Walking is man’s best medicine.
-- Hippocrates
Thoughts come clearly while one walks.
-- Thomas Mann
I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.
Now shall I walk
Or shall I ride?
“Ride,” Pleasure said.
“Walk,” Joy replied.
-- W.H. Davies
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
-- Viktor E. Frankl
Ever noticed...how integrated your sense of well-being is?
When your well-being or sense of it is good, it tends to be good in most of the dimensions that include overall well-being in your life. But, when your sense of well-being is not good, you also feel that gap across many of the dimensions of well-being.
Is this news? Well, only to the degree that we participate with our well-being holistically (rather than by simply trying to address or treat things in pieces and parts, as if they were all independent things).
The most difficult things seem to create the deepest impressions in us.
It's not what you've heard or know about that matters; it's what you actually practice with your life.
If life is primarily about flow, it would do us well to be aware of what clogs us up — I'm guessing it's related to too much information and too little action.
What is more influential — narrative or story?
We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.
If you focus on results, you will never change. If you focus on change, you will get results.
-- Jack Dixon
I'm wondering...how much of our capacity to imagine the future is related to our awareness of the influence of the past on our current experience?
The theodicy question is not why God allows bad things to happen to good people, but why we abandon God in the face of suffering.
-- Ilia Delio
We often get off on the wrong question….
You have to dance with faith, otherwise it can get a little weird.
We are all trying our best AND we are all deeply committed to something that works against us.
At some point, I have to recognize that I have to take responsibility for my own health — then, I can recognize how I contribute to the health of others.
Can anything be understood without context?
Prior 3 Observations & A Question….
'Poem for the week' -- "After Striving":
I think of my father’s one-room woodshop,
how his business sign eventually blew over
beside apple trees and blueberry bushes.
At church, men would ask, Staying busy?
He hated that question, and kept adding logs
to the stove and sanding doors.
There was a time I’d stare at the grass in September
and not think about the push mower.
When work is over, I find his skin. His hips
metronome while rinsing plates like it’s joy
he’s practicing. We relearn simple math like dance,
because how long have we been striving
and what has work numbed?
-- Corrie Lynn White
From the Author:
“When my partner and I got together, the worst of the pandemic was over and we were, self-admittedly, training ourselves to let ease and joy back into our lives. Culturally, we’re encouraged to work late, live online, and pack optimal productivity into waking hours. The antidotes to this mandate are living quietly and remembering our bodies as mechanisms for pleasure and joy; like my father, who makes his living as a carpenter in an unmarked woodshop, tucked behind an old orchard.”
The sands of time absorb all greatness.
Or...
The vast majority of people have no idea where their great grandfather is even buried.
While potentially fatalistic observations, they may actually enable true greatness more than anything else.
Greatness is often times the cultural appropriation of admiration. And, therefore, it is quite temporal and evolutionary, even in retrospect. But, true greatness has a transcendent quality that ultimately supersedes the fashionability often associated with it. Bound as it often is by its times, greatness retains the better virtues of humanity and provides, therefore, the opportunity for all of us to participate in its perpetuation (whether we are especially known for that contribution or not).
Another way to put it might be that what is great about something is our ability to perpetuate it. And, this framing often creates the very tilt that is both distracting and the essence of it. We tend to think of greatness as something in the order of ability — something you do or can do or should do. It's not that this is untrue, it's just that this is more likely one of the smaller features of it. This is why focusing on ability, often is more distracting than helpful.
The higher greatness of greatness is likely closer to our participation in it (rather than our ability to be it). The difference is the locus of what makes something great. When it is primarily about us, it becomes more...about us. But, when something is truly great, it has less to do with the our part and more to do with the what is great about it.
Take love, for example. What is great about love is...love. People who love well aren't often considered "great". Such an attribution seems to fly in the face of the basic ideals about love — it isn't about the person doing it, it is about the loving itself. Love is a great thing, a transcendent thing. It takes someone to do it, and to receive it. But, it's greatness is more about it, than the people involved in it.
More things are probably like that than we realize. And, it is those things that perpetuate great things — manifested in both timeless and new ways all throughout history. We can participate in that greatness by being the personification of those things. This is what makes those things both persist and great. We, on the other hand, melt into time...even as the great things we can participate in continue.
People who try to be great are often playing in categories that don't really transcend much beyond the local time and space they occupy. Some names do rise above in the annuls of history, but it is often what they did that is the great thing about them. It is the transcendent thing they joined and perpetuated that creates the acclaim or recognition; not as much themselves, that are the essence of that greatness. Obviously, there is a blend involved — our true humanity expressed in great things. But, those who are after the celebrity of something great often fail miserably because they themselves are not the essence of what IS great about great things.
By joining the greater things of human existence, we perpetuate what is truly great about them throughout time...even as we more often are simply absorbed into the trajectory of that greatness.
In that way, perhaps, the sands of time are generous to include us.
Real leaders don’t try to create a following (not to mention maintain one by milking them) — this would more accurately be called pandering, if not worse.
I've noticed...that I have an increasing tendency towards the things I know how to do (and, if unchecked, less tendency towards things I don't).
The more you own, the more you’re owned.
It takes confidence to be irrelevant.
One surprising thing I’ve learned about…me is, I need to keep moving towards at least two things.
What is wisdom if it’s not communal?
Prior 3 Observations & A Question….
It began as a dare.
One of Bob Baker’s co-workers in the federal government challenged him to grow a beard for a year without trimming it in 2018.
“I was constantly growing a beard, then shaving it because my skin would get itchy,” said Baker, who lives in Greene County, Va. “She basically dared me not to shave it.”
Baker not only accepted his co-worker’s challenge, he decided if he was taking on a beard, he was going to do it right.
“I bought some beard shampoo, beard oil and beard balm, and by the end of the year in 2019, I had this really nice-looking beard,” he said. “It was about seven inches long — the longest one I’d ever had.”
There was one problem, though...continue here.
-- Cathy Fee
"How do you 'identify'?"
A nearly main-stream question these days. And, one that seems to both explode and contract at the same time — so many (and different kinds of) answers, too.
At some point, it seems to me, we've got to think more collectively about this question and the nature of identity itself.
Given all the 'identities' that are being used to define who we are, it is hard not to notice that so many things are being conflated, making it more and more difficult to find a constructive approach to parsing things a bit. We seem a bit lost in this regard, don't we?
So, what in the end is a true source of identity?
How much of what is going on in all our x-identity questions is related to the lack of answer to that question? It seems likely that we can't effectively answer something we aren't asking. What is identity anyway? Where does it come from? Why does it matter?
No disrespect to aliens, but sometimes I think if they were to visit and observe us, would they wonder if we believe that our identity is something that has to be completely self-identified or self authenticated? In other words, sometimes it looks like identity issues are tied up in self-actualization more than in a larger sense of the ecosystem in which we exist (do we after all, individually determine our identify?). Is this because we are trying to do more than one big thing here at the same time? Larger frameworks are imperfect, especially the ones we end up constructing. They often leave important things out. When this is exposed, though, we seem to opt for a simple categorical rejection of the whole framework, rather than allow the opportunity to ask better questions — to work harder at understanding what we are using to define things. In these rejection habits, have we left ourselves bereft of anything to use, to better think about and understand reality?
For example, why is it, anyway, that we seem to have adopted a primarily sexual framework for sorting such things out? Doesn't that seem a bit odd — to focus on just one function or dynamic of existence? Historically, would this even be the primary locus of understanding about what and who we are?
So, if we have rejected some of the more traditional ideals as a means of understanding things like identity, where does that dump us off — both baby and bathwater landing in the same puddle? Perhaps we do need to take a more honest look at what mankind has historically used to understand itself, as a whole? Otherwise, don't we end up with something that (even aliens might say) looks like a collective preoccupation with self-identification (everyone just decides for themselves)?
We are not independent isolated units, either of existence or understanding. Nothing is, in fact. The implications of this are both significant and substantial and, it would seem, they need to be re-explored and developed. If we are not alone and we are connected, what information should we use to constructively develop our sense of identity, especially as it relates to the context we are in? Maybe the answer is staring us right in the face:
In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.
-- Donald Trump, 2023 CPAC
Ever noticed...that many people who have never really suffered (been tested?) don’t have much depth?
The point isn’t that such people are bad (or less than — you know, like sufferers are better than non-sufferers) as much as that suffering often seems to create a quality in people who have suffered that allows them to engage more deeply or fully with the world.
At that time, Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.
-- Matthew 4:1
In the Scriptures, the desert serves as a mythical place—externally and internally—of spiritual testing.
The Lenten season always begins with the same Gospel of the temptation of Jesus in the desert. He has gone into the desert for forty days for his own initiation, as it were, and this is a beautiful telling of the demons we all have to face to grow up, to become mature.
The first two temptations are proceeded by the same phrase, “If you are the Son of God.” The primary temptation we all face is to doubt our Divine Identity. That’s what the evil one says to us, too: if you are a child of God. We can all think of a thousand reasons to condemn ourselves. The main temptation we have to overcome is the doubting of our identity. Once we doubt that, it’s all downhill from there. What made Jesus special, it seems, is that he never doubted he was God’s beloved son.
The first temptation is to misuse power. Maybe we could say it’s a temptation to be spectacular, to be special, to be important, to be showy. The tempter says, “Tell these stones to become bread” (Matthew 4:3). When we’re young, we all want that. We all want to stand out. We want people to notice us. We want to be something special and to do something special, but Jesus refuses to play the game.
Then a second temptation: “The devil took him to the Holy City and made him stand on the very pinnacle of the Temple” (Matthew 4:5), and tells Jesus to throw himself down. The second great temptation is to misuse religion by playing games with God. Jesus says, “I’m not going to play the religious game either.” It’s transactional religion as opposed to transformational. But what religion is about is real transformation. Changing our mind toward love, changing our heart toward community, changing our body toward living in the present moment.
The third temptation is the temptation to political power. It’s not inherently wrong. There has to be a way we can use power for good. But until we’re tested, and until we don’t need it too much, we will almost always misuse it. If we’re not tested in the ways of power, very often we end up worshiping power to have power.
What religion at its most mature level means is that there is one goal. There is one source. There is one focus. There is one meaning, and it’s outside ourselves. It’s not about making more money. It’s not about being famous. It’s not about winning. What we were given in the Gospel is an agenda in which everybody wins. We’re all equally children of God.
-- Richard Rohr
I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
-- Joseph Campbell
The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.
-- Thích Nhat Hanh
But also I say this: that light / is an invitation / to happiness, / and that happiness, / when it’s done right, / is a kind of holiness, / palpable and redemptive.
-- Mary Oliver
God bless your idealism and the hard work required, but there has to be joy too. Nothing good can be accomplished without joy. I think Emerson said that. If not, he should’ve.
-- Garrison Keillor
'Poem for the week' -- "On Joy and Sorrow":
Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.
And he answered:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.
-- Kahlil Gibran
I keep lots of notes.
Partly because I never can predict what will take hold and grow...and what won't. But often, I've been surprised in both directions — wow, this is really emerging now or wow, what was that again? Saving stuff. Stuff I see. Stuff I read. Stuff I catch myself thinking about. And, I suspect it is the possibility of surprise that keeps me doing it.
While one kind of surprise can be the startled kind, the one I'm entertaining here is more the better-than-anticipated kind.
I often feel a bit transported by this kind of surprise, in a variety of contexts. Perhaps this is why I often get bored by my own writing. Once the surprise of it is over, I'm not sure what is very compelling about it. And, being compelling is somehow at cross-purposes with what draws me forward.
Sometimes I stumble across things, like I'm discovering something. It doesn't need to be something new; just something that feels like it surprises me in some way. There is something going on for me in the relationship between discovery and surprise. For example, when good comedy works for me, it often seems to include this relationship. When the two are working me effectively, I can even move rather quickly into deep emotion (often to my surprise).
I've also noticed I can't force surprise. When I try to, it just stops. But, I can put myself in contexts where it can occur — doing things where discovering something is possible. Often this seems related to something beautiful — a song, an idea, a color, a scene, a bird, a person, an act of kindness, an expression, a turn of phrase, a laugh, a kind of strength, a freedom about someone, etc. And, it is often the surprise of such things that facilitates something joyful about it.
This reflection strikes me as both thin and deep at the same time. No particular marvel in the simple observation (so, I am a tad disappointed), but also tapping into something that is a bit of a life-long undercurrent that both energizes me and brings me some joy.
I am learning more and more to simply enjoy the surprise of discovery when it happens. For so long, I felt other things, like jealousy that I couldn't create that...whatever it was (full disclosure — I can still feel that at times now). But, mostly I simply try to enjoy it when this happens and am grateful to have simply participated in the observation of it.
As we begin a new month, plodding one step closer to the emergence of another Spring and the unfolding activity beyond it, what will happen? I'd like to be surprised, so I'm trying to keep myself in a position to be.
...making notes along the way.
I'm wondering...about how many mechanisms we build and accumulate in our lives that are primarily designed to head-off something else?
This may not necessarily be bad; in fact, it could be called learning.
But, when does it become avoidance...of things that actually needs attention?
Purpose and beauty seem even better when married.
Narratives change meaning — it seems like 'conservative' now almost fully means "against liberals" (not what it used to mean, at least exclusively).
One surprising thing I’ve learned about…love is, ultimately, I have to let others love me the way they want to love me (rather than the way I want to be loved).
What If...we are being given so much more than we know in the middle of the circumstances we are in?
One of the most valuable gifts in my life was from my mom. She taught us to never look away from pain. The lesson was simple and clear:
Don’t look away. Don’t look down.
Don’t pretend not to see hurt.
Look people in the eye.
Even when their pain is overwhelming.
And when you’re hurting and in pain, find the people who can look you in the eye.
We need to know we’re not alone—especially when we’re hurting.
Even in my fifties, I find myself wrestling with the same questions that left me confused as a kid: Why do we cause each other so much pain, and why do we turn away from hurt when the only way to the other side of struggle is through it?... It just takes so much more energy and creates so much more emotional churn than having a seat and asking hurt or uncertainty to pull up a chair….
Every single day, our feelings and experiences show up in our bodies, they’re shaped by where we come from and how we were raised, they drive how we show up, and each feeling has its own unique backstory. Understanding these emotions and experiences is our life’s work. The more we learn, the deeper we can continue to explore.
-- Brené Brown
I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
I've noticed...that I have a strained relationship with cables — I do my part and they don't do theirs.
One of my criticisms of modern American evangelical Christianity is its preoccupation with self-interest, particularly as opposed to common interest.
Even its sense of salvation seems to be primarily private (personal).
But, this is in contrast to nearly the whole Biblical narrative of the larger community of faith it is interested in...that God is interested in and actively working toward.
Just because you’re used to it, doesn’t make it right.
Whataboutism is not a good way to set or reinforce a standard.
Your primary point of reference cannot be outside of yourself.
Suffering from earthquakes (like the recent one in Turkey) is really hard to comprehend; they feel so distant from human causality — so where does that leave us?
Prior 3 Observations & A Question….
Our dog, Fletcher, is 12 — he's not in imminent danger (for those of you who know him), but he is showing his age in a variety of ways.
As he rubbed up against me again the other day (making his routinely irritating contribution of hair and dander to my dark dress pants), a thought snuck past my typical reaction, "You're not going to be doing that much longer, are you?"
Not a particular watershed thought, for sure. But, it did prompt me toward something closer to wondering what I will feel when he will never do that any more. Will miss it — will I miss him?
Yes, I will. He is so presumptuous at times...and I will miss him even for that simplicity.
So, what would it be like to have compassion for him and his 'irritations'...simply because of who he is? You can see where I might be going with this....
After all, I'm showing my age, too. And, perhaps because of that, I'm catching myself actually trending toward irritability (in a number of domains) rather than toward compassion.
It got me thinking about some things; noticing some things. Like, I don't have infinite time left either. And, I need to pay more attention to some realities about my existence, too.
For example, I've discovered lately that the last person I am compassionate with is...me.
I can often easily discover compassion for someone else — just tell me their story. But, it is not as easy for me, to honor mine and to extend it to myself. And, that actually limits my compassion for others more than I often realize.
The truth is, I want compassion, as badly as anyone else. The strange part is that I hide my need for it from others. A habit (maybe)? A mechanism (more likely). In fact, this pattern often hides my need for it from myself.
So, I'm exploring these patterns of thinking and behaving (and I must say I'm not too thrilled with what it is revealing).
A week or two ago, I blew an emotional gasket. As usual, it was not about the thing that triggered it. I was bruised by it, in more ways than one. The week after I was having bizarre dreams (you know, the perennial ones we all have from time to time; but, this time with some derivative versions that were...disturbing). Something consistent and something not. What IS happening?
I shared the gory details...continue here.
'Poem for the week' -- "Will You?":
When, at the end, the children wanted
to add glitter to their valentines, I said no.
I said nope, no, no glitter, and then,
when they started to fuss, I found myself
saying something my brother’s football coach
used to bark from the sidelines when one
of his players showed signs of being
human: oh come on now, suck it up.
That’s what I said to my children.
Suck what up? my daughter asked,
and, because she is so young, I told her
I didn’t know and never mind, and she took
that for an answer. My children are so young
when I turn off the radio as the news turns
to counting the dead or naming the act,
they aren’t even suspicious. My children
are so young they cannot imagine a world
like the one they live in. Their God is still
a real God, a whole God, a God made wholly
of actions. And I think they think I work
for that God. And I know they will someday soon
see everything and they will know about
everything and they will no longer take
never mind for an answer. The valentines
would’ve been better with glitter, and my son
hurt himself on an envelope, and then, much
later, when we were eating dinner, my daughter
realized she’d forgotten one of the three
Henrys in her class. How can there be three Henrys
in one class? I said, and she said, Because there are.
And so, before bed we took everything out
again—paper and pens and stamps and scissors—
and she sat at the table with her freshly washed hair
parted smartly down the middle and wrote
WILL YOU BE MINE, HENRY T.? and she did it
so carefully, I could hardly stand to watch.
-- Carrie Fountain
Ever noticed...that the people who’ve learned how to deeply take care of themselves are often the most capable of deeply caring for others?
