Category: meditation

Big History

This is really important – funny to say considering he’s talking essentially about everything – everything we can (or think we) know through all of history – Big Bang to now. Big History.

Mr. Christian both illuminates our tiny, tiny, tiny place in Big History; but also shows us how vitally important our place is in it – at least in regards to our own survival – that being the survival of the most complex, learned, and learning organisms we know to have existed. It’s not simply hubris to say we’re crazy amazing!

It reminds us that our obliteration would be both the saddest thing we could know, and ultimately, just an infinitesimally small blip in Big History. Humbling, to say the least.

Every kid should watch this every year, at least, as a reminder to just how simultaneously small, yet hugely important, a person they are in Big History.

I Know A Guy

I know a guy knows everything.
You know that guy? I know you do.
He lives right down the street from you.
No matter what you think you do,
he’ll tell you what you ought to do.

His wife, she knows he knows, it’s true:
“He says,” she says, “that red is blue.”
And certainly she’s certain, too,
That blue is blue and red is, too.

I know a guy’s done everything.
You know that guy? I know you do.
He’s done it all once more than you.
You say to him,
“I once fell from a jet airliner.
Thank god I had a carabiner,
For as I hit the atmosphere,
I passed a purple elephant ear,
Saw angels playing synthesizers,
And fans who cheered from balsa risers,
And landed on a 10-foot crow,
who brought me safely down below.”

“That’s nice,” he’ll bleat,
“but my crow was 22 feet.”

what do you hear?

“The faculty of embarrassment was located in the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex by neurologists who made brain-damaged subjects sing along to “My Girl” and then listen to their own singing played back without musical accompaniment.”

From Harper’s Findings June 2011

Forget “brain-damaged”, most people are at first uncomfortable with their own voice when they hear it played back on another device – even embarrassed. Somehow the resonance of our voice in our heads often sounds quite different from how we sound to the rest of the world, and that sudden realization can be startling. Why is that? Is it just the surprise that we sound different? Personally, I was shocked at just how nasally I sounded playing back my voice on our little cassette recorder as a kid. I remember asking, “Is that how I sound?” And my sister giving me the bad news.

Makes me wonder, too, whether people hear other people’s voices differently from one another, possibly related to the size, shape and location of the ear and ear drum. Could it be that my daughter’s enjoyment of the singing of her pubescent Disney stars is related to just how differently her ear is to mine? Why is it that bagpipes make me want to tear my ears off while others find them beautiful?

I’ve often wondered if other people see colors differently as well. Is my blue your green? Why should they be the same exactly? To me it actually makes more sense that we all see them somewhat differently, if not completely. My brown is your gray. Without any prodding as far as I can tell, my daughter fell in love with pink as a color – as so many young girls do, but I’m certain (no, hopeful) that “my girl” will soon learn to love other colors as vividly. Something oddly creepy about an older woman purposely surrounding herself in too much pink.

To each his or her own, I suppose, and for good reason maybe.

learn after you leap

“Scientists concluded that … frogs learned to leap before they learned how to land,” which is obvious at one level, I suppose, but also inspiring at another. Not only for many of us who experience a certain amount of trepidation when up against that moment that separates the leapers from the losers, but for frogs, as well, who’ve been relegated to croaking, slow-moving blobs by much of popular culture.

It’s hard to learn how to land without leaping first, but having the fortitude to leap first is where the excitement begins. Suddenly, I wish I were more like a frog.

the sunnyside upside to death

Writing and posting that about the sunnyside up show brought to mind this article reprinted in part in The Week magazine, which reminds us that our online life – emails to tweets, posts to updates to comments – will be with the rest of the world long after we’re dead. And anyone looking in to you for any reason (curious relatives or anyone else if you’re somehow famous) will find that and only that. You, will not be present there, but this pile of information stuff will be. And they’ll draw conclusions on whatever portion they read, listen to or view. That’s it. That’s you.

I’ve heard it said that being remembered in a positive way is heaven, afterlife and . You continue then to affect life in a positive manner. You can do good long after you’re long gone.

But the post is so quickly drawn, obtuse and mostly stupid. What would anyone draw from that in a hundred years? Jeez.

Unless of course there actually is a right wing conspiracy on the set and among the Sunnyside Up Show cast replete with subliminal messages and imprisoned hosts, and then i’ll be lauded a hero and who would believe me at that point that it was all a coincidence? That’s when things will get complicated. It’s a good thing I’ll be dead.

Here comes the sun

It’s 3 am on the shortest day of the year and I’m having the sort of anxiety reserved for 3 am on the shortest day of the year at this latitude where the shortest day of the year is to put it succinctly – very, very short. Darkness surrounds us for sixteen or so hours of the 24 we got. It’s anxiety based on any tiny thing it decides to direct its attention to, and it keeps one awake, fidgeting, worrying, wondering why being I’m blessed with so much, I can have this daunting sense of impending doom. I’ve obviously blown my life, people hate me, I’m horrible at my job; I mean, look at me, it’s 3 am and I can’t even sleep, for the love of God (who also hates me).

I should be celebrating, right? It’s the winter solstice! The light is coming! Bright days ahead! In a few months we’ll have 10, 12, 14, then 16+ hours of sunshiny daylight to bask in. Our anxiety will be relegated to serious matters or mental illness, not this general malaise, this pointless worry. The seasons cycle and it all repeats. I can remember similar nights last year and the year before and pretty much everyone before that throughout my adult life. I don’t recall anxiety like this in my younger days. Worry, certainly, but not anxiety. That came on as if it were age-related, like a bad back, thinning hair or crow’s feet.

Maybe it’s based on complexity. My life has become ever more complex over the years and so maybe this is just my mind knowing there is so much to think about that it kind of just crashes a bit like an overwhelmed computer. All day long, I tend to whatever presents itself: getting the kids ready for school, myself to work, all that entails, dinner and so on. The middle of the night is empty of all that and a great opportunity for the mind to take off down some dark, creepy path. Running from another complex day that is sure to come before the sun rises. We go to bed in the dark and get up in the dark.

It’s silly, really. These are the moments I remember my buddy Colin fighting and then losing his life to leukemia. What he would give to have a sleepless night in the home of his beautiful wife and two beautiful kids.

What he would say to me right now I can’t even imagine, but something along the lines of stop whining! It’s the winter solstice! It’s only going to get lighter now!

He’s right. I’m fine. I’m going back to bed. Thanks, Colin.

Sweetness and Light

Wake up at 5 am and gaze upon one of our little creations who had come into our bed in the night. Big two-year-old head, thin neck and skinny shoulders, breathing softly next to me. A small miracle with big attitude, quiet now, practically purring. I slip out of bed and into the morning on a walking meditation. It is one of those mornings after a stormy night where blue skies lead to a bank of black clouds to the east just covering the rising sun, giving a sense of great anticipation for the day ahead. Words like “creation” and “glorious” keep coming into my head as I try to concentrate on my body and breathing.

I remember how large a world “creation” was to a little boy sitting in Sunday school. “God in his Creation” was like a commandment in itself. The start and finish of all we knew. But I was a decidedly skeptical kid and it never took – that version of the universe. It wasn’t long before “creation” seemed a tiny word in relation to my very slow comprehension of a more scientific view of how the Universe unfolded. Creation by some deity in six days seemed tiny and suspiciously fictionalized up against 13 billion years of the incomprehensibly complex and unfolding of our, again, incomprehensibly large universe. The simplicity of the former was a great bore in light of the great mysteries of the latter.

Bill Bryson does a wonderful job of describing for lay people those mysteries in his book “A Short History of Nearly Everything.” I have the audio book and particularly enjoy his voice. He’s obviously brilliant and with a great sense of humor. Worth it for anyone interested in how science and the scientists of note have over time helped us understand and define the world in which we life.

Walking around Lake Como I am treated to one of those moments when the sun, still covered by the black clouds, manages to cascade some light over the edge. You’ve seen in depicted in hundreds of paintings over the years. It was often used to signify “God in His Heaven” and it does a great job especially in light of the fact that the sun was one of our earliest gods and probably the one that makes the most sense. It gives us life, keeps us alive under its gaze, and is there when we die. Our ancestors, before understanding much about the firmament, could only have wondered at its heat, where it goes every night, why it sometimes hides behind great black clouds that rain and throw lightening down upon us, why every so often, it obscures itself with a disk in the middle of the day. God in his Heaven, indeed.

Now I will go upstairs to awaken them little creations to a new and gorgeous day. We like to open the shades and say, “Look! It’s another day full of possibilities!” And we like to give each other loads and loads of ever-changing nicknames. Today I am going to call ’em Sweetness and Light.

the practice of non-practice

The Buddha said, “My Dharma is the practice of non-practice.” And when I’m in the deepest meditative state, I can almost achieve that. I’m like the proverbial pebble at the bottom of the river. All things rush by and I am still, quiet, empty of all the distractions, frustrations and obsessions of the so-called real world. I practice and when I succeed I am, as he said, not practicing anything. I’m just being, being a part of everything else, deeply present and aware, but unaffected in any way. It is here that I can truly rest and I can heal the wounds of 46 years of mostly unmindful living.

And then I go back into the world and start all over. So be it. I’m no Buddha, but I’m trying, and if I slingshot back and forth from booze to Buddha and back, so be that, too. The effort is to make it effortless to stay here, now, mindful and kind.