Friday, November 15, 2024

Ralph Waldo Emerson: The pace of Nature


You can't push the river, as the saying goes. 
and - we live in a world which rewards speed and willpower over living in attunement with our deeper selves and nature, which we are a part of. we are taught to push and get things done, with too little regard for the consequences. instead of tuning in. i think that's why many of us are here. to slow down, become still, tune in, ask, let go of resistance, act with wisdom, and surrender... 




Monday, November 11, 2024

Oliver Sacks on despair and the meaning of life, Toni Morrison on our task in troubled times, the science of tears and the art of crying

The Marginalian by Maria Popova

Oliver Sacks on despair and the meaning of life, Toni Morrison on our task in troubled times, the science of tears and the art of crying
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The Marginalian

Welcome Hello Hsi Lin! This is the weekly email digest of The Marginalian by Maria Popova. If you missed Thursday's emergency edition, it is here; if you missed last week's regular edition — the personal and political power of empaths, the relationship between democracy and creativity, the mesmerizing beauty of Earth's oldest life-forms — you can catch up right here. And if my labor of love enriches your life in any way, please consider supporting it with a donation — for eighteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know.

Oliver Sacks on Despair and the Meaning of Life

Meaning is not something we find — it is something we make, and the puzzle pieces are often the fragments of our shattered hopes and dreams. "There is no love of life without despair of life," Albert Camus wrote between two World Wars. The transmutation of despair into love is what we call meaning. It is an active, searching process — a creative act. Paradoxically, we make meaning most readily, most urgently, in times of confusion and despair, when life as we know it has ceased to make sense and we must derive for ourselves not only what makes it livable but what makes it worth living. Those are clarifying times, sanctifying times, when the simulacra of meaning we have consciously and unconsciously borrowed from our culture — God and money, the family unit and perfect teeth — fall away to reveal the naked soul of being, to hone the spirit on the mortal bone.

The poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) — who thought with uncommon rigor and compassion about what it means to be human and all the different ways of being and remaining human no matter how our minds may fray — takes up this question of life's meaning in one of his magnificent collected Letters (public library).

Oliver Sacks by his partner, Bill Hayes.

In his fifty-seventh year, Sacks reached out to the philosopher Hugh S. Moorhead in response to his anthology of reflections on the meaning of life by some of the twentieth century's greatest writers and thinkers. (Three years later, LIFE magazine would plagiarize Moorhead's concept in an anthology of their own, even taking the same title.) Sacks — a self-described "sort of atheist (curious, sometimes wistful, often indifferent, never militant)" — offers his own perspective:

I envy those who are able to find meanings — above all, ultimate meanings — from cultural and religious structures. And, in this sense, to "believe" and "belong."

[…]

I do not find, for myself, that any steady sense of "meaning" can be provided by any cultural institution, or any religion, or any philosophy, or (what might be called) a dully "materialistic" Science. I am excited by a different vision of Science, which sees the emergence and making of order as the "center" of the universe.

It is in this 1990 letter that Sacks began germinating the seeds of the personal credo that would come abloom in his poignant deathbed reflection on the measure of living and the dignity of dying thirty-five years later. He tells Moorhead:

I do not (at least consciously) have a steady sense of life's meaning. I keep losing it, and having to re-achieve it, again and again. I can only re-achieve (or "remember") it when I am "inspired" by things or events or people, when I get a sense of the immense intricacy and mystery, but also the deep ordering positivity, of Nature and History.

I do not believe in, never have believed in, any "transcendental" spirit above Nature; but there is a spirit in Nature, a cosmogenic spirit, which commands my respect and love; and it is this, perhaps most deeply, which serves to "explain" life, give it "meaning."

Nine years later, in a different letter to Stephen Jay Gould, he would take issue with the idea that there are two "magisteria" — two different realms of reality, one natural and one supernatural — writing:

Talk of "parapsychology" and astrology and ghosts and spirits infuriates me, with their implication of "another," as-it-were parallel world. But when I read poetry, or listen to Mozart, or see selfless acts, I do, of course feel a "higher" domain (but one which Nature reaches up to, not separate in nature).

Art by Ariana Fields from What Love Knows by poet Aracelis Girmay

A century and a half earlier, his beloved Darwin had articulated a similar sentiment in contemplating the spirituality of nature after docking the Beagle in Chile, as had Whitman in contemplating the meaning of life in the wake of a paralytic stroke — exactly the kind of physiological and neurological disordering Sacks studied with such passion and compassion for what keeps despair at bay, what keeps life meaningful, when the mind — that meeting place of the body and the spirit — comes undone. At the heart of his letter to Moorhead is the recognition that there is something wider than thought, deeper than belief, that animates our lives:

When moods of defeat, despair, accidie and "So-what-ness" visit me (they are not infrequent!), I find a sense of hope and meaning in my patients, who do not give up despite devastating disease. If they who are so ill, so without the usual strengths and supports and hopes, if they can be affirmative — there must be something to affirm, and an inextinguishable power of affirmation within us.

I think "the meaning of life" is something we have to formulate for ourselves, we have to determine what has meaning for us… It clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

As if to remind us that the capacity for love may be the crowning achievement of consciousness, which is itself the crowning achievement of the universe, which means that we may only be here to learn how to love, he adds:

I do not think that love is "just an emotion," but that it is constitutive in our whole mental structure (and, therefore, in the development of our brains).

Complement this small fragment of Oliver Sacks's wide and wonderful Letters with Rachel Carson on the meaning of life, Loren Eiseley on its first and final truth, and Mary Shelley — having lost her mother at birth, having lost three of her own children, her only sister, and the love of her life before the end of her twenties — on what makes life worth living, then revisit Oliver Sacks (writing 30 years before ChatGPT) on consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning and his timely long-ago reflection on how to save humanity from itself.

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The Science of Tears and the Art of Crying: An Illustrated Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Deepest Humanity

"All the poems of our lives are not yet made. We hear them crying to us," Muriel Rukeyser writes in her timeless ode to the power of poetry. "Cry, heart, but never break," entreats one of my favorite children's books — which, at their best, are always philosophies for living. It may be that our tears keep our hearts from breaking by making living poems of our pain, of our confusion, of the almost unbearable beauty of being. They are our singular evolutionary inheritance — we are the only animals with lacrimal glands activated by emotion — and our richest involuntary language. They are how we signal to each other what makes us and breaks us human: that we feel life deeply, that we are moved by moving through this world, that something, something that matters enough, has punctured our illusion of control just enough to open a pinhole into the incalculable fragility that grants life its bittersweet beauty. To cry is to claim our humanity, to claim our very lives. It is an indelible part of mastering what the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm called "the art of living."

That is what Argentine visual artist Pepita Sandwich explores in The Art of Crying: The Healing Power of Tears (public library) — part memoir of a lacrimal life, part investigation of the creaturely and cultural function of tears, part manifesto for unabashed crying as a radical act of emotional intelligence.

She begins with the science of crying, taxonomizing the three kinds of tears we produce: basal tears (the lubricant that makes our vision possible), reflex tears (the body's cleansing response to irritation and foreign particles), and emotional tears (those "custodians of the heart," as she calls them, biologically unique to the human animal).

Crying, however, is an embodied process — a Rube Goldberg machine of reactions between the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the autonomic nervous system — that does not require tears: We are born without fully developed lacrimal glands and can't produce tears for the first two months of life, yet new babies dry-cry just the same to express their physiological and emotional needs.

The history of tears emanates the history of science itself, of our yearning to know what we are and what the world is, with all our misguided guesses along the way.

She details a succession of theories about why we cry — from the Galean notion that tears were "the humors of the heart," to the medieval belief that tears were a tonic that could cure infections and release souls from purgatory, to Darwin's studies of emotional expressions, which led him to believe that tears gave us an evolutionary advantage in being able to signal for help but puzzled him in their positive manifestation.
We cry when we need to be held, yes — the tears of distress, signaling a need for comfort — but we also cry at what we cannot hold — the tears of joy and awe, which Darwin himself barely held back in his encounter with the spiritual aspect of raw nature. Pepita recalls weeping before one of the world's largest waterfalls, not knowing how to hold and how else to express her overflowing joy at the transcendent spectacle.

This kind of crying betokens what Iris Murdoch so wonderfully termed "an occasion for unselfing," locating its twin springs in nature and in art. To cry before a painting, at the movies, or while listening to music is training ground for empathy. (The word empathy itself only came into popular use in the early twentieth century to describe the imaginative act of projecting oneself into a work of art in an effort to understand why art moves us.)

This is why crying may be a precious foothold on our own humanity in an age of artificial intelligence that makes the criteria for consciousness increasingly slippery. Pepita writes:

It doesn't matter how well people program robots and machines; the capacity to feel spontaneous emotion and intuitive empathy is what makes our interactions uniquely and intrinsically human.

It is not surprising, then, that tears punctuate not only the biological history of our species but the cultural history of every civilization — the ancient Egyptian myth that the tears Isis cried over her husband Osiris's death flooded the Nile; the ritual weeping of the Aztecs; the Incan belief that silver came from the tears of the Moon (and gold from the sweat of the Sun); the ancient Chinese wailing performances for mourning called ku; the Mexican folklore legend of La Llorona, the eternally weeping woman who haunts the forests and rivers at night looking for small children who have misbehaved; the Victorian tear-catcher vials known as lachrymatories.

Because every artist's art is an instrument of self-understanding and a coping mechanism for whatever haunts their interior world, Pepita's interest in the phenomenon of crying springs from the amplitude of unabashed tears in her own life. She writes of crying on the subway, crying at the museum, crying at a Halloween party, crying with her young brother upon his first heartbreak, crying while reading Patti Smith's Just Kids on the airplane taking her from her homeland to a new life in New York City, crying underwater after finishing Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking at the beach, crying "with pure love at the grocery store line."

She goes on to explore such facets of our lacrimal lives as the mystery of crying in dreams, the biological and sociological role of gender in crying, the physiological hazards of trying to suppress tears and the physiological benefits of a good cry, and how crying together strengthens human relationships.

Complement with artist Rose-Lynn Fisher's mesmerizing photomicroscopy of tears cried with different emotions (which makes a cameo in The Art of Crying as one of many celebrations of other artists' art), then savor the fascinating evolutionary history of dreaming — our other complex language for reckoning with the mystery of who and what we are.

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Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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FROM THE ARCHIVE | No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear: Toni Morrison on the Artist's Task in Troubled Times

"Only an artist can telL... what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it," James Baldwin asserted in contemplating how the artist's struggle illuminates the common human struggle. "War and chaos have plagued the world for quite a long time," wrote a forgotten defender of E.E. Cummings and the artist's duty to challenge the status quo, "but each epoch creates its own special pulse-beat for the artists to interpret." Often, the pulse-beats of chaos that feel most unsurvivable are those which artists must most urgently interpret in order for us to indeed survive.

That task of the artist as a grounding and elevating force in turbulent times is what Toni Morrison (February 18, 1931–August 5, 2019) explores in a stunning essay titled "No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear," included in the 150th anniversary issue of The Nation.

Toni Morrison (Courtesy Alfred A. Knopf)

Morrison writes:

Christmas, the day after, in 2004, following the presidential re-election of George W. Bush.

I am staring out of the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist, calls to wish me happy holidays. He asks, "How are you?" And instead of "Oh, fine — and you?", I blurt out the truth: "Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can't seem to work, to write; it's as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything more in the novel I've begun. I've never felt this way before, but the election…" I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting: "No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work — not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That's our job!"

I felt foolish the rest of the morning, especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed.

With an eye to the various brokennesses of the world, past and present, Morrison writes:

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.

Complement with Morrison on how to be your own story and George Saunders on the artist's task, then revisit JFK's spectacular speech on the artist's role in society.

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Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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IF YOU MISSED IT

Thursday, November 7, 2024

from 'Embracing Our Suffering'

So coming back to embrace ourselves, to start the process of healing, to touch the positive elements does not seem to be a difficult practice. You only need a Sangha where there are people who are doing that and who enjoy just doing that. When you come to the Meditation Hall and sit down holding your plate of food, you may do it with a lot of pleasure. Don’t think of it as a hard practice. Yes, we don’t talk during the whole meal, you sit quiet in an erect position during the whole meal. Yes, we do that. But many of us enjoy doing that. We don’t have to talk, we don’t have to think, we don’t have to do anything: we just realize complete rest during the whole meal. To be able to share a meal with a Sangha in mindfulness, not to have to do anything at all, to just enjoy every morsel of your food, touching your food deeply without any thinking, without making any project in your mind is the practice, the practice of stopping and resting.


Wednesday, November 6, 2024

After election processing: dhukka... the heart not wanting to accept what is

 dhukka: that which is hard to face

eg, 'we are so far apart politically'... 'I don't want to be with that'

But whatever that is: it is based on causes and conditions... the election results are 'lawful'...and the heart doesn't always get what it wants.  Remember to ask how are we aligned with and participating with this moment? The heart cares, the heart wants to understand its own participation, am i being skillful with what is happening now? 

[Shelly Graf spoke on Nov 6 - evening.] 

Mara and the Buddha – Embracing our Suffering | Plum Village

Mara and the Buddha – Embracing our Suffering | Plum Village

After the election, how can we accept that we didn't get what we want?
A lesson in dhukka, dukkha, transforming suffering

Wise Hope by Joan Halifax

 https://shorturl.at/LU0qk

A good part of my life has been spent relating to situations that might be deemed hopeless—as an anti-war activist, a civil rights worker, a caregiver of dying people. I have also volunteered with death row inmates, served in medical clinics in remote areas of the Himalayas—where life is hard, food is scarce, and access to health care is nil—and worked in Kathmandu with Rohingya refugees who have no status, anywhere. You might ask, why bother? Why hold out hope for ending war or injustice? Why have hope for people who are dying, or for refugees fleeing from genocide, or for solutions to climate change?

I have often been troubled by the notion of hope. But recently, in part because of the work of social critic Rebecca Solnit and her powerful book Hope in the Dark, I am opening to another view of hope—what I call wise hope.
As Buddhists, we know that ordinary hope is based in desire, wanting an outcome that could well be different from what will actually happen. Not getting what we hoped for is usually experienced as some kind of misfortune. Someone who is hopeful in this way has an expectation that always hovers in the background, the shadow of fear that one’s wishes will not be fulfilled. This ordinary hope is a subtle expression of fear and a form of suffering.
Wise hope doesn’t mean denying these realities. It means facing them.

Wise hope is not seeing things unrealistically but rather seeing things as they are, including the truth of suffering—both its existence and our capacity to transform it. It’s when we realize we don’t know what will happen that this kind of hope comes alive; in that spaciousness of uncertainty is the very space we need to act.

Too often we become paralyzed by the belief that there is nothing to hope for—that our cancer diagnosis is a one-way street with no exit, that our political situation is beyond repair, that there is no way out of our climate crisis. It becomes easy to think that nothing makes sense anymore, or that we have no power and there’s no reason to act.

I often say that there should be just two words over the door of our temple in Santa Fe: Show up! Yes, suffering is present. We cannot deny it. There are 65.3 million refugees in the world today, only eleven countries are free from conflict, and climate change is turning forests into deserts. Economic injustice is driving people into greater and greater poverty. Racism and sexism remain rampant.

But understand, wise hope doesn’t mean denying these realities. It means facing them, addressing them, and remembering what else is present, like the shifts in our values that recognize and move us to address suffering right now. “Do not find fault with the present,” says Zen Master Keizan. He invites us to see it, not flee it!

The Czech statesman Václav Havel said, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” We can’t know, but we can trust that there will be movement, there will be change. And that we will be part of it. We move forward in our day and get out the vote, or sit at the bedside of a dying patient, or teach that third grade class.

As Buddhists, we share a common aspiration to awaken from suffering; for many of us, this aspiration is not a “small self” improvement program. The bodhisattva vows at the heart of the Mahayana tradition are, if nothing else, a powerful expression of radical and wise hope—an unconditional hope that is free of desire.

Dostoyevsky said, “To live without hope is to cease to live.” His words remind us that apathy is not an enlightened path. We are called to live with possibility, knowing full well that impermanence prevails. So why not just show up?

Monday, November 4, 2024

L’amour chasse la peur

La peur chasse, l’amour et l’amour chasse la peur. ~ 


Via Jonathan Lehmann via Méditation du matin on Insight Timer



fear drives out love and love drives out fear