Tidying Up

When I first heard of this book, I thought it sounded too corny. And sometimes it is corny. But I suspect it is going to be life changing. I have read other books about getting the house in order, but this is the first book that really convinced me to get rid of my surplus belongings. I was introduced to this book at a time when I was installing carpet in my bedroom. I had taken everything out of the room, and inspired by Kondo, decided that some of it wasn't going back in. I have probably given away ten bags of clothes and miscellaneous items, and I have three bags of books and a bookcase ready to go. Most of this is from the bedroom, and it feels so spacious. I hope I have the stamina to do the whole house.

Just say her name and !!!

The morning after Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic convention, I posted the statement below on FaceBook. I thought the whole conversation that followed had much to say about how we communicate and what does and does not worked. Even the fact that I said I was awed was unclear: Was I referring to Obama or slavery?

Me: Awed by this statement from Michelle Obama last night: “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.” July 26 at 8:11am

Respondent 1: Me too. July 26 at 10:53am

Respondent 2: I agree.

Like · Reply · July 26 at 11:29am

Respondent 3: Totally inaccurate . Perhaps that's why she goes on vacation so often.

Like · Reply · 1 · July 26 at 11:56am

Back to Basics

I've been "Tidying Up" (more about that later) and found a bunch of charts like the one above. I've been using them to check off daily meditation and journal writing. I don't imagine that I'm changed for life, but it has been helpful for meeting some of my goals and enjoyable to check the boxes.

Oh Yes!!

Here's a song from today's spinning class.
And another...

It can be hard to find the right words.

What Enlightment feels like according to Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche:

The sky turns into a blue pancake and drops on our head.

I read this in Integral Mediation by Ken Wilber. Wilber found it in Journey without Goal by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

Generous Questions, Part 2

Sometimes when I watch birds in my feeder, walk along the river, or even walk through a downtown full of strangers, I feel a pleasant source of unity with creation. How suffering fits into this is a puzzle. Thinking about annoying people, on a daily level, is even more of a puzzle. I think the generous question to myself is this: What needs to happen for me to feel that peaceful connection to all when I'm aware of myself making negative judgments?

I don't want to scold myself. I just want to be mindful of negative thoughts—I want to live with the question so to speak.

Cartoon here.

No Other?

“Wherever there is an ‘other’ there is fear – that’s the individual self. If you’re identified with the larger whole, pain still happens but suffering is lessened as you’re not identified with it.” (Ken Wilber)

Generous Questions

I'm fascinated by a talk given by Krista Tippett at the annual General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Here's just a little piece where she ponders the value of a question:

...A question is a mighty form of words. Here is how I’ve learned to experience it. Questions elicit answers in their likeness. Answers mirror the questions they rise or fall to meet. It turns out it's not true what they taught us in school. There is such a thing as a bad question.

I struggled with this, but I’ve finally decided it's true. It is often true that a simple, honest question is precisely what's needed to drive to the heart of the matter. That remains as true as ever. But it is hard to meet a simplistic question with anything but a simplistic answer. It's hard, almost impossible, to transcend a combative answer, a combative question.

But I can state this positively. It is hard to resist a generous question. And we can all formulate questions that invite honesty, dignity, and revelation. There is something redemptive and life giving about asking a better question.

Here's another quality of generous questions, questions as social art and civic tools. They may not want answers, or not immediately. They might be raised in order to be pondered, dwelt on instead. The intimate and civilizational questions we are living with in our times are not going to be answered with answers we can all agree on any time soon.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke spoke of holding questions, living questions....Rilke said we should "love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

I always have a lot of question. Right now, in these trying times, I have even more. I want to work on asking myself more “generous” questions. Maybe, I'll put them in writing. And then, I shall just live with them.

Video and text of Tippett's talk is here.

Predictable Results

Yesterday, Adam Gopnik wrote this at the New Yorker website:

In light of last night’s assassinations, it is also essential to remember that the more guns there are, the greater the danger to police officers themselves. It requires no apology for unjustified police violence to point out that, in a heavily armed country, the police officer who thinks that a suspect is arhttp://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-horrific-predictable-result-of-a-widely-armed-citizenrymed is likelier to panic than when he can be fairly confident that the suspect is not. We have come to accept it as natural that ordinary police officers should be armed and ready to use lethal force at all times. They should not be. A black man with a concealed weapon should be no more liable to be killed than a white man with one. But having a nation of men carrying concealed lethal weapons pretty much guarantees that there will be lethal results, an outcome only made worse by our toxic racial history. Last night’s tragedy was also the grotesque reductio ad absurdum of the claim that it takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun. There were nothing but good guys and they had nothing but guns, and five died anyway, as helpless as the rest of us.

Read the entire article here.

Trivial and Absurd

The sign from the South Bend Brew Werks speaks for itself. The book below it needs a little introduction.  Author Thomas Thwaites spends time as a goat and writes about it, and it is reviewed by Austin Bailey in World Ark. Of the book Bailey says,

[Twaites] seems ultimately to enjoy his few days of goat life, but fails to give it much meaning. In the end, Thwaites comes off more like a stunt man looking for validation than a serious thinker in search of a vacation from the human condition.

However, Bailey goes on to say the book contains lots of “interesting factoids."

For example, did you know that jockeys used to put goats in pens with horses the night before a big race to keep the horses calm? Jockeys would sometimes steal the competition's goat to upset a horse, hence the term “get his goat.”

Some days you just stumble across goofiness and entertainment.