onehouse

Pause.

It's hot up here today and I have small throbbing in my temples from thinking about all the things I should be getting into order. I am also mulling what "exploring the contemplative life" now means to me. It used to have much more of a basis in christian traditions but that seems to be fading into the background in a way that is difficult to articulate. I have found that when a thing needs to be expressed, it comes in the proper time - perhaps through someone else's writing, an experience, or a conversation. I'll continue to wait for that time.

I've decided to listen, to really pay attention and to work on being mindful this summer. For a few days a week, I am looking after my Tiny Niece and it is an excellent opportunity to pay attention to very small things. I focus on a daily rhythm , on things located close to the ground - ants, tide pools, pebbles, and curious puppies - and things out the window - construction trucks, bikes, birds, and of course, more puppies. I have never noticed so many puppies in my life.

I have the advantage of not being a parent - someone who needs to get phone calls and shopping and errands done while looking after a child - so it can be a bit easier for me to focus. It's been a relief after too much time spent multi-tasking which is an illusion of efficiency that never became real.

My books are all in Calgary so I've been reading what is under my nose and to truly be mindful, I must take care of a few boxes of paper that followed me onto the island. Little by little I unbuild my nest instead of "petit a petit l'oiseau fait son nid". Maybe it's the same thing.

So yes...

I am still here and so glad that I didn't attempt to do the last few months online. There can be a temptation to think that any thought needs to be a public thought or a written one or even an overly processed one but sometimes when you are overly analytical you end up with the equivalent of Velveeta cheese - a dyed orange lump of something that should be good food but really is another entity altogether. I thought I might restart Onehouse on February 1 but didn't and so I reboot now, in the middle of changing locations both physically - a move off the prairies to the west coast - and mentally - a more direct change from the influences of my faith background to many somethings more attuned to listening and paying attention.

There will be a bit, only a tiny bit, of this later. I sent this to a friend the other day. I liked it as sometimes we think we know many things about one another from these few electric bits on the page. We know in part...

February 5, 1860

Coming home last night in the twilight, I recognized a neighbor a dozen rods off by his walk or carriage, though it was so dark that I could not see a single feature of his person. Indeed, his person was all covered up excepting his face and hands, and I could not possibly have distinguished these at this distance from another man's. Nor was it owing to any peculiarity in his dress, for I should have known him though he had had on a perfectly new suit. It was because the man within the clothes moved them in a peculiar manner that I knew him thus at once at a distance and in the twilight. He made a certain figure in any clothes he might wear, and moved in it in a peculiar manner. Indeed, we have a very intimate knowledge of one another; we see through thick and thin; spirit meets spirit. A man hangs out innumerable signs by which we may know him.

From Thoreau's Journal. This blog is good for your daily bit of Thoreau.

Simpsons. Giggle.

Over ten years ago, I interviewed a church leader who lowered his voice and quietly closed his office door. I thought I was about to hear some ultra-secret pastor-ish code but instead I heard, "Listen. I'm not like the other guys okay? I wear jeans and flip flops to work. I wear t-shirts to meetings. Sometimes...sometimes I don't shave." The man was entirely sincere but I heard Simpsons voices in my head and had to bite my lower lip and pretend to take notes to keep from giggling.

I've been reading media reports commenting on jean clad, t-shirt wearing folks like this for over a decade now. The writer always comments on how DIFFERENT church is because the pastor is wearing jeans. How avant garde that gathering is because they have a smoke machine or electric guitars. And there are chairs. Actual chairs not pews.

I am wondering if religious reporters can be so uninformed that jeans and guitars get their attention. More likely, I think, these reports are done by insiders who think this stuff impresses the outsiders who imagine the organ and suited preacher of their youth. (Decades into declining church attendance, the now outsiders like myself may have left partly because this tedious version of mainstream pop culture is liked eating pre-chewed food...pre-chewed fast food...pre-chewed bad fast food.)

This weekend's reporting and blogging on a faith forum in the U.S. continues the trend. (Let's put aside the fact that I do not understand what two presidential candidates were doing inside of a church defending and proclaiming themselves. Separation of what and what? ) I read all the same stock phrases. I think I can make a list of them, string them together and have a thousand word piece. Unfortunately this is part of the same writing that makes every evangelical leader think they must write a book. Evangelical writing is so poor that it doesn't take much to think "I could do that too. I'll write a book on cultural lessons. As a pastor. I may include movies." And then imagining interviews in jeans and t-shirts and book covers with distressed type. "It will blow their minds!"

Simpsons. Giggle.

Stay away from my ant hill.

The summer meanders by and I am having some problem sensing where the time is going. A trip here and there, time with family, too little work, some training (walking), and some illness.

I can see the yellow coming in behind the green of the trees already. We had a late spring and it looks like it will be an early fall. Tick, tick, tick.

On one of my long training walks I listened to an Ideas podcast on the illusion of time. It affirms to me that the human search to try and justify one's existence has little meaning in time and space. There is a way of being and moving in the whole of cosmos that can allow us to decrease in a healthy way instead of constantly scrapping to be heard, to be justified, to be known beyond our ordinary existence.

Tonight I am continuing a long battle with two ant hills. One has been in the front right side of the garden since I moved in over a dozen years ago. I realize that most ants are helpful to a garden ecosystem but these ones have destroyed plant after plant until I am left with a dry little patch that fills with quack grass and weeds. I have tried all the regular organic baits of borax and sugar, boiling water (I know...so mean), drying powders, organic repellents of citrus matter and coffee grinds but nothing seems to work.

I read online that you can take ants from one hill and add them to the ants of another hill. Over time, the ants battle each other to the death leaving beautifully empty ant hills. So I am trying that and feeling a bit like Darth Vader watching the ensuing battles and waiting for the death of two civilizations.

I wonder in our desperate need to have our egos and existence justified if we are separated into ant hills only seeing our little piece of earth. If any other species, any different way of thinking comes our way, rather than co-exist and survive we will battle to the end and leave the earth scorched so nothing else can grow there. Somewhere Darth Vader is laughing.

Random

I'm back in the office and cleaning for the next round of guests while getting a few things done. Here are a few things I've found:

- some notes from a meeting with Alan Roxburgh in February 2001:

"The worst thing you can do in a time of discontinuous change is take people out of their chaos"
" You cannot create strange attractors - conversation, imagination, intuition etc."
(notes mine - but you can create a welcoming space for all these things...)

- with great respect to Eugene Peterson, I'm getting rid of all my versions of The Message that Navpress insisted on sending me for years and years. I still have other books by Peterson but I never took to the tone and pace of The Message and probably never will. I did an interview with Peterson a long time ago...I should dig that up and put a few notes in...

- I was a bit slow adding The Big Picture to my blog feeds due to my ongoing news from/pictures of/art of/stories about America fatigue. But there's a good balance here of images from around the world.

- I don't know...I find the 10 things, 12 things of this site to be more like the never ending North American emphasis on personal development only with a side of zen. I had to work with a lot of these kinds of tip lists in my previous tradition. It feels like gears and machinery to me.

- more brilliant deconstructing by Sarah Haskins on the latest Target Women.

Structures

I've been thinking on this quote for a while:

When I left the convent, I did not know how to live without these structures. I felt the whole tenure of my life had changed and yet I was still the same. I was still basically a nun but in secular clothes and I needed to train myself to become a secular as rigourously as I had trained myself to become a nun.

Karen Armstrong

What to do for May?

Well, that whole theme-based picture blogging thing seemed to knock me out of the blank page so I think I'll try something else this month.

Now I can't pretend to understand the whole picture but I have noticed something in the blogging world that bugs me. What is it, you ask? It's a type of blogging that's done by what could be a type of woman. The blogging that capitalizes things like Love, Joy and Grace - a kind of hipster version of 1950's femininity where everything is just a little bit precious, and personal revelations induce "weeping at the keyboard." (Seriously, there's a whole lot of weeping at keyboards going on.)

Coming from my background, dismissed and often maligned because of my gender, I understand the need for women to gather in spaces, conferences and collectives to help their voices be heard in what was once and still can be a white-male dominated blogging world. All good and well.

But there's writing being done by women that's funny, that wrestles with ideas, and that talks about things like nutrition or architecture or their lives without having every second breath taken away by some kind of personal or self-development revelation. That other writing just doesn't work for me. Frankly, in those environments I often feel like I've been thrown back into the neighborhood or church ladies meeting. Oh sure, martinis are being drunk rather than tea and there's a little more profanity, but the tone drives me out of the room.

So for the next month, I'd like to see if I can be mindful of how other women choose to meet and greet the world in ways that don't try to get me to "weep at my keyboard" or use Capital Letters. And I'll probably do it while drinking a nice cup of tea. Or maybe a martini. Or nine.

Words and action.

I had a nice long read of this today. You can also watch the video on the site. I am fond of some one who is taking the art of oratory seriously, who is not giving up on speech or preach with some misplaced notion that "no one wants that anymore". No one wants bad anything anymore - lazy, "relevant", infotainment speeches that are whipped together to show off the speaker's coolness.

And I am fond of confronting foolish arguments and silly narrow speech head on. On the net, we often avoid bringing this up. We don't want the controversy or the hits from the nutty crowd, those who love to scream "heretic" and then write long "I'm offended" blog posts when someone calls them foolish for tossing such language around.

I do agree with Obama here - if we don't confront it, if we just say "peace, peace" the assumption is that all who have faith agree  with the angry few. They are loudest and the meanest and are certain that they and they alone are God's megaphone to the world. When we always walk away without challenging this sheer stupidity, we let stupidity be all that is visible. Yes, our actions speak. Along with words. Not exclusive to words but words and action together.

Confront a fool. Walk away from a fool. There is a time for each but the teeter totter must go up and down and we must sometimes fling ourselves into the air and let our views be known.

Resources for contemplatives. And mutts. And cool kids.

I have been stewing, mulling, hamster-wheelin ' over the nature of contemplative practices for those who have limited resources.  Does anyone has some examples of ways to be involved in contemplative pursuits for the working poor? Especially the working poor who are isolated, who exist somewhere without communities.

Everything I see online (which requires a computer and an online connection and, at the very least, access to a library) requires some form of monetary investment. Retreats need money to operate and when they can offer a low cost alternative, there are transportation requirements. Many spiritual directors offer low or no-fee consultations but it can be quite difficult to find someone within walking distance and it is often embarrassing to ask someone for low fee services.

It is difficult to learn about these things outside of community resources. And there are quite a few of us - little mutts barking up all kinds of trees.

I also was wondering if instead of starting another blog maybe it would be good to turn the short lived Listening Post into a kind of resource sharing centre and by that I mean real resources - DVD's, music, books, that could be tossed around the country by strangers - a way of practicing hospitality remotely but in the real. Any one interested in talking about this and putting hands to it? Email me if you are. Even if there are a couple of us, it could be cool. And hey, you know Onehouse is all about pressuring you to be cool. C'mon....all the cool kids are doin' it.

Kids these days...

Nearly a month of being sick off and on has really put some pressure on a few deadlines that I am facing. Long days and and long evenings but good sleep and not bad food and a few breaks for a drink or time away from the computer. I've learned a few things over the years.

I've been thinking about that phrase this past week. It's come up in a few conversations - about how kids process the internet or advertising. Or how "kids these days"  don't want to read. That one really got to me. These reductionist phrases that then develop programs and policies. It's not very thoughtful - a general scan over your living room at your XBox lovin' nephew and you're into the "kids these days" mode.

It works the other way too. I noticed it when I was in my twenties, the panting desire for the "youth are our future" programs in institutions of all kinds with their "top 40 under 40" lists and their references to "drum kits" and "eeeeelectric guitars".

I wonder why we do things like this. I guess it is comforting to look into a gloomy future, shake our heads, and say the old folks screwed it up or the young kids will save us if only they would quit im-ing one another. It is one of the silliest ways of processing where good news will appear when the good news is erupting everywhere. Seeds of all kinds push through the smallest patches of soil.

I know kids who read enormous amounts. They thoughtfully and intentionally avoid certain products for well thought out reasons usually involving social justice. I know actively engaged "young people" in the arts and reaaaaallly old people who aren't waiting for the world to end but are learning, questioning and growing. It's where you look  and it doesn't take that long. You turn around and there's another old or young or whatever plant, lifting its head toward the sky.