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Educating the Heart

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Many people today are thinking and writing about the way technology is changing our brain. At the same time, there is an explosion of research about the brain itself. One of the things that is becoming clear and clearer, at least for me, as I attempt to follow the understanding about the brain research that is coming out, is how connected the brain is to the heart. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson, for example, explains the interaction between the heart and brain, and how emotions create hormones that effect our body’s well- being. When people learn to regulate their stress hormones, says Davidson, they experience better physical health, and have less working memory performance problems. Learning calm yourself, can help you improve your emotional well-being and cognition. The Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education is one place that is working toward “integration of the mind, body, and spirit.” Their motto is “Educate the Heart”.  People can learn to embody and practice social and emotional skills to help make the world a more compassionate place, as well as one that is fair or that runs efficiently.

One of the books I’m currently reading, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, the Conflict Between Word and Image, by Leonard Shlain, explores the thought-provoking theory that the written alphabet dramatically changed the brain, and that as written literacy increased, so did people’s intolerance for those different from themselves. Laws and civic institutions can benefit us in many ways, but as Shlain describes, they can also “become the instrument of tyranny.” Writing is a wonderful thing. It allows us to carry knowledge from one generation to the next, it gives us the opportunity to explore our thoughts, and express our imagination.  On the other hand, Shlain describes the enormous value of the irrational, “Archaic people considered irrationality coequal with reason…Laughter is irrational. Faith is irrational. Watching a sunset is an irrational act. There is no demonstrable “purpose” involved. The appreciation  of both art and beauty are irrational: logic cannot completely explain why a work of art is compelling; the experience is essentially ineffable…All acts of altruism are inherently irrational. Yet who among us would want to eliminate…(these) from our lives? Like irrationality itself, they contribute to the sumptuous, verrigated texture of the human condition.”

I would say that there is a kind of rationality to altruistic acts in that they bind our hearts to others and create a sense of belonging and community, nevertheless, I believe Shlain has a point. Not everything in our life has to be measured in rational terms, and in fact, those things most meaningful to us in our lives–our relationships to others–are not something we want to go around measuring constantly. It could kill the relationship.

Yesterday, as I was walking across the street, I looked up into the sky and noticed there were what appeared to be thousands of dragonflies swarming the air. Above them enormous clouds billowed up in an Everest height. Dark underneath and whiter on top, the clouds opened in the center into wide vistas and canyons of space. Birds–kites, pigeons, crows, swirled in the sea of sky. The world seemed to be virtually swimming in tremendous pool of energy and life. This kind of experience is rare and raw beauty, given as a gift–unmeasurable, and nearly indescribable. I had merely to look up and absorb it, as it lifted me out of myself into a moment of awe, connecting me with the vastness of the universe. Author, Fredrich Beuchner, tells how “ . . some moment happens in your life that you say yes right up to the roots of your hair, that makes it worth having been born just to have happen, laughing with somebody till the tears run down your cheeks, waking up to the first snow, being in bed with somebody you love… whether you thank God for such a moment or thank your lucky stars, it is a moment that is trying to open up your whole life. If you turn your back on such a moment and hurry along to business as usual, it may lose you the ball game. If you throw your arms around such a moment and hug it like crazy, it may save your soul.”

Moments of awe make me feel alive. Everything contains wonder, can become mysterious again–bigger, unknowable, if we have eyes to see it, if we allow ourselves to enter that place of being in our minds? The wide sky and swirling birds, your child sleeping in the room next door, your parents’ love touching you now–reaching from all the way back through the years of your childhood, your breath rhythmically persisting without ever having to be directed– all of these, and a thousand other experiences are examples tinged with wonder where we can allow ourselves to let go into an awareness of life’s great gift.

Encounters with death, too, can be moments to bring us back into an awareness of wonder. Steve Jobs explains in this short video, that knowing he was going to die was the best tool he encountered to enable him to realize what is truly important in life. “All external expectations–pride, fear of embarrassment and failure fall away in the face of death. There is no reason not to follow your heart,” says Jobs.

Dragonflies in many parts of the world are considered a symbol of change whose source is based in a deeper understanding and insight of life that comes from looking beyond the surface. All those dragonflies with their eyes that see 360 degrees swirling beneath the open window of sky, maybe it’s the universe’s way of saying, “Open your heart. Walk out a bit further into the unknown, the irrational, and dare to learn more of what it is you are here on earth for. Buechner in Now and Then, a Memoir of Vocation, says, “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.” This week, I want to consciously take moments in my day to look for wonder, and to open my heart to the world.

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Gratitude Helps You!

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Did you know that gratitude makes it easier for you to:

  • Celebrate the present moment.
  • Block negative emotions like envy, resentment, regret and depression.
  • Not be bothered by negative experiences–makes you more stress-resilient and gives people perspective.
  • Gratitude helps you see your connectedness to others and generally feel better?

The list above is from Robert Emmons: What Good is Gratitude.

When you appreciate your life, LIFE APPRECIATES–gets bigger! See what Tal Ben has to say about this!

Keep your gratitude lists going and keep the good feelings flowing. Life is there for you to live. LIVE BIG!

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Self-Reliance and Interdependence

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For many people the work place is a competitive arena where people carve out their territories as a way to gain, define, and hold power. American culture encourages people to be self-reliant, to do things on their own. We want to be able to think for ourselves and know we can make our way on the earth. We also want to be able to let other people do things for themselves so they can learn the strengths and abilities they wouldn’t know they had without putting in the effort to try things on their own. American poet, Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass tells us,
“Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere – on water and land.”

Last week, I experienced something very different, however. Two people I worked with asked me to help them out. I did so, and afterwards, they found success, but I also realized how happy it made me to know that I had something I could give them. Their dependence on me to meet their need affirmed my sense of purpose, made me feel loved, happy, and deepened my sense of belonging. Often, we tend to think that asking people for something might burden them–we should be able to do things on our own. Maybe it’s also a good thing to recognize that asking someone to help us can allow that person to give something he or she might be hoping someone recognized they had and wanted to share.

There is a lot of loneliness in this world. One in 10 people in Britain are lonely, says Vanessa Barford in her BBC article, “Is Modern Life Making Us Lonely?”   Loneliness can be triggered by big life changes or ill health. We lose our old ways of living, and the things that grounded us are removed. We fall out of balance and feel lost, alone. If one in 10 people in the UK feel lonely, it’s a good bet that they are not the only country this way.  Jane Dutton, business and psychology professor at the University of Michigan has been researching organizations that nurture inspiration and productivity, and “found that employees who’d experienced compassion at work saw themselves, their co-workers, and the organization in a more positive light,” (Greater Good, Compassion Across Cubicles) It’s true that some people prefer to be left alone and to learn things completely by themselves and it’s good to be able to discern this. It can also be true that doing things with and for others,letting others depend on you, to learn from you, can be a wonderful gift. Looking outside of the workplace into the broader areas of life, we might find that even just our presence with someone can be a way of giving that allows a relationships roots to grow, and happiness to blossom. We don’t have enough people in this world who are there to remind us that our presence–our being with them–is as important as what we do.

Relationships require allowing ourselves to become mutually interdependent. This interdependence can allow us to find ourselves in new ways, even find new freedoms. Commitments to a job, a place, a person can be viewed as something that confines us in the sense that by choosing one thing, we can’t always choose something else. But commitments aren’t merely limitations, they are a path that shapes us and carries us into a deeper understanding of ourselves–as any practice we take up can do. If you find that you’ve committed yourself to a job in a big city that makes it difficult for you to go out of doors, for example, it can be an opportunity to renew yourself in other ways. You can learn to draw, make things out of clay, or take up an instrument. You can find your way to new things and can continue to grow. We can change and open new doors, explore new rooms of being together. Mary Oliver, in her poem, “The Summer Day”, says,
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Circumstances lean in to us in ways that will make us want to move in a new direction and find new ways of being, and we can go there in relationship with others, as well as by ourselves.

Presence

The Value of Nothing Much

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Today is one of those days when nothing much happens. Outside the sky is gray, the fan in the hallway drones, birds land on the roof momentarily and then lift off only to land on a perch a few feet away. It’s not a day to make great plans or accomplish anything. It’s a day to sleep in, draw, read, bake bread, swim, go for a walk–a day to savor sinking down into the humus of being and rest in the arms of living where there are no set schedules, no timelines to meet. It is a day to remember that being human, the gift of being alive is an unmeasurable essence, important beyond the list of what you want to accomplish.

Recently, several friends and acquaintances have had to make emergency trips to the doctor. One person experienced a heart attack and will need to change his profession. Another friend, after her bout in the emergency room told me that she realized that you can do all the right things for your health–eat right, exercise, rest, but in the end you aren’t necessarily in control of  your life. Things can happen. Taking a down day, a sabbath day one day in the week, where you do no work, is a way of purposefully letting go of the world that tells us that we need to have control over all aspects of our lives, and that meaning is found in what we produce and consume, that we must always be “on” and on top of all we do. Purposefully setting time aside where we chose not work is challenging in a world where we are encouraged to be forever task and goal oriented, where we are threatened with the idea that if we don’t keep climbing  we won’t stay up or catch up with the rest of the world. There won’t be enough of whatever it is we want left for us. We won’t be “good enough” any more. To stop working is to begin to live in a different kind of time where time is not money, but a gift. We can begin to see the world around us and become more aware of nature and its gifts, given not through our own efforts or because we deserve it, but freely available to enjoy–a kind of grace to open our eyes to.

We can point to practical reasons to step away from work. For example, recent brain research teaches us that taking time out from a project we are working on allows the creative mind to work at a different level. Aha moments often occur during these times when we’re not intentionally working on a project. Since I’m between creative projects right now, some serious downtime could help me think of how to start my next project. Rest also helps the brain to restore itself.  Scientific American’s article, “New Hypothesis Explains Why We Sleep” suggests that when we sleep, the synapses in our brains weaken, possibly so that they won’t become “oversaturated with daily experience and from consuming too much energy.” This, scientists believe, helps to aid memory.  Rest strengthens us! More important than downtime being useful for the creative mind and memory, however, is the fact that we need rest so we can reconnect with our bodies and remember the importance of being.

As pointed out in this interesting video on materialism from the Center for a New American Dream, our culture has an imbalance in looking to materialism and consumerism as a way of trying to meet what are essentially emotional needs. A more satisfying way of living might be to take time to build community and meet with friends–to build deeper connections through conversation so that we know in our hearts that we truly matter to others. Consumerism and materialism breeds a sense of lack. Time with friends breeds a sense of community and belonging, allowing us to feel more content.  We can also take quiet time for ourselves that enables us to restore our inner selves so we have a self who can continue to give ourselves to others and to our work with an open heart.

If taking time out of the week for rest and restoration calls out to you, know you’re not alone. The Sabbath Manifesto, is a group that encourages others to unplug and get out and enjoy life by getting outside, meeting with others to eat, light a candle, and find ways to give back. The Abbey of the Arts, is an online community directed by Christine Valters Paintner, whose aim is” to nurture contemplative values, compassion and creativity in every day life.” One of those values is to “commit to finding moments each day for silence and solitude, to make space for another voice to be heard, and to resist a culture of noise and constant stimulation.”  When you think about it, it’s a radical thing to do.  Learning to let go and to regularly step inside the place of being can be one of the great life gifts you give yourself.  It is a rare and wonderful gift indeed. Savor it.

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You’re So Good to Me

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Recently, my friend from grad school, Lisa, visited me. I’d not seen her in quite a few years, and we had just finished eating dinner one evening when she first arrived. I took up Lisa’s dinner plate and offered her the mug of tea when she said, “You’re so good to me.” The words took me aback because the gesture was a simple one, and yet there she was naming how she not only noticed it, but took it in personally and felt grateful for it. The words made me feel light. I asked her about where she came up with such a phrase, as I’d never heard it before. She explained that she had picked up the phrase from a former teacher she used to work with, and she began using the phrase herself. The idea of the phrase stuck with me as I had hearing her say them to me felt so refreshing. They made me feel somehow lighter.

Later, Lisa and I went downtown to the bookstore. I pulled in to the parking garage, but wasn’t quite close enough to grab the ticket from the machine. Since it was the first day the garage was charging for parking, a parking lot attendant was present at the entrance to the garage.  She saw my dilemma, pulled the ticket from the booth and handed it to me. It was a thoughtful gesture, and I decided I would use Lisa’s phrase, “You’re so good to me,” and when I did, her whole expression lit up and she came alive. She was no longer simply a parking attendant doing a job, she was a person with a meaningful presence. Her reaction brought home to me the powerful effect gratitude can have on a person’s day, and how I had the power to bring happiness to someone in a very simple yet meaningful way. Now I’m consciously looking for ways I can use this phrase on a regular basis to bring an awareness of other people’s goodness more into their lives–how through noticing people’s work or thoughtfulness in simple ways, I can acknowledge the benefit of other people’s presence in my life.

The short film, Validation, by writer/director/composer – Kurt Kuenne, illustrates in such a delightful way the powerful effect we can have on others lives simply by noticing who they are and naming the positive qualities we  observe. It’s worth watching. A parking attendant decides to not simply validate people’s parking stub, but to validate the person him or herself. People come from everywhere just to get validated. The world is hungry for it, the filmmaker shows us. The film helps viewers to understand that by noticing the good in others and calling it to their attention, we can change lives.

This summer I attended the mindfulness training course for educators at UC Berkeley through the Greater Good, and learned some excellent tips for thanking people with power: tell what the person specifically did, tell them how much what they did impacted your day or how it impacted your day, acknowledge the effort the person took. The quality of the thank you is important.

Research done by the people at the Greater Good, shows that those who keep a gratitude journal once a week feel happier than those who don’t. It seems like it might be rather obvious that tuning in to things that we can honestly feel gratitude can help make us feel more whole and happy, but just as Benedictine monk, David Steindl-Rast points out in Jill Suttie’s article, “Is Gratitude the Path to a Better World?” just because we know that we need to eat to survive, doesn’t mean that the study of nutrition can’t give us further insights into what is good for us. Steindl-Rast points out that “Grateful living brings in place of greed: sharing; in place of oppression: respect; in place of violence: peace. Who does not long for a world of sharing, mutual respect, and peace?”

I encourage you to go out and notice what people are doing in the world that you might have previously overlooked, but that you can be grateful for. Purposely look for situations where you can use the phrase, “You’re so good to me,” and thank the person for what he or she is doing. Try it out! I’d love to hear what kind of reactions you get. If you’re like me,  you’ll feel a bit happier yourself as well.

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A Wider Perspective

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It has been a summer of work–building a framed structure with bird netting to protect the berries, laying a stone walkway, planting, cleaning, sweeping, hanging doors, moping, waxing, cutting glass for cabinets, hanging lights, organizing workers to lay tile, build a stone wall, make cabinets and more. Through it all, my husband and I have watched the grape vines at the entrance to our gate grow foot by foot, first reaching to the top of the trellis, then growing one by one down the crossbars overhead, the vibrant green leaves a symbol of the beauty and fullness of our lives here under the rich blue skies and the perfumed air of the Santa Cruz mountains. Then, last night my husband got up to get a middle of the night snack when he noticed the leaves were missing on the grape vines. He came to tell me, and I, too, got up and went outside to examine the damage. The vines were, indeed, bare. The deer, perhaps the very same beautiful deer I wrote about a couple of postings ago who mysteriously stared at us at us for so long from the edge of the forest, had indiscriminately eaten what we had watered every morning, and that had brought so much joy to our hearts.

“It’s deermagedon,” my husband explained this morning, as we further perused the damage, discovering the deer had eaten the strawberry plants, and the kale as well. “We work without rest, and then what we work so hard for is gone over night. It makes me wonder what we are doing,” he said. I thought about those who lost their loved ones in the tsunamis in Sri Lanka and in Japan, the Chinese girls who died in the recent plane crash at the San Francisco airport. We’ve all lost things precious to us, but to lose a family member in such a way would be truly tragic. Most of our losses in life aren’t as enormous or as difficult as what happens when a natural disaster strikes or a terrible accident, but still the losses must be confronted, and perhaps the way we deal with smaller losses gives us practice for how we will deal with me difficult losses when the arrive. We’re all bound to face serious losses in our lives when we lose the ones we love to death, and all will die one day. To protect our garden we had built an eight foot deer fence, not exactly the walled garden of Luso, Portugal, filled with exotic trees and hermitages, but peaceful, and precious to us, though we don’t yet have a latch on the gate. Sadly, the deer discovered our vulnerability and boldly ate our plants.

So what did we do after “deermagedon”–how did we deal with the loss? After an hour of sleeplessness, and a bit of rest, we woke and assessed the damage in the daylight, and noted that the vine stems were still present. Also, not all the leaves had been eaten. The ones that were too high for the deer to reach, and the ones the deer had to bend to low to eat still remained. The vine wouldn’t die. The base of the strawberry plants were still there, along with some of the strawberries, and about a third of the leaves. The kale was pretty much done for, but at least we had had the opportunity to eat some of the kale the previous night. We watered the plants and sent them some words of encouragement, told the story to a few friends and family members. Then, we got back to work, though we still took notice of the plants through the day.

Does loss cause us to change direction in what we are doing? That probably depends on the severity of the loss, and though we were upset by what the deer had done and how something we treasure was lost, we knew we could recover. Rick Hanson suggests in his blog post, “Drop the Case” that when someone has wronged you, a good thing to do is get a wider perspective on the situation so that you can “drop your case” rather than letting it get its hooks in to you. The deer was just being a deer. We can make it less inviting for it to come in our yard once we get a latch made.

Loss can also be a matter of perspective. When you think about it, we’re losing something all the time as our lives change and morph. When we leave one city, one state, or one country for another, we lose things–the people we know from that locale are left behind, as are the geographic uniquenesses of that particular location–the plants, animals, landmarks, the food specialties from the area. The history of the place we move to is different. If we are choosing to move from the area, losing these things has a different feeling than if we are forced to leave, however. If our choosing to leave something, someone or some place behind, helps us to deal with loss more constructively, then perhaps a key to dealing with loss is to change our perspective.

Years ago, I read Henri Nouwen’s book, With Open Hands, where he talked about how you can’t receive anything new until you let go of what you are holding on to so tightly. “You hold fast to what is familiar, even if you aren’t proud of it. You find yourself saying: “That’s just how it is with me. I would like it to be different, but it can’t be now. That’s just the way it is and this is the way I’ll have to leave it.” Once you talk like that, you’ve already given up believing that your life might be otherwise. You’ve already let the hope for a new life float by. Since you wouldn’t dare to put a question mark after a bit of your own experience with all its attachments, you have wrapped yourself up in the destiny of facts. You feel it is safer to cling to a sorry past than to trust in a new future. So you fill your hands with small, clammy coins which you don’t want to surrender.” (beliefnet) Nouwen clearly describes the consequence of trying to hold on to what we have lost or are afraid of losing–we end up with something small and clammy, when we could be opening ourselves to a new adventure, an new way of being that is reaching out to us, ready to embrace us.

Carrie Newcomer’s lovely song, “Leaves Don’t Drop” shares a wonderful insight about trees. “Leaves don’t drop, they just let go,” Newcomer sings, illustrating an interesting paradox that in letting go–in dying, we make space for something new to grow. “To die and live is life’s refrain,” describes Newcomer. In death is life. This is an ancient truth that many religions describe. Jewish scriptures in Ecclesiastes tell us that “For everything there is a season, a time to be born and a time to die.” Christians trust the paradox found in Jesus’s death: through it life is found.” In Chinese belief, the yin yang symbol teaches us that in life is the seed of death, and in death the seed of life. They are interrelated and part of each other.

Losing the leaves off the plants in the yard was disheartening, but in the bigger picture, not so bad. I’m made aware, again, that I share my space here with deer, birds, insects, and gophers. Getting along with everyone’s needs is challenging, and yes, I could even say an adventure.

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Celebration

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Celebrate with me!  Saudade, my first chapbook of poetry is out and available for reading. If you have been meaning to purchase your copy but haven’t gotten around to it yet, you can order your copy either through Finishing Line Press, or through Amazon.

I hope all of you who ordered Saudade are enjoying reading it and find poems that speak to your lives. I welcome you to post a review of Saudade on both Finishing Line Press‘s site and on Amazon. If you enjoy what you are reading, pass on the good news!

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Experiencing Awe and Wonder

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A couple of evenings ago, my husband and are were sitting in the hot tub in a clearing under the redwoods outside our back door talking, when out of the edge of the trees came a deer. She stood there, ears perked, staring straight at us. Immediately, we went silent, our eyes fixed on the deer, her form subtly outlined somewhere between visible and invisible. We have seen this deer maybe four times in the past week or so. She comes up into the clearing, pauses, looks at us, waits for her fawn to follow, or sends it on ahead, then bounds along the edge of the trees a bit, perhaps pausing to nibble at a branch or two, before disappearing down the embankment and deeper into the trees. When the deer appeared again last night however, she didn’t move on. She continued to look at us for what was probably 15 minutes while we sat very still observing her observing us. Occasionally she moved, looking to the sides of the clearing, and later lowering her head slightly, as if in a bow. Not knowing what this meant, we lowered our heads slight too, bowing in return. Later that night,  I read that deer lower their heads down as if to eat if it senses danger, and then jerk it back up again abruptly when in danger, hoping the predator will give away its position. We weren’t predators, though, so had nothing to give away.

As we continued staring in silence at each other, I couldn’t help but think of Annie Dillard’s essay, “Living Like Weasels” where Dillard describes looking into the weasel’s eyes and she is “stunned into stillness,” and this is how we, too, felt. Dillard describes how her eyes were locked with the weasel’s. In our case, it was too dark to see the deer’s eyes, but this kind of precise vision of each other wasn’t necessary. Our presence mesmerized each other. I don’t know what the deer was thinking, if she was simply curious about us, afraid, or some other thing. What is the mind of a deer like, I can’t understand. She was free to move on, but didn’t. Dillard explains how her encounter with the weasel helped her realize how she would like to learn how to live totally present in the act of living as a weasel does.  “I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you,” she explains. Such encounters in nature as these throw us out of our humdrum expectations about life or about what will happen next, and enable us to become suddenly aware of our connection to the universe of being. We are in awe, aware of our senses, fully present in the moment, conscious we are alive. This, for me, is one of the important reasons I am alive–to experience the wonder of being!

Moments of awe are rare, which makes me curious if awe requires certain conditions for it to appear. Is awe rare because we are so concerned with our schedules and chores that we don’t notice world around us as alive with the potential to fill us with wonder? Is it because we aren’t often out in wild places where we might be more likely to experience the presence of nature’s raw or intense moments? Art, music, and experiences in nature can all be possible ways awe emerges. Though most of us don’t often do we have the opportunity to witness the kind of art that stops us short because of its power to make us see ourselves or life so precisely, maybe we want to do more to cultivate an open awareness of life where awe can surface naturally. Could we, for example, practice noticing things on a particular walk we take every day from and to a particular location and begin to ask questions about what is there?

A couple of examples of things in nature that have the potential to evoke awe are found as video links in Vicki Zakraewski article, “How Awe Can Help Students Develop Purpose”. Interestingly, Dacher Keltner from the Greater Good, has found in his recent research that experiences of awe have the potential to feel less self-centered and act more empathetically. Empathy could go a long way in helping people gain the insight into each other’s worlds in ways that could help us live together more cooperatively and meaningfully.

Unrelated to power and control, wonder and awe require a stance toward the world that is open and receptive. The deer I observed in hushed scintillated silence in my backyard turned away with a snort when she heard a rustle in the bushes, but those moments in her presence made me aware of the wonder it is to simply be alive. The Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “Mankind will not perish for want of information; but for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.”

gardening

Coming Down to Earth

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This morning, my husband and I lifted 7,000 pounds of rock from their wire containers and hauled them over to the ditch in about an hour and a half, where they will soon be made into a retaining wall. Yesterday we lifted 3,500 pounds of rock for the same purpose. Needless to say, I’m tired today. Nevertheless, it feels very good to be working with my hands, my feet on the earth, and working hard. It’s a contrast to my life during the school year where I meet with students, spend time commenting on student work, and go to various meetings. I love the contrast, the balance of those two ways of being. It’s so satisfying to look out across the yard as I did this evening, and say, I made those stone steps leading down to the house! It gives me joy to be able to see the physical results of my labor, and it was labor, too, as the earth here is close to being sand stone and required my using a hatchet to chop into it so that I could carve a space for the stones to fit. When I am standing on the earth outside my door in the summer, or sitting on it, fingers in the soil planting, when I look up at the sky and smell the redwood tree incense, I feel so full and alive, complete. Connected. Real. As Wendell Berry said, “One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener’s own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.”

Mornings, I water the berries and herbs, the lemon tree and grapes. Since arriving in California this summer, the grape vine has grown about a foot, and the lemon put on numerous new leaves. My husband and I have worked to protect the berries by making a walk in wood-framed room hung with bird netting, which we are calling our berry palace. The juice of a boysenberry or a blueberry picked from our own vines and bushes exploding with tart sweetness in our mouths is a wonderful gift. Working on the land for our food, even the preparation of the land for food that we will later grow, helps me to see more clearly my place in the world, and how I am connected to all that is around me. I water the plants, and amazingly enough, they grow and become what they were meant to be. The diversity of life growing all around me seems a miracle.  Again, Wendell Berry says, “And the real name of our connection to this everywhere different and differently named earth is “work.” When you work with the earth, when you learn about it and from it, and take care of it, you love it. Work, it seems, can be a path toward love, can be the way to come to know the meaning of the earth’s gifts from the inside.

Slowly, as I spend more time working outside, I’m becoming more aware of the intricacy and mystery of life all continuing on silently around me. Professor Suzanne Simard in British Columbia studies forest ecosystem and explains how the “mother trees” exchange of nutrients underground through intricate webs of communication through nutrients. Her work is fascinating. By continuing to listen to the land, we can grow to live better with it. Working on the land, even in small ways, is one way to grow toward understanding what it needs.

As a teacher, my life allows me to contribute to other’s in a way that enriches, and that opens exploration and opportunities for students. A teacher’s life is a good life because of this. As I am outdoors working these past few weeks, I feel a growing awareness of building a new life here in America, a life I will come home to someday. I don’t know what that life will be yet, or when it will come to pass, but I hope it is a life that will go on giving back to the world, and that will allow me to grow more connected to the earth, to listen to its mysteries, and to be able to share my discoveries with others.

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The Subtle Beauty of Creating A Good Line

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When I lived in the desert several years back, I recall seeing the beautiful lines nature drew on the desert floor’s red sand crystals using slender grass strands, as the breeze bent them back and forth in the wind. Beneath the grass in wonderful dark silhouetted lines rested shadows. The desert contains a wide variety of fantastic textures and lines. National Geographic has captured some of these here, and Danielle Venton in her Wired article, “Photographers Capture Mysterious, Beautiful Patterns in the Sand” says that people don’t even understand the physics involved that creates such beautiful lines in the sand. 

Using my husband’s recent gift of a new set of drawing pens and lessons from Arthur L. Guptill’s book, Rendering in Pen and Ink, I’m learning a new appreciation for the beauty of lines. What the sand, wind and sun do effortlessly, is a challenge to create with pen and ink. Drawing a simple curve and then duplicating it so the line goes exactly in the direction you want it to, for example, is not easy. You need to take your time and go slowly, deliberately forming lines like warm-up scales for use later in drawing. Even then, creating a beautiful line takes practice, lots of it.

Malcom Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master something. If this is an accurate analysis of what it takes to get really good at a skill, then I’ve got about 9,995 hours to go.  BBC’s David Bradley says in his article, “Why Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour Rule is Wrong” that the research Gladwell based his research on actually suggests that the 10,00 hours are just a rule of thumb, though, not the “tipping point” at which you are a virtuoso. The amount of time depends on the particular skill you are practicing. “Learning and gaining experience are gradual processes; skills evolve slowly, with practice. And there is a vast range of time periods over which different individuals reach their own peak of proficiency – their concert level, you might say – in whatever field.” Ericson, the person’s study at Berlin’s Academy of Music on which Gladwell’s statement is based, suggests that what counts further is that “not just any old practice counts towards the 10,000-hour average. It has to be deliberate, dedicated time spent focusing on improvement.”

I don’t know how many hours French artist Simon Beck has put in to create his fantastic geometric figures in the snow, but the lines he draws using snow shoes are truly a thing of beauty and take hours at a time to create. The perseverance his work takes is inspiring.

Creating a good line is also important to poetry as well, and over the last few years, this is something that I’ve been trying to understand how to get better at. I examined lines from different poets, from William Stafford to Denise Levertov, John Ciardi, Louis Simpson, Mary Oliver, Naomi Shihab Nye, Lucile Clifton, Nick Samaras, Li Young Lee and a number of others, trying to define what gives a line its energy and strength. Sometimes I see it clearly, and sometimes it’s a mystery. It might take 10,000 hours to get it right. Seems like many things that hold great beauty take a lot of hours to learn. These kinds of skills are subtle. You can’t just create a rule to never break a line after using an article or after a conjunction, for example, because after making such a generalization, you’ll find a really good poem from an excellent writer that breaks the rule. That’s not to say that a good poet can’t or doesn’t sometimes make a weak line break choice, but I think that the writers I’ve mentioned are experienced, and their line break choices deliberate. People have different ideas of beauty, and different ideas about line breaks in poetry. The goal for me is to experiment and practice with increased deliberate focus while writing. What makes a line so powerful? What makes it feel right? Maybe it is an individual thing, but in any thing a person creates, practicing the skill over and over, and attuning oneself to observe closely what others are doing that stirs your own soul, and then to listening from the inside to what your own work suggests is a good start down a path that leads to better understanding. If I can learn to listen better to others’ work as well as to my own, if I can learn to listen more deeply to the world around me, I think I might gain greater insight into many things in life, not just how to draw or write a good line of poetry, but how to live. All these things are part of each other.