The Meadow. This video was made by a friend in England, Chris Webb. He’s a world traveler, but sent this reminding me that we have such beauty right in our own backyard. This is his backyard…If you need a 3-minute meditation at work, close the door, relax, breathe and hit play.
(Source: vimeo.com)
“When she was not yet ten she saw a man charming a snake in the bazaar. Simultaneously, she was the man and the snake and whatever flowed between them.” – A New Love of the Unknown
We were two strangers circling an evergreen to get a look at the bird trilling from within its highest branches. We moved slowly around the base of the tree. The song was delightful, inconsistent, surprising. Louder and louder it came as if the singer was gaining confidence with each burst. The woman was standing at 12 o’clock. I was standing at six.
I heard the woman say to a curious passerby, “You can’t see him. He’s deep in there.” They walked on, but the woman stayed put, straining to see something. I had to see him, too. And then I did.
Sitting in plain view on my side of the tree was a small Mockingbird. I watched him for a moment to be sure I’d found the source of that captivating sound. When I saw the orange of his throat and heard his distinct voice, I knew I had him.
“You can see him from here,” I said to the woman. She looked at me with intensity and scrambled to my side of the brush to get a look. As she moved, he flew to the next tree and sat there singing in plain site. Now we were standing shoulder to shoulder.
“I think it’s a Mockingbird,” I said. Then the bird fired up a staccato pattern of fanciful sounds and let his voice soar through the air. The woman and I both laughed. We looked at each other with delight and then at the bird. “He’s showing off,” I said. And the way she nodded I knew she was thinking the same thing. We both turned our full attention back to the bird and as people washed around us in the garden, unaware of the private concert, I marveled at how close I felt to her. So close, that for those few moments, the woman and I were one. The bird’s voice had done it. We’d been called to listen to a song we couldn’t understand, but one that touched us both.
Poetry at parties. These guys were at a friend’s recent dance party. I adore this idea. As they express it:
Poetry is so back.
(Source: poetryatparties)
Oh. Oh. A reminder that so much of poetry is meant to be eaten with the ears, not the eyes. Taken in through it’s vibration, not its structure on the printed page. Sit back, relax and listen to this. See if it doesn’t strike you to the core. The aural tradition, the oral tradition, is alive and well…in fact, it may be experiencing a renaissance. Speak. Hear. Learn. Live.
— Kurt Vonnegut
This is what I was thinking about this morning on my rainy walk through the park: machetes.
A couple of weeks ago when I saw John Mackey speak at the Conscious Capitalism conference in San Francisco, he offered an analogy I can’t get out of my head. A question came from the audience that had to do with moments of doubt or discouragement on the path. A wry smile crossed John’s lips and then he said, “You know…sometimes I feel like I was whacking my way through the jungle with a machete for thirty years.”
I was delighted to hear the question posed because it had been on my mind, too. Every speaker who took the stage was more optimistic and enthusiastic than the next–which makes sense given the uplifting nature of such a movement and the fact that it is nascent and still trying to build converts. But, halfway through the conference I jotted this in my notebook: “What I am missing right now: messiness, mistakes, pain, the difficulties you are guaranteed to endure on the path to Truth.” And I was. I was missing the “dirt.” Ironically, this realization struck me as Eric Ryan bounded about the stage talking about Method: People Against Dirt.
The description John offered of his own journey struck me deeply because I can imagine how hard it would be to whack a path through the jungle for thirty years. In an instant I felt the intensity of his struggle and also a sense of gratitude that he’d kept at it. Plenty of men and women never take up the machete and plenty more put it down before the path is cut all the way through to the other side. I know both feelings–the conviction required to wield the tool and the exhaustion that makes one ache to put it down. Most of us do.
The thing I realized this morning as I was walking through the rainy woods was that I’d only really thought about the pathfinder. I was still contemplating John’s journey, the hero’s journey, my own struggles and those of friends and colleagues who are trying to change something ingrained, something with deep roots…a jungle, undergrowth, paradigms, habits, cultures.
I hadn’t considered all the people who can travel a path once it’s cut. The pathfinder isn’t just struggling for his own self-mastery or merely chopping down his own demons, he’s making the journey that much easier for all those who choose down the line to join him at the destination. The same act of destruction that uproots obstacles, is the act of creation that clears a path for those who need it next.
Today we’re living in times of extreme change, change so significant there are no maps to the future. We’re living and working in a world of our own making, and now we have to unmake it, we have to recalibrate and question everything we’ve known to be “true” up to now. We’re having to rethink not just the future, but the present and even our past. So many of the “truths” we became so fond of have now become unruly, weedy, impenetrable undergrowth. A lot of people are waking up right now to find the ideas that have kept us so comfortable (too comfortable…asleep!) are now constricting us, constraining us, and even strangling us. Look around you. People (maybe even you) are having a hard time catching a breath, seeing the big picture. We’re suffocating in this jungle of our own creation.
But, there is a way out. Two ways out really, depending on your temperament and constitution. One way is to pick up a machete and start hacking a path through the densest, gnarliest part of the jungle you see in front of you. You are a pathfinder. The other way is to feel around a little bit until you find an opening, a place where the brush has already been cleared, follow that path and do not let it fall back into ruin. You may not be the pathfinder, but you are its keeper. Because all of us, pathfinders and pathkeepers, need to consider not just our own task, but the needs of all those who come after us.
The recipe for success for any great movement includes solid ideas, clear vision, fearless leadership, and a healthy dose of magic. All of those things were present in my experience of the Conscious Capitalism conference in San Francisco today. A little internet research will furnish you with most of what you need to know about this clarion call to Corporate America, so I’ll elaborate here on the magic that could only be experienced firsthand.
Rachel to Ross: “I am over you. And that, my friend, is what they call closure.” –Friends, Season 2, Episode 7, “The One Where Ross Finds Out”
When this episode of Friends aired in 1995, the term, “closure,” and all it represented became a catchphrase among my cohort: graduating college seniors. There we were on the brink of life, scared and without direction. We looked ahead at our prospects–a blank slate of possibility–and felt like the only thing we could do with any confidence was “close” those areas of unfinished business that might keep us mired in the past or tethered to our childhood selves: a relationship here, lingering assignments, outdated ideas…We checked these things off our list with a great flourish and seeking comic effect, said to each other, “And that, my friend, is what they call closure.”
The world was a slower place in 1995–starting to speed up, but nothing like now. Then, we allowed events to follow and consummate their natural arc. Stories–whether in the popular culture of entertainment, advertising, the world stage, or in our own lives–generally followed a traditional narrative structure. Anything that didn’t was considered avant-garde, radical…Waiting for Godot.
Psychologists use the term, need for closure, to describe the individual’s desire for information that will help him/her conclude an issue that has previously been cloaked in ambiguity and uncertainty. It’s a drive towards stability. In a linear time, which is what we inhabited for much of the 20th century, its easy and somewhat accurate to believe the world is comprised–like our storybooks and history books–of beginnings, middles, and ends. In that paradigm, closure is the sensation that allows us to make sense of the epic nature of a life by carving it up into bite-size pieces. It gives us the illusion of being in control of our own narrative. What we couldn’t have known in 1995 was that our need for closure would fail to serve us in a future that resists linearity. And that future is here.
I don’t know about you, but I’m just about done with cold, hard “facts.” These days you can find the data to support whatever point you want to make. Between marketers, journalists, and politicians we’ve seen more data abuse over the last few years than in the whole of history combined. More people with fewer credentials are “crunching the numbers,” and more special interests are biasing reporting processes to “prove” their point. Inside advertising agencies over the past five years or so–since the belt-tightening due to the recession–I’ve noticed a real lowering of standards for the way research is handled. While all of this seems like bad news, it’s actually a good sign–I see it as the precursor to a more intuitive way of doing business. As we lose our footing on the rocks of “proof,” we’re soon going to find ourselves diving into the waters of intuition where it’s sink or swim.
Is the violent female trickster poised to overtake the sleeping beauty as our leading heroine? Maria...
Warren Street. Hudson, New York.
Here’s the full text of a piece I wrote for The Magazine a few months ago. I really enjoyed writing it, and would like to thank
Modern romance
Cherry Alley. Hudson, New York. The Alleys of Hudson.
