onehouse

Overheard in Costco

Jotted down in my notebook:

- (enthusiastic)Yeah but mom I collect those! (pause) Yeah but mom I collect everything!

- (factual) You have to admit, that's a pretty good price for that.

- (puzzled) I don't know how fish keep their eyes open underwater...

- (tired, over a filled cart) Okay. That's birthdays. Now Christmas.

- (teenage monotone) O my God. I have to tell you about my dream. It was so scary.

Moral Values

I listened to Chittister talk about Obedience and Action on my walk today. It was my second time through. This was one of my favorite parts. I love that Speaking of Faith provides transcripts. (emphasis mine)

Sister Chittister: ... Somebody said to me in another radio interview, "Now, Sister Joan," the interviewer said, "you know, the last election was decided on moral values." I said, "Wait a minute. Just hold a minute. Hold it. The last election was decided on some moral values." The place of religion right now is to remember the rest of the moral values.  

Ms. Tippett: What are those for you?  

Sister Chittister: Well, one of them has something to do with whether or not you can take a baby to an emergency room in this country, the richest country in the world, and have that baby treated or not. We have 10 million babies, as you and I speak, without health insurance in this country. It's wrong. It's immoral. And the whole notion that private sexual morality is the definition of religious life in this country is a cute ploy. It gets our minds off of the sins that are really killing the greatest number of people. I'm not saying that those are also not important values. Of course they are. They define our character as a people and our ability to live within our relationships. But there's a big difference between being pro-life and pro-birth. It's easy to get a baby born. What I want to know is once that baby is born will you feed it and house it and educate it? All I see is that every day we reduce those figures in our national budget more and more. That's the morality and the religion that I'm talking about. And until we care about those things, we cannot, on either spectrum, left or right, call ourselves a religious people, I don't think.  

   

The cosmos under the sink.

In last week's Mad Men, Don Draper and his 1960's family end their picnic by shaking out their blanket and letting napkins, cups, and paper plates blow away in the wind. My brother once saw a family near Dubai do the same thing - leaving Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets, plastic bags and pop cans to rot in the landscape. When I was near a wadi in the desert near Dubai, I looked down into a gorge to see bits of plastic and food containers of all kinds. It reminded me of a walk that took me away from a resort in Cancun. At the line where the resort ended the sand became full of garbage while the water held old diapers, oil  cans, and other packaging.

At the very beginning of trying to pay attention to the ordinary, I noticed my kitchen garbage can. It said a lot about my eating habits and about the way I treated not only my body but the world around me. All of these things change slowly. Paying more attention to recycling helped me to change my eating habits. It seems like the worse the food is for me, the more packaging it has around it. I suppose Twinkies or bottles of pop (soda for some of you) defy this rule with those thin layers of plastic around "food" that will survive a nuclear holocaust.

Years later, I do more composting (thanks to my super duper shiny compost pail from a you-know-who-you-are friend) and there is less and less that belongs to instant food in the garbage can. My eating habits have changed but I also see food and its packaging in a larger context than just filling my stomach for the moment.

One of the things that makes me most happy is the ability to recycle plastic packaging. There is so much of it - around strawberries, eggs, house tools, light bulbs - just about everything. I used to save bags of plastic for a friend who lived in a small town outside of Calgary because, for some reason, the big city would only take plastic bags. In 2009, Calgary will institute curbside recycling and we will finally be able to find a use for all those petroleum byproducts - plastic cups, shampoo bottles, and yogurt containers that everyone has been happily adding to the landfills. I'm saving as much plastic as I can and my storage shed is filled with bags and bags of plastic rated 1-7 until the curbside recycling kicks in. It is astonishing to look at and makes me wonder once again, little by little, how can I cut down the use of petroleum byproducts if I pay attention to this.

I often think of that famous verse from the Bible held up at football games and rallies and given to me to memorize as a little child. It talks about loving the world and in a religion bent on over-personalizing everything, teachers often asked us to replace "world" with our own names. Later, I found out that the word "world" could actually mean "cosmos" - all of creation. I guess paying attention to my garbage can is one way of noticing the beloved cosmos beneath my kitchen sink.

The hills are alive...

This is where I chose to do hill training today. I used google's distance measurement tool and tried to find a 400 metre hill a little closer to home and then proceeded to walk up and down it six times -one orange mark to the other. I stayed off the sidewalk and walked on the grass, past the tennis courts where people wondered who the crazy lady was, past the ever expanding cemetery where no one wondered anything, and up to the corner of the dog park where everyone was too busy running around and barking to care about me at all.

Concrete sidewalks are the worst things for your bones. I usually walk that path past the baseball diamond and on into Confederation Park which is off the lower left corner of this photo. It has nice asphalt walking paths which are much easier on the body and I don't have to watch for or listen to traffic. The little pink mark is a set of trees that I enjoy. There are many, many trees in the park ahead but these ones always catch my eye and I've always meant to photograph or draw them.

Today I listened to a Tapestry podcast with Laurence Freeman on Christian Meditation. I liked the part where he quotes John Cassian saying that the two dangers of the spiritual life are "the lethal sleep" and "the pernicious peace" referring to the temptation to create a foggy alternate reality or escape - the three scotch feeling I believe he called it - and to only be peaceful when separated from the world and its needs. Those who do not use their practices as escape will experience conversion and transformation that keeps them doing real inner and outer work.  A good warning.

Podcast of the Day

I've been listening to podcasts during my training walks. My short walks take around 45-55 minutes and longer ones can take up to 3 hours. Yesterday I listened to Sustaining Meaning: An Ojibwe Story - a beautiful rolling journey with author David Treuer.

Oneof my favorite parts:

Tippett: The world's 6 billion people speak between 6,000 and 7,000 languages. But experts predict that as many as 90 percent of those languages may cease to be in use by the end of this century. Endangered languages are just one ripple effect of ever more accessible means of travel, communication, and entertainment. But there is a growing field of awareness that something more than speech, more than words, perishes when a language dies. "When we lose a language," says David Harrison of the Living Tongues Institute in Oregon, "we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown, and the everyday."

Treuer also mentions how the move towards one language has led to more conflict and less understanding. It is important to have difference, to enhance the ability to see the world through various lenses is a healthy thing.

We should think of this every time someone or crowds of someones tries to get us to use just one word or one phrase - and it is usually their preferred word or phrase -  to describe unending mysteries. This would be like thinking (and then preaching) that the dissected frog on your Grade 8 biology table is actually the whole of the universe.

More Armstrong

City and Arts Lectures

Some of the shots on this video are a little odd, lingering on the host while Armstrong speaks, but a good 32 minutes nonetheless. It is such a relief to hear such an intelligent woman speak and offer you the chance to agree or disagree and especially to move onto further exploration. I am growing weary of certain kinds of women's writing on the net. It falls into very few categories that don't really appeal to me. This can't be the only representation of the feminine experience out there.

There is a broader scope - women of science, religion, arts, justice - who speak from their perspective with a broad range and elevate the human condition with their chosen explorations. I'm going to remind myself of these places over the next few days because I've been discouraged of late and I think I'm paying attention to the wrong places.

The Centre of a Seed

This is one of my favorite songs right now. You can only find a 30 second clip on the band's website so this live clip (with backup by Sarah Harmer as on the CD) will have to do. Someone called this whole album "zen americana" which works for me.  Lyrics below.

I Became Awake
Great Lake Swimmers
CD: Ongiara

I became awake,
From a very dark place, a patchwork of fear, of poorly conceived ideas.
With a blister of water, the mark of working hands,
Ready to catch, or cut.
The senses aligned, the animal urgency, and voices picked up,
Flowing over the static, late, quiet.

I became awake.
Fingers are open, eyes they are open, the firing if images, an orchestra of scribbles.
The guts of an engine, the veins of a leaf, light onto paper, exposed.
A filament in a bulb, up above or in the ground.
Together we are magic, together we are dreaming, together we reach enlessly,
The centre of a seed, so full of possibilities.

I became awake.
I thought I was sleeping, but I was only forming a structure with no ceiling,
With words like a runway, a cloud of a person drifting away.
I was heavy, but now I am light.
I was heavy, but now I am light

Overheard: at the coffee shop

Four twenty-somethings at a nearby table:

"So Good Friday is supposed to be the day he rose again?"
"I think so..."
"And then Sunday, like today, he dies or something right?"
"I guess so..."

The Wisdom of Tenderness: Jean Vanier

I finally got around to listening to Jean Vanier's The Wisdom of Tenderness at Speaking of Faith. There is the radio version and a video here and as usual Vanier's soft spoken wisdom. I like what he has to say at the very end of the address about Mother Teresa's "lack of faith". This a lovely long drink of water.

Obedience and Action

Last night while searching through dozens and dozens of illustrator websites, I listened to a rebroadcast with Joan Chittister called Obedience and Action from Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett. I can't help it. I always loving listening to Joan - such a great combination of enthusiasm balanced with common sense.

I like how she tells us, after 52 years, that the monastic life can be wonderful, meaningful, productive, and happy. I find this in contrast to the sometimes dreary opinion of contemplative life. I have heard some of the deepest and heartiest laughs at retreats and teaching events.

And listening to this reminds me, as Anthony told me, that Benedictine is pronounced with an "inn" at the end not an "een". Benedict-inn. Benedict-inn. Benedict-inn.