. 

And lurking at the bottom of this morass [that taxes are a form of theft and the right kind of market will solve all our problems] one finds flagrantly irrational ideas about the human condition. Many of my critics pretend that they have been entirely self-made. They seem to feel responsible for their intellectual gifts, for their freedom from injury and disease, and for the fact that they were born at a specific moment in history. Many appear to have absolutely no awareness of how lucky one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, to not have cerebral palsy, or to not have been bankrupted in middle age by the mortal illness of a spouse.

How would you react?

A friend posted a link on Facebook to a video on racial profiling.  I couldn't figure out how to post it here, but there's the link.  I was shocked at the reactions of others and shocked at my own.  There's a part of me that thinks this video can't be true, but I can't think of a real argument to say it isn't.  If you have time (4:41 minutes), give it a look.  I'd like your opinion.

Guns: Location, Location, Location

In the June 5 edition of Newsweek, Christopher Dicky explains one of the complications that makes talking about gun regulation so difficult.  Rural dwellers and urban dwellers see the issue differently and may actually have different needs.  In rural areas with low numbers of police officers, guns may provide additional safety.  In urban areas, it's different. 

The embattled streets of the city and the gunland of the heartland are wildly different places, and the failure to understand that difference, and overcome it, is the great American tragedy of our time. 

Mostly, the discussions about firearms are framed as a question of constitutional rights for gun owners. But what about the gun owners in Tyquran’s world [high crime urban areas]? Are the rights of the 223 people shot to death in New York City last year, or the 435 in Chicago, or the 414 in Los Angeles being protected by the right to bear arms? In big cities across the country, gun control doesn’t hurt gun owners, other gun owners do, especially if they are people of color. Recent Pew surveys show that 82 percent of the nation’s gun owners are white, and most are outside metropolitan areas, but 72 percent of gun-homicide victims are black or Hispanic, and live—and die—in the cities. 

This article is packed with interesting information and presents a slightly different perspective to the gun issue.  The conclusion of the article talks a lot about New York city crime reduction.

Where it's @

John Brownlee writes (more than I want to know) about the @ symbol.  Interestingly, he does not give it a name.  He talks about @ or the @ symbol.  However, some cultures have colorful names for the ubiquitous @. 

In Danish, the symbol is known as an “elephant’s trunk a”; the French call it an escargot. It’s a streudel in German, a monkey’s tail in Dutch, and a rose in Istanbul. In Italian, it’s named after a huge amphora of wine, a liquid some Italian bookkeepers have been known to show a fondness for.

Música para el domingo

It's a cute song and maybe a spanish lesson:  Viene de Mi.

Knowing You Already Have Your Ticket

Many of my friends have heard me mention “my favorite blogger” Ta-Nehisi Coates. I've mentioned him here as well. Yesterday he posted an article that illustrates why I appreciate him so much.  He has recently criticized President Obama for lecturing and shaming predominantly black audiences when he speaks to them.  One of his readers asked Coates what kinds of things he would say if he were to address a group of high school students.  Here are some excerpts from Coates’ answer. 

[W]eirdly enough, I often do get asked to speak to predominantly black schools. …What I generally try to do is avoid messages about "hard work" and "homework," not because I think those things are unimportant, but because I think they put the cart before the horse. The two words I try to use with them are "excitement" and "entrepreneurial." I try to get them to think of education not as something that pleases their teachers, but as a ticket out into a world so grand and stunning that it defies their imagination. 

I'se been a-climbin' on...

After reading The Warmth of Other Suns, which, from time to time, quotes the poetry of Langston Hughes, I wanted to review his well-known works and see what else he wrote.  The introduction to The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes says he was controversial, loved by many and accused of doggerel by others.  Below is what I consider one of his touching and familiar poems.  Below it is a poem less touching, less familiar, and less lasting.

Mother to Son

Well, son, I’ll tell you:

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

It’s had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor—

Bare.

But all the time

I’se been a-climbin’ on,

And reachin’ landin’s,

And turnin’ corners,

And sometimes goin’ in the dark

Where there ain’t been no light.

So boy, don’t you turn back.

Don’t you set down on the steps

’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.

Don’t you fall now—

For I’se still goin’, honey,

I’se still climbin’,

And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

Don't let this stop you from reading my blog!

Jared Keller sorts through information about what seems to be an ever-growing need to be connected to electronic media.  

As Stafford explains, our love for the Internet is rooted in the fact that human beings, in Ghose’s words, “compulsively seek unpredictable payoffs.” The cognitive-reward structure offered by services like email and social media are similar to those of a casino slot machine: “Most of it is junk, but every so often, you hit the jackpot.” This is a symptom of low-risk/high-reward activities like lotteries in general. As researchers found in a 2001 article in International Gambling Studies, systems that offer a low-cost chance of winning a very large prize are more likely to attract repetitive participation and, in turn, stimulate excessive (and potentially problematic) play. Although the stimuli are different (the payoff on the Internet being juicy morsels of information and entertainment rather than money), Stafford says that the immediacy and ubiquity of Internet “play”—i.e. being able to check your tweets or emails on your phone with no major transaction cost—only increases the likelihood that someone will get sucked into a continuous cycle.

"Leaving Forever"

 There is no mistaking what is going on; it is a regular exodus.  It is without head, tail, or leadership.  Its greatest factor is momentum, and this is increasing, despite amazing efforts on the part of white Southerners to stop it.  People are leaving their homes and everything about them, under cover of night, as though they were going on a day’s journey—leaving forever.  (The Cleveland Advocate, April 28, 1917) 

The Warmth of other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson is a story of the Great Migration, a period in the United States between 1915 through 1970 when six million African American people fled the oppression and lack of opportunity in the south for the suns of the northern and western states.

A Little Sunday Music

While it's still spring:  "Spring."

Mom Gets Old

Adam Gopnik explores his feeling about parental love as his son prepares to leave for college:

What I wonder about is why we love our children so asymmetrically, so entirely, knowing that the very best we can hope for is that they will feel about us as we feel about our own parents: that slightly aggrieved mixture of affection, pity, tolerance and forgiveness, with a final soupcon - if we live long enough - of sorrow for our falling away, stumbling and shattered, from the vigor that once was ours.