“There are only two days in the year that nothing can be done. One is called Yesterday and the other is called Tomorrow. Today is the right day to Love, Believe, Do and mostly Live.” ~ His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama
Source: Nothing Can Be Done 2 Days Out of the Year
This is a wonderful reminder of the essential nature of mindfulness in our lives. To be present, is to accept that we live in one moment at a time. In each ensuing moment, our life is created.
I finished reading a book by Jacques Rancière and am reading another by Emmanuel Levinas. Their philosophic writings suggest a preexisting ethical condition exists in when encountering another person. There is an empathic quality calling humans to walk in the other’s shoes as we encounter each other.
In my dissertation, I argue a teacher’s subjectivity forms in placing themselves in relationship with others, students and topics. Rancière argued humans take part in life, and are not merely external observers at a spectacle. Teaching is relational and is one where the relating with students and topics is the matter that matters.
W.S. Merwin’s poem proposes even when separated humans can wait on the other person’s side of things. In mindfulness and attentiveness, humans place themselves in the shoes of the other. Today, as I read, talked to my advisor, and chatted with Kathy a question came to mind. What has happened in the world today that we struggle with the ethical and empathic living that might heal the world we live in?
If we are separated I will
try to wait for you
on your side of things
your side of the wall and the water
and of the light moving at its own speed
even on leaves that we have seen
I will wait on one side
while a side is there
Some days, I sit and watch, listen, and sense the wonders of the world around me. Within these wonders, things and people invite me to remember things embedded within nature and in my life. The extraordinary emerges from the ordinary. Often, I overlook what and who is important in my life, who give and gave me unconditional support.
Natasha Trethewey shared this wonderful poem about the unobserved industry that goes on around me. It is not just busy industry. I focus on a particular calling in life. I find my voice in the work. For humans, there is a multiplicity in the work and the way it shapes life. Similar to the woodpecker, it seems I look for the gifts I overlook. There is more embedded in life than just hanging laundry and other obvious tasks I undertake. When I attend and am present, the barely perceptible–the liminal– is visible, heard, and fully sensed.
All day I’ve listened to the industry
of a single woodpecker, worrying the catalpa tree
just outside my window. Hard at his task,
his body is a hinge, a door knocker
to the cluttered house of memory in which
I can almost see my mother’s face.
She is here, beyond the tree,
its slender pods and heart-shaped leaves,
hanging wet sheets on the line–each one
a thin white screen between between us. So insistent
is this woodpecker, I’m sure he must be
looking for something else–not simply
the beetles and grubs inside, but some other gift
the tree might hold. All day he’s been at work,
tireless, making the green hearts flutter.
The way the world and the universe are in order is something we take for granted in daily life. We overlook the ordinary, but there is importance layered in the ordinary. It is here we find the extraordinary. We come and go and, when we pay attention, so much is revealed about the world and the way we help create it.
Billy Collins shared a common, everyday way to examine the patterns of life, the Dharma of the world we live with all the time by examining a dog and the way she lives life without worrying about life.
The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her dog house
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.
Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance—
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Ghandi with his staff and his holy diapers?
Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.
If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.
I commented on How to Land about Eco Ethics. The underlying principle is deep ecology which shifts us from an environmental anthropocentric and views all living beings as having inherent worth and not merely instrumental value. Deep ecology understand a complex interdependence between all living beings and allows that to guide decision-making. We are part of the Earth and not holding dominion over it in this sense. We can make similar decisions about harvesting, mining, and building as we do but use numerous perspectives in doing so.
James Hatley wrote, The Uncanny Goodness of Being Edible to Bears. He referred to hunters, outdoors people, and survivors of bear attacks. People, who are deep ecologists, revere Nature and understand the risks of entering wilderness. Their view is Nature and what it holds makes us more human and complete, as we are one with Nature and not separate.
I wrote this poem as one way to better understand the concept myself.
Am I more than the sum of parts?
More than just a body, a mind, a spirit?
If so, what role might the bee play?
The one who manufactured honey?
The one I so enjoyed with bread today.
Is he or she part of me?
Or, is there even more to it than that?
What about the clover?
The water and other things used in delectable manufacture?
Can I now take that Bee’s perspective?
Ever so fleetingly,
Does it make a difference?
Might it be a lesson in being more human?
Letting the Bee be part of me?
I wrote about paradox in Warrior’s Quest and part of the motivating force was this poem. It takes real courage to accept paradox and hold the tension. The hole in the whole completes the whole.
Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn’t
is where it’s useful.
Hollowed out,
clay makes the pot.
Where the pot’s not
is where it’s useful.
Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn’t
there’s room for you.
So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn’t.
Lao Tzu
Annie Dillard is a wonderful writer whose prose has a great poetic quality. Her words ask me to find quiet and solitude provided on the Sabbath. In that quiet, I go deeper and seek peace among the turmoil.
“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if we ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop them further over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the test, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. It is given. It is not learned.”
Take care and see you Monday.
I made a promise coming into the school year. I would keep my head, do only what I can, and not flounder. I won’t let things get me down. I find solace in writing, nature, with Kathy, and in reading poetry. Some days I just open a book and find a poem which speaks to me in such a clear voice I think the poet stands or sits across from me sharing their words. That is what happened with this poem by Vaclav Havel.
It is I who must begin,
Once I begin, once I try—
here and now,
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying that things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and
ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
—to live in harmony
with the “voice of Being,” as I
understand it within myself
—as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
nor the most important one
to have set out upon the road.
Whether all is really lost
or not depends entirely on
whether or not I am lost.
I struggled today. Starbucks’ Internet was intermittent and my day was cleaved in half with an appointment. I reflected on what my blogging and there has been a substantial change in the tone and voice of the blogger. When I began, I was doing it for all the wrong reasons and was driven from ego. Transformation is about my self and not about what goes on outside me.
I influence the world and as Gandhi wisely said, “Be the change you want to see in the world” is important.
Change
Occupies an idle mind.
Denies, oppresses
Another self.
Transform
Inner terrain.
Who is this self?
What life does this self live?
Mature
Through life.
Define
the self who lives this life.
Emerge
from chrysalis each day.
Present
A thoughtful gift
Transform my self.
Reveal through selfless acts
Flourish beyond rhetoric
Beyond fad.
Journey with others
Appreciate
Valorize.
I think this is a thought-provoking question. It is possible conversation, like community, is in the midst of being redefined, but we should take care and retain the intimacy each brings into our lives. I felt a kinship as I read this posting. Kathy and I, after almost 40 years, try to find time for each other. We always made time, and continue to do so, for each other. It is what makes a relationship healthy.
This recent think-piece in The New York Times argues that we have:
At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates…
We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.
One of the rituals my husband and I enjoy is my driving him to the commuter train station in the morning. It’s only about 10 minutes door…
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Teacher as Transformer 