Puppy in springtime

Today is the vernal equinox, and therefore often described as the first day of spring. It was also the day on which our puppy cleared her second vaccination release date into the big wide world.

 We took her to a little bit of beach nearby. Just think of the impact that all must have had on her, after nothing but house and garden all her life. Huge range of new smells (they see through their noses, don't they?) and sights and sounds, and a vast and puzzling new thing - looks like water but doesn't taste right, makes a totally new sound, and it keeps moving, and...

 it's all overwhelmingly wonderful.

I was reminded of Prospero's response, in "The Tempest," when Miranda says: 

"O brave new world, that hath such people in it." 

She's just met the first human beings she has ever met, apart from her father, who says simply: 

"'tis new to thee." 

That line can express an exhausted, hard-bitten view of human society (after all it's done to him) or it can be a sweetly poignant recognition of all his daughter has before her, still to explore and experience - all the delights and despairs of life in the material world, all the pain he won't be able to shield her from, with no Ariel at his service.

The puppy faces none of this. She is entirely and absolutely in the moment; no preconceptions or projections into her future, no sense, even, of what that might be.

We're people, not puppies, with all the splendour and agony that offers us. But how good for us sometimes to see the world as the puppy does today - in the present entirely, full of wonder.

Mind you, sometimes she needs to get close to a reassuringly familiar presence, amidst this vast newness!

Clumsy breakfast-times

Always lots to do in this life, so, eager to get the day going, I can be (usually am) clumsy around getting breakfast. Drop stuff (aren't pan-lids fun first thing?) absent-mindedly hurry on, get wrong jar out of the fridge. Etbloodycetera.

It's caused by haste, and an accompanying mild tension.  Mind not on the task, being not with the present but hanging between present which will not take care of itself if I'm not there (toast will burn) and future which doesn't actually exist yet anyway.

We've got a new puppy; she stopped trying to chew up the entire kitchen this morning and settled down for a nap. That's a nice break for both of us.

I moved slowly round the kitchen, carefully and deliberately, so as to keep quiet. I found I was actually rather enjoying getting breakfast ready; no tension at all. I stayed with the slower-than-usual movements, watched my hands doing things carefully and competently.

It took me maybe 15 or 20% longer than usual. Or maybe not. I didn't drop anything, didn't stop to swear because I'd managed to get the lime pickle out instead of the marmalade, etbloodtcetera.

Better quality doing. Stay in what I'm doing, be with the movements.

Simple enough, I guess. Haste and mindful calm are obviously incompatible. Festina lente, as the Romans used to say (I was told a long time ago.) Hurry slowly. More haste less speed. But it's better than merely being efficient, because I enjoyed my breakfast-time a lot more than usual.

The puppy didn't wake up till I'd finished eating. I didn't drop anything.

Here endeth the pan-lid sutra/parable.

(fair enough, you can't boil an egg out there, but I expect he's had his mindful brekafast already)

Ursula K Le Guin

I'm paying  my respects to a literary hero of mine, who died last week. I'll start with the 'science fiction' novels, of which I've read City of Illusions, The Lathe of Heaven, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Disposessed, plus a few stories. And now I'm rereading some of them.

First thing to say is that she preferred to be seen simply as a novelist; she tried to avoid the genre trap, but also questioned the whole idea of "literary" science fiction, which was sometimes applied to her work. (If it's a book, it's, in the largest sense, 'literary,' but I can see what people meant. She writes so very well.) 

 "People who don't worry at least a little about semi-colons aren't likely to be writers." She wrote a lot of interesting essays about writing and creativity.

 What she wrote were simply, novels and stories. Generally about places and states of being that don't exist, i.e. imagined worlds - like any novelist, whether the imaginings are located in Camden and Dundee, or the planet Anarres and our planet in the future.

What marks her out for me is her ability to bring ideas to life - political ideas (especially in The Disposessed), scientific ideas (brain wave manipulation in The Lathe of Heaven) and ideas about gender and sexuality (The Left Hand of Darkness.) 

Her science fiction has little or nothing in it of cops and robbers in space; no violence for its own sake, only as needed by the plot, and not dwelt upon. She created worlds in which she could work out her ideas and themes, and set her well-drawn characters amongst them. My guess is she needed the total control of an imagined world to do that; she wouldn't want readers distracted by thoughts such as "would they really say that on the BBC?" Or "but that subway station closed years ago."

She was an anarchist - she liked to explore the possibilities and consequences of anarchism, to keep the idea and the vision alive, as she did in The Disposessed. But she never resorted to black hats versus white hats. The society on the anarchist planet Annares suffers from problems and shortcomings not experienced by those on its twin, the capitalist Urras - and vice versa. She shows us her understanding that humans are not perfectable, but they can do perfect things, sometimes.

She was also a Taoist, which meant she knew the value of doing less or doing nothing when that is the best thing to do:

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”         (from The Left Hand of Darkness)

 She published her own version of the foundation text of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching. 

She was an environmentalist, who gave us, a long time before things got to their present pass, some terrifying images of exhausted resources and polluted ecosystems.


And she was a feminist, who wrote this to women (to all of us): 
“Now this is what I want: I want to hear your judgments. I am sick of the silence of women. I want to hear you speaking all the languages, offering your experience as your truth, as human truth, talking about working, about making, about unmaking, about eating, about cooking, about feeding, about taking in seed and giving out life, about killing, about feeling, about thinking; about what women do; about what men do; about war, about peace; about who presses the buttons and what buttons get pressed and whether pressing buttons is in the long run a fit occupation for human beings. There’s a lot of things I want to hear you talk about.

This is what I don’t want: I don’t want what men have. I’m glad to let them do their work and talk their talk. But I do not want and will not have them saying or thinking or telling us that theirs is the only fit work or speech for human beings. Let them not take our work, our words, from us. If they can, if they will, let them work with us and talk with us. We can all talk mother tongue, we can all talk father tongue, and together we can try to hear and speak that language which may be our truest way of being in the world, we who speak for a world that has no words but ours."
                                                        (from her 1986 commencement address to Bryn Mawr College)
If that doesn't fill you up or make you want to cheer, check your pulse.

And then there is her best-known work, her fantasy novels for children/young people (actually, for any of us who value such things.) The Wizard of Earthsea, originally a trio but eventually extending to six stories. Here she creates a world in which there are dragons and other fabulous creatures, without ever resorting to the tedious villains vs good guys binary vision of Tolkien and his army of followers. (There are dragons, magic and wizards in Earthsea, but no goody-goody bloody perfect elves!) She wrote about a school for wizards long before Harry Potter, but placed it in its own unique moral, mythical and physical world - no warmed-over British public schools, dorm jests and meal-time naughtiness. Her stories can be dark at times, and tough, but never morally easy or confusing. They are good to grow up with, I'd imagine.

Someone (more than one, I'm sure) asked her once if she minded JK Rowling having nicked her idea. Le Guin said words to the effect that there was no point in worrying about such things, that when you write your ideas float off and live where they can, and in a way it was a kind of compliment. Some writers might have consulted lawyers - Rowling is a very rich woman (good luck to her, too) - but no lawyers for Le Guin. She was a truly free spirit.

 Thank you.

A Sense of the Mysterious - Still Looking... 2

I've been looking at a book for many months, thinking "must get to that..." It looks good. "The Upright Thinkers," Leonard Mlodinow.

The epigraph to chapter one:

"The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion, as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind." 

Who wrote this?  A New Age guru? Someone who commutes between Glastonbury, Totnes and Findhorn according to the phases of the moon?

By the time he wrote this, in 1932, he had developed the special and general theories of relativity, and predicted the existence of gravitational waves, which were only confirmed a year and a half ago.


The sense of the mysterious is an infinitely valuable thing, thought the man who turned physics on its head.

I'm with Albert. 

(I'm sure he'd have been relieved to know that.)
 (We'll let his exclusively male statements go by - they are of the time.) 


 

a noisy meditation

We've often observed, in our meditation group, that there is no point in regarding extraneous sounds as intrustions, as disturbance to our peaceful meditative atmosphere. Note and be with the sounds, make them part of the present in which you are meditating, might be the advice - perhaps from an unusually self-righteous teacher! Still, good advice. Easier advice to follow with the sound of birds' feet on the roof, or a strong wind. But industrial noise levels?

Next door are having their cobbled outside area pressure-washed today, and the guys are using the noisiest compressor in the history of the world. For a moment, I thought it was an angle-grinder. Perhaps a bass one. We decided to go out in order to escape it, but first I wanted a short meditation.

 So I setled me down to meditate, thinking "wonder if this is hopeless?" It really was a loud and monotonous noise.

No problem, to my surprise. Didn't even have to work at concentrating on it or ignoring it. It was simply - there. 

Maybe regular meditation can actually make us better at accepting what is happening now, rather than wanting it to be different, wanting to move on to the next thing. If so, it worked this morning.

So I stayed with the noise. Only difficulty was, when it stopped. The sudden quiet came crashing in.

But it was, of course, nice when it stopped.

"We must admit there will be music despite everything."

Excerpts from "A Brief for the Defence" by WS Merwin

(thanks, Annee.)
 

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants....

                                                     The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
                                           From REFUSING HEAVEN (Knopf, 2005

Some things don't resonate for me - "what God wants..." when the only God I can relate to is nonhuman, so doesn't "want" - though I follow the poet into the idea of praising the Devil (as a symbol for evil in the world) if we make injustice the only measure of our attention. That's an important insight.

None of this stops us trying to do something about sorrow, slaughter and malnourished babies - but if our attention to the wrongs and evils of the world takes us over, we are in deep trouble, and those who suffer get nothing from our despair. From our delight, from our enjoyment, comes the sense of values and contrasts that enables us to take useful action in the social sphere. 

And so, of course, the poem reminds us to seek to live in the present moment and to act from it.

"We must admit there will be music despite everything."

There was music in Terezin transit camp - not, as in Auschwitz, to keep time as the slaves were marched to work, or to deceive inmates about the true nature of the place, but for its own sake. Despite everything. Despite the fact that what they were in transit to, from Terezin, meant that most of them eventually died. But before then - there was music.

Olivier Messaien wrote his "Quartet for the End of Time" in a prisoner-of-war camp. The quartet was premiered at the camp, on a bitterly cold night 15 January 1941, in an unheated space. The musicians had decrepit instruments and an audience of about 400 fellow prisoners and guards. The cello was bought with donations from camp members. Messiaen later recalled: 'Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension.'

flat on my back, not really meditating, when...

 In a meditation session, our minds rest with the breath, or areas of the body, or ..whatever it is we are using to centre ourselves. But our minds move away into linked chains of memories, or anticipations and fantasies, or - well, if you meditate you'll know the stuff. So we are taught to bring our consciousness gently back to the breath, or whatever we're using...

It's been frequently observed  that one difficulty with discrete meditation sessions can be that we try too hard - "how can I get back to that wonderful feeling of being here and now and only here and now?" (Not that we ever can, in any real sense, "get back" to anything - time's arrow moves in only one direction.) "How can I stop my mind wandering away from the breath?" And the harder you try, the harder it gets.

And meditators can often feel self-critical because they feel they were "drifting off,"  "not concentrating," "letting my thoughts run away with themselves." The "I'm useless at meditating, must try harder " treadwheel.

 Perhaps these feelings are endemic in discrete sessions "on the cushion" (chair, stool etc) exactly because sesssions can seem special, apart, to one side of daily life. 

I should try to remember two things; it was John Peacock who first made it clear to me that having the mind wander off, and gently returning it to the present moment, is all part of meditating, it is not some shameful failure of mind! And secondly, that it's not helpful to feel that being mindful is only a product of discrete meditation sessions.

This morning, I was doing the few simple Pilates-based exercises I use each morning. These are to stop my back throwing in the towel too far in advance of the rest of me. 

 it's probably needless to say that this lissome young fellow is not me, and I was on the carpet at home, not on the grass surrounded by flowers.

Lying on my back, I finished with a big stretch, then relaxed - and with no bidding or effort felt -  It. Being entirely and only present. No effort preceeded it, no thought in particular led to it. 

Maybe it was having being bodily aware of the various quite small and focused movements needed for the Pilates, letting my mind stay with them. Maybe it was the contrast between the effort required, followed by the abrupt release of effort and muscular tension.

It didn't last long, It never does, but It'll be back, perhaps when I'm on my back, perhaps when I'm walking along the top lane, perhaps when I'm in session.

 Doesn't really do to analyse It too much, I'm just grateful for It's arrival, and will try to arrange myself, in whatever posture and location seem propitious, to encourage Its arrival.

"Time past and time future

Allow but a little consciousness.

To be conscious is not to be in time..." 

                                  (TS Eliot, Burnt Norton)