I'm listening to Adyashanti's live online radio broadcast tonight. He is saying something about "the ways we barricade ourselves from the rawness of existence, from directly encountering what we really and truly are."
Straight ahead, as I blog hangs a calendar at Flora's Cafe with the caption: "Accept the unpredictable."
I know I've been running circles in my own mind of late. The laps around on the track are exhausting me, and yet I press on in its predictable groove. Once in a while, there are bursts of unabashed unpredictability a.k.a as spontaneous joy when my mind takes a breather from its endless plotting and prodding.
A week ago, on a good day as I only briefly flirt with thinking (rather than ensconce myself in it): "Shall I go see Quintron's new album (recorded entirely on-site at the museum and City Park) being played during the gloaming (my favorite hours, perhaps because I was born into the world then) in the luscious sculpture garden at The Museum of Modern Art?"
"Nope. Too far. And I don't wish to strategize how to get there." However, there is no question the entire New Orleans Museum of Art exhibition of the underground speakeasy artists has intrigued me for months, and I'd intended on going to the listening party. But now that it's the day, I'm not interested in the effort of figuring it all out. The idea of going dissolves.
Fast forward to this morning. I am reading the first story in Augusten Burrough's Magical Thinking -- a book I picked up off the free box on the curb last night. There's a story of the author as a seven-year-old boy in a quintessentially Americana small town. His whole quaint world is upended when a New York City advertising agency discovers his schoolhouse, and namely, selects him among a handful of children to be in a TV commercial:
"The thing is, I'd known since the men first uttered the words "Tang commercial" that I was perfect for this role. All I had to do was be my natural, born-for-it self. But something had gone catastrophically wrong. In my obsession to be a perfectly natural boy for the camera, I was unable to be even vaguely natural, let alone perfect.
And each time I spoke my line, my voice sounded forced, pretentious, dishonest. These were concepts I'd gleaned from a copy of Acting: A Handbook of the Stanislavski Method, which I'd found in my mother's bookshelf.
... Was I going to a class? Or coming from a class? These were essential questions, and the director refused to give me answers.
"Will you shut up and just walk!" was what he said.
"But when I walk, do you want me to be walking with urgency or relief?" was my reply.
"Oh Jesus Christ, can we get another kid?" he shouted over his shoulder. - Magical Thinking: True Stories, by Augusten Burroughs
As he states, it is his own obsession to be "natural" that has the seven-year-old Burroughs and his one spoken line completely edited out of the final commercial.
Back to my non-plotting, spontaneously unfolding day last week -- plus the Quintron outdoor concert I've already set aside.
It's late afternoon. I'm plugging away online -- and, simultaneously enjoying a fantastic fiddler playing in the cafe -- which I hadn't expected. I splurge on a mint julep.
As I'm enjoying my afternoon in ease... fiddler and mint julep are icing on the cake, into the cafe walks my housemate -- whom "happens" to be taking some out-of-town visiting artists to see Quintron's concert at the sculpture garden in just a few minutes.
All is natural, perfect -- just as it was a moment before I knew I was going to get to go to the concert after all.
"You can't base your life on what someone else believes, what your culture believes or even what your own mind believes (its own abstractions). Okay -- so what is this one thing that I can know -- I am. Let me experience THAT -- not just make it another belief." - Adyashanti
Bonus: So, confession, I often times worry being a storyteller -- more accurately, a myth-maker -- will only create a yet more refined belief system, yet more polished "acting methods" of Being rather than draw out what is simply, innately natural.
Yet now that I write that confession out, I don't think stories are so much the problem. They're an expression of a specific facet of infinity; thereby yet another facet of infinity.
Once, on a long open-aired journey up a hill into the tea bush country in Ceylon, I was feeling exhausted from my constant journaling. In a flash, I realized it wasn't the act of writing that was tiring. It was the unceasing coming up with opinions, judgments, and intepretation of what I was observing that was draining. Recounting the story in a "and this happened, then this happened" was natural.
That's the challenge. Writing that doesn't create a scaffolding of abstractions. And myths that are engaging, and interactive enough they're experienced directly. [1]
"When you come to think about it, nothing has any meaning, for when there was nobody to think, there was nobody to interpret what happened." - Carl Jung
[1] In Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth, she writes that originally myth was experiential and enacted as part of mystery rites; they didn't hold meaning when only seen as text.
Art credits: 1) Still from one of Miss Pussycat's (Quintron's partner and collaborator) puppet films. From the NOMA exhibition, Parallel Universe. (2) There's a Jauma Plensa sculpture like this in the NOMA sculpture garden; this photo by Don3rdSE.
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