“WHAT CAN I DO, RIGHT now, to better myself?”
Mom in the drug store Called out to her son: “Brooklyn!” Am I getting old?
| Email Edition | Contact“WHAT CAN I DO, RIGHT now, to better myself?”
A SURE TEST OF ANY theology is to ask, “Does God exist before human beings?”
Among other things, the answer can shed light on one’s grasp of science. For if you allow for a God who watched over the dinosaurs, who saw the primordial soup trend toward consciousness on a billion planets, who was delighted by the Big Bang — in short, One who doesn’t need humans to survive and Whom humans can only love fiercely but dimly — you may well be on to something.
“WHAT PRESENT CAN I GIVE to the world?”
“WHEN THE CENTER IS MOVING, no quiet is.
When the center is still, no chaos.
Where is the chaos when there is no center?
Where is the center when there is no motion?”
– From the Red Papyrus in O-kaze Temple, an Egyptian Zen sect nestled in the deepest shadow of Mount Fuji. Follow the Serene Sphinx signs and tell ‘em “Bob” sent you.
PROLONGING THE GOD EXPERIENCE INTO every waking moment. (All else — songs, prayers, chants, acts, texts, charity, incense, beads, building fund — is just stage direction. Which is not to dismiss the stage direction, since that’s one of the keys to the Experience. But the key isn’t the lock, and what you really want anyway is to open.)
“What does that song mean?” I asked Ernie once about a particular song.
He thought for a bit and then replied that if I wanted to know what the words meant, he’d be glad to translate them for me. But if I was asking what the song meant, that was different. A song, he explained, carries much more meaning than just its words. For him, for example, a large part of a song’s meaning is about who first taught it to him — a relative? an elder? a friend? What instructions were given with that teaching? Can it be sung in the daytime or only at night? Can it be sung only at one particular season? Is it a public song or private? Can women sing it or only men? Is it spiritual or ‘just for fun?’ Are there dietary or behavioral restrictions placed upon the singer as he prepares to perform? Each time a song is sung, he went on to explain, it accumulates further meaning — from the people he is singing it with, the audience he is singing it to, the circumstances under which it is sung. If a song is brought out at a funeral, for example, the funeral lends a weight and history to the song that is felt each time it is subsequently sung. Even my own curiosity about the song, he smiled, adds to its meaning.
– Malcolm Margolin, The Ohlone Way
(And yes, I excerpted this Friday, but it’s quite too good not to share in full.)
TODAY IS THE SECOND OF Elul, the month preceding Rosh Hashana, and that fact lends the period an air of expectancy and overhaul.
The Jewish New Year is less a time for partying all night and more a time for reflection and making right, especially of our relationships. Have we wronged anyone? Hurt anyone? Been less than true or right or kind? Now’s the time to fix that.
So if I have in the past year treated you less than you deserve, or been blunt or flip where tender seriousness would have been better, please let me know. Life is too short not to live it fully, and it’s hard to live it fully if there’s an interpersonal problem sticking things up. As Elwood P. Dowd would say, “I’d rather be kind than right.” (I’d actually rather be both, but sometimes you can’t have everything.)
May your own annual journey to renewal and rebirth go as smoothly as it needs to be, and, to paraphrase Ecclesiastes, may you become no wiser than necessary.
A MODERN SENSIBILITY IS THE greatest impediment to understanding ancient traditions. (And sometimes vice-versa.)
GIVEN THE POSSIBILITY OF EARTH’S demise-by-asteroid in 25 years, we at The Metaphorager will be trying to stay awake, aware, conscious, intent, productive, or otherwise engaged for the next
days:hours:etc. (Live it up, fellow Earthlings.)
THE FIRST TIME I DISCOVERED that my words had an effect on other people was when something I wrote made other people cry.
The people were my fellow high-school English students, and the topic was a personal essay we’d been assigned. My take on it was to write about loneliness, and I wish I still had the essay because I can’t even remotely reconstruct it after 31 years and thousands of more words down the line. Read more »
HOW MUCH CAN YOU CHANGE something before it no longer resembles the original — yet still call it by the same name?
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