Reading This Post Could Affect Your Spirituality

"I walk past one group of teenagers who are "voluntouring" with a church group. They've assembled on the street, where a chaperone is telling them that they're about to get an hour to explore the French Quarter on their own. He admonishes that if anyone sees something during this time that has an "adult theme," they're to turn away. "This is serious, guys," he says. "It could affect your spirituality." - "ReNew Orleans", Southwest Airlines Spirit, November 2006

I laughed out loud in my plane seat on my way to LA for Thanksgiving when I first read this. Luckily laughing is encouraged on Southwest Airlines flights.

This blog will compromise whatever you thought spirituality was. I guarantee it.

The last century ushered the end to the split between materiality and spirituality. In the 21st century, it's plain natural.

I get a hoot at observing how people perceive me. A new friend recently told me I ascribe too much to supernatural forces. I decided not to correct him. I have no idea what he means by supernatural.

I typically send out Salon invites to folks I know. I also include a few folks that I've only met once, or a few times folks that I don't know at all but were introduced by a mutual friend, and that I'd like to know better. Folks that I sense would expand the group's diversity of thinking.

One of these Salon newbies took one glance at my evite for the January 6th Epiphany Salon and declined: "Too new-agey. I knew I couldn't go."

Hmmmm, that's interesting. Eccentric, sure. Trippy, I'd been called worse. Irreverent, yep. Edgy, uh-huh. Off-the-wall, okay. But, new age? At first I took umbrage, then I found it particularly funny because it's usually me that steers away from new-age things. It took me eons to join Zaadz because it first came across to me as too "new-agey."

The fact of the matter is I feel about as comfortable talking to New-Agers as I do born-again pious Christians as I do atheists as I do to no-holds-barred hedonists who quite often mock "those hippie granola New-Agers".

So I think I get it that I may make some people uncomfortable talking about gurus, about oneness, about epiphany, about prayer, about unconditioned love. Fine. In the spirit of resolution, I'm going to finally challenge myself to rise to the old writer's adage, Show, Don't Tell, on my blog for 21 days straight because they say it takes that long to create a new habit. (That's through January 28th.)

(Steve Pavlina says gives it a 30-day trial himself.)

Show-don't-tell reminds me of this passage about Beat poets. (To say Jack Kerouac has influenced me would be an understatement, btw.)

“Three centuries later, Kerouac provided an American definition of the [haiku] form: “POP-American (non-Japanese) Haiku, short three-line poems, or ‘pomes’, rhyming or nonrhyming, delineating ‘little Samadhis’ if possible, usually of a Buddhist connotation, aiming toward enlightenment”…

“This actual moment! That bedraggled crow! This moonlit evening, that cold rain on your skull! There you stand, inhabiting your body with animal clarity, wide-open senses, and no preconception or abstract idea can touch the experience itself. Buddhists call this tattva, thusness. “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams famously wrote, setting ten thousand poems free from abstraction. He could have been reading Basho: “To know the pine, go to the pine. To know the bamboo, go to the bamboo.”

…Haiku’s simplicity of spirit is what so quickly allies it to Zen Buddhism. I like to think the current popularity of Zen in America is due in part to a tenacious belief that we remain a no-nonsense people, a people who talk straight and try to keep life simple - this and a mounting restlessness with our overabundance of things… This Thoreau-like hunger for unadorned living, and the belief that the richest insights can only be acquired through close-to-the-bone experience, carries on in the spirit of modern poets. It is nowhere more evident than in the embrace of the haiku ethic.”

- from “Rucksack Poetry: How Haiku Found a Home in America”, Winter 2004, Tricycle, (in The Best Buddhist Writing 2005 anthology)

Bonus: On the 21 days to a new habit meme (much more via Google Answers): 

"Brain circuits take engrams (memory traces), and produce neuroconnections and neuropathways only if they are bombarded for 21 days in a row. This means that our brain does not accept ‘new’ data for a change of habit unless it is repeated each day for 21 days (without missing a day)." - Aristotle website

"...The more senses you can involve in the new habit, the more likely it is to become ingrained in the neural pathways, so, even if you're working on your self image in a mental construct, it's helpful to use all the faculties of your imagination to include sights, sounds, smells, and the senses of feeling and taste to strengthen the image which you come to associate with your new self image.

...If you miss a day, just keep going until you've been doing the new behavior for 21 days in a row."

Bonus: The Desolate Field, by William Carlos Williams (via The Beat Page)

        Vast and grey, the sky
        is a simulacrum
        to all but him whose days
        are vast and grey and --
        In the tall, dried grasses
        a goat stirs
        with nozzle searching the ground.
        My head is in the air
        but who am I . . . ?
        -- and my heart stops amazed
        at the thought of love
        vast and grey
        yearning silently over me.

p.s. I loved Southwest Airlines devoted the November 2006 issue of their inflight mag to coverage of New Orleans. The editor, Eric Celeste, writes about his recent visit to New Orleans (just a snippet):

"It was still hot and muggy, a place where you expect your shirt to stick to your chest from sunrise to sunset. It still had the most fascinating array of scents you can find; one minute you pass a funky alley filled with odors from last night's revelry, the next you're standing in the doorway of a world-class eatery, mouth watering from the smells of sausage frying or strong coffee brewing.

Most of all, it was alive. Sure, part of the reason is because libations flow in the Quarter at all hours. But its vibrancy was not just because of the qualities that liken it to a fraternity party. It came from the cliché things you've always heard about the city: Its music is vibrant, its people warm, its culture unique.

We spent 48 hours walking the city, minus about nine hours of sleep. I had blisters on my feet for nearly a week. Didn't matter. To experience the French Quarter, you had to hit every dive bar with a piano, sample every restaurant your stomach would allow, talk to every street performer who didn't hit you up for money (and a few that did).

We returned more sure than ever that a) New Orleans was our favorite American city..."

Life. Vibrancy. Charm. Now, that's spirit.

images The Sorceress by John William Waterhouse; and my local artist and friend Gilbert Marosi's Jive Lady

Comments

[Dan]

Maybe the Show, Don't Tell mode goes something like this:

Evelyn didn't see the droplets skittering across her window; she felt them. She knew she was supposed to write, but she couldn't say anything until it was wholly in her face. It was a good day to get wet. "Everyday is," she thought, putting her coat back on its hook. Why bother getting dressed up for it? Why protect, when it's meant to release its pure cold onto the skin, pure taste onto the tongue? She looked into the sky: "That's it," she thought, "Rain!"

She stood there, the rest of us not really understanding. But she did. That was clear. Arms spread wide. "Rain!" she shouted. "Rain!"

[~C4Chaos]

thanks for giving Zaadz a chance ;) keep it flowing with your show and tell :)

~C

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Evelyn, shaking her head in amazement, with a twinkle in her eye, wonders just how she is going to respond to Dan's comment but as she doesn't have a clue she keeps typing away at the keyboard in hopes the act of typing taps into an answer. She is a big fan of stream-of-consciousness automatic writing so some of the drizzle Dan refers to could very well be within the interior of her head. She ponders Wikipedia's entry of "Show, Don't Tell" and decides that it is not a very complete explanation of Show, Don't Tell. This ain't ever going to read like a detective story. And she starts to answer the next comment.

C4Chaos, Yep, too easy to put people into an automatic definition and pin them down, and not even begin to explore the terra igcognita that everyone is. Even I do that. That's why I said it was funny that this person automatically pinned me down as 'new age' because it brought to light that I can easily do the same to others.

[mackenzie chambers]

re:jan 9th

"This blog will compromise whatever you thought spirituality was. I guarantee it.

(i am) Eccentric, sure. Trippy, I'd been called worse. Irreverent, yep. Edgy, uh-huh. Off-the-wall, okay. But, new age? At first I took umbrage....
So I think I get it that I may make some people uncomfortable talking about gurus, about oneness, about epiphany, about prayer, about unconditioned love."

my take on "new agey" is sloppy thinking demonstrated by assuming that language- especially pop language- is taken in and understood the same by all. Also, there is often a certainty that suffering, rage and sorrow can be by-passed in the spiritual journey. A lack of understanding that one turns to the direction of "love"(in quotes because of the infinite meanings) and then must take to rigourously observing our obstacles to such. It is in that rigour that the mind expands.

sister, your thoughts and ideas come pre-packaged and with not a little pride. Thomas Merton once said that perhaps those who had the least desire to be prophets were the ones most qualified.

Your joy in your own precious thoughts concerns me and annoys me. forgive my impatience.

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Mackenzie, thanks for your comment. "There is often a certainty that suffering, rage and sorrow can be by-passed in the spiritual journey."

My experience is the opposite. It is one of the most wrenching experiences a personal individual can ever undergo. Until we realize we aren't exactly a personal individual -- or what we take our selves to be.

I would never have undertaken a spiritual journey of my own accord. I was relatively comfortably living a middle class life, albeit completely shutoff from my heart and quite numb, but why rock the boat? It was only when everything I knew was torn away from me in the space of a year that I had enough humility to ask some deep questions and keep following a thread of inspiration.

This post was mostly meant to say that I don't exclude or reject or resist certain subjects or things or people or places as being NON-spiritual.

I never claim to be a prophet. That would defeating my purpose and potentially place another in a position of believing that they don't know. And you know everything.

If I preach anything, it's follow YOUR own deepest desires and inner guidance. The path is parodoxically unique, and mine is not yours, and vice versa.

I tend to be exuberant. And certainly never perfect.

Maybe, yes, even prideful. I am grateful as it gets harder to find people that will call out your bullshit, and I will inquire into the pride aspect. Thank you.

[arkieology]

Just an interjection here, projection is a well known psychological phenomenon. Impatience at another's pronouncements and correcting their path is a pure form of pride and if you will projection. I like your blog because it does not claim to be what it is not, not necessarily spirituality, but spiritual questions are part of your life, not necessarily marketing but marketing is part of your life, not a prophet or profit maker though both are present. Let your own consience be your brakes, your own heart speaks truer than any prophet coach, including this one. Your writings at their best are quite poetic, reflecting some sufi influence indeed. I heard a voice whispering in the night and it said "There is no such thing as a voice whispering in the night." (I can't remember the source for this, but it's not mine)
Keep dreaming large, and keep sharing your dreams.

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Thanks Arkieology. Sure, there is probably some projection going on. Anytime I am irked or annoyed by another I look at myself too. But also, another friend asked me about the same time as Mackenzie's comment if I just liked to hear myself think. There was something in his statement that had me wonder about pride as an open inquiry, not necessarily taking it on completely, but inquiring.

I just came across this quote when searching for another Starbucks cup quote...

The Way I See It #177
"I think when we get angry at others, most of the time, we’re really angry at ourselves. It is not “us versus them” – we are all connected. Perhaps the anger comes in how much of “us” we see in “them.” Whether it is cutting someone off or taking more than one’s share, perhaps we are angry at ourselves for doing similar things every day. In any case, change will come when we stop pointing the finger and start looking in the mirror."

-- Christina Morton
Starbucks shift supervisor in Los Angeles, California.

[mackenzie chambers]

I was excited to be provoked, questioned and mostly felt blessed by your open-ess. and yes,arkielogy, of course, my first inward turning before I posted was about my own pride.( perhaps you may project some pride onto my "of course". perhaps you are right.)Mostly, I think, I am mistrustful of those who openly claim the spiritual way. I shoot an arrow and am desperate to find an equal or larger arc returned. Not sure, then if in this I am prideful, but I can barely contain a desire to keep spiritual inquiry( for lack of a better term)- which is everything to me- pure and sharp. The purity will lie not in my declaration, but in the dialogue that follows. In this, I feel surprisingly gratified by you both. Thank you. and I meant it when I said forgive me.

[arkieology]

Mackenzie and Evelyn
I guess all I was thinking about was a sufi story in one of Idries Shah's books(I think). A well reputed man of learning was rowing his boat by an island and he heard a man chanting. He felt an obligation to go correct the man, as he had the chant all wrong, so the man rowed to the island and corrected the chanter. He got back in his boat and started to row away when he looked up and saw the man walking on the water next to him humbly asking him to repeat his instructions. I think purity of intention and practice far out strip any purity of ritual or of language, and that was my only point. If I sensed some pride in your first post I certainly sensed none in your second. So adieu and thanks for the kind and generous thoughts from all.

[Spiritual]

Spirituality is a matter of understanding self and awareness of others. Perhaps our religion and manifestation of lkife can be different form all the surrounding that salivate the understanding of spirituality and religion. To understand the essence of self spiritual guide to new life ferris wanli and not rely more on the understating of the life as a whole. To be on that level then we need the dogma of essence and more of the new trilogy of the higher power.

[Ynsbdnrd]

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