“Be in Love with Yr Life” — A Online Summer Writing Course with The Book of Mev*

From time to time I’ve learned how some readers of The Book of Mev recognize themselves in Mev Puleo’s words, say, from her letters and journals. They remind of the French novelist Marcel Proust, who wrote: “In reality every reader is, while she is reading, the reader of her own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable her to discern what, without this book, she could perhaps never have perceived in herself.”

In this late summer-early fall writing class, I invite you to read (or reread) and write off of stories, themes, and questions from The Book of Mev. We’ll explore topics like being present, community, accompaniment, faith, spirituality, the state of the world, the state of the soul,  friends, mentors, teachers, creative arts (e.g., photography), travel, breakdowns, breakthroughs, illness, celebrating, grieving, letting go, poetry, El Salvador, Palestine, Haiti, schools, gospels, letter-writing, gratitude, bearing witness, and much else.

The Good News of Giving and Receiving Books, 6.26.2017

Ten years ago, because of a Social Justice theology class, I got to know Melissa Banerjee, a Bengali-American.  It made sense to me to give her a hardback edition of the The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.  Later on, after staying several weeks in India, she brought back to me Letters of Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna’s foremost disciple. Melissa inscribed the book this way: “Dr C., Hope this brings  you a small ‘piece’ of the peace I experienced at Sri Ramakrishna’s Mission and Math at Belur, Kolkata.”

This selection of Vivekananda’s letters  range from 1888 to 1902, and address members of his community as well as  Westerners eager to learn more about Indian spirituality.   The following is a small sample  of passages I noted of the swami’s observations, advice, exhortation, and insight…

On the Buddha: His greatness lies in his unrivaled sympathy. 18

Have faith in yourselves, great convictions are the mothers of great deeds.  64

The Good News of What To Do, 5.13.2017

A student asked Soen Nakagawa
During a meditation retreat:

“I am very discouraged. What should I do?”
Soen replied, “Encourage others.

May the sun's warmth continue
May its greatness be known
in its presence and absence
in both its excess and its void

May the rain continue
May its greatness be known
in its presence and absence
in both its abundance and its scantness

The Truly & Exceptionally Ecstasy-Inducing Good News, 4.29.2017

Last September, Brendan, and Jen, friends whom I had in Social Justice class years ago at SLU, told me that he had been diagnosed with malignant metastatic melanoma.  The other day, Jen sent me the following text: “We just found out that Brendan’s full body CT scan done on Tuesday was normal—so no signs of cancer 12 weeks into treatment and 6 months after his surgery!”

after diana di prima

I am full of things beginning

Look at all these names carved in this big old beech tree!

Where the grooves sprout clean shoots

Let it begin

I read the clarity of the sky and her haze

The way it hangs on the trees that bear my name

The milky dust that waits out the blue

Let it begin

The tulips will open!  

Golden Parade

Missouri Sweet

Her Victory

Let it begin

All the trees bear tags that each hold

A variation of the benediction  

In loving memory of our mother

Let it begin

Common witch hazel grows

The grass is ripe

With cardinal conditions

Let it begin

We talk our way down St. Felix Street

Attributes of banners and deer

Coronets at our feet

Let it begin

My son watches the dancers

Being fit for spring’s costumes

The pins are tucked slowly

Let it begin

The Endless Net

Ten years ago, I read Eliot Weinberger’s anthology, World Beat: International Poetry Now (New Directions, 2006). Looking back, I’m grateful, because that volume (re)introduced me to Israeli Aharon Shabtai, Iraqi Dunya Mikhail, and Chilean Nicanor Parra, all of whom I have read over and over since then. I encourage anyone to read Mikhail’s “The War Works Hard,” Shabtai’s “As We Were Marching,” and Parra’s “Seven Voluntary Labors and One Seditious Act.”  In his introduction, Weinberger offers a sobering yet hopeful case for us engaging poets outside the U.S.: “All translation sends the essential message that one’s own culture is not enough, and that the way to avoid intellectual stagnation is to learn from other ways of thinking about, perceiving, luxuriating and despairing in the world. This book appears at a moment when the United States is particularly self-absorbed. Less than a fifth of its citizens have passports; a third of its high school students can find the Pacific Ocean on a world map; its rulers dream without embarrassment of a global empire. Poetry, though not the salvation of the world, presents a small alternate model: an endless net of individual dialogues between writers, and between writers and readers, regardless of governments, nations, and communal identities. Its books are a way out of one’s world and a way into the world at large.” Twenty years ago, I received a doctorate from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. I rarely read theologians these days, and I eagerly take joy and refuge in the poets. Weinberger’s books helped facilitate this shift for me.

Eliot Weinberger

Reading Leads to Writing

1.

Yesterday I was rereading Chilean poet Nicanor Parra’s After-Dinner Declarations, which I first read in 2013, and came across this page with my scribbles:

When I moved to Atlanta as a teenager, my mother looked at a home just inside the perimeter that once belonged to Maya Angelou. 

We did not live there. Mom chose instead to move us into a townhouse in Sandy Springs to avoid to traffic on Ashford-Dunwoody. 

I could not pass the house in Dunwoody without thinking of Dr. Angelou-- her work as poet, novelist, activist; her uncredited turn as a dancer in Porgy and Bess; the bliss she found in the glitches of it all. 

Every time we drove by, I wondered what it would have been to have cooked in her kitchen, to have been a teenager within the energy of those walls. 

I have this quote tacked above my desk: 

"Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told, 'I'm with you kid. Let's go.’” 

Some favorite quotes

Most quotes I save from the books I read are lines that I think are clever or touched me in some way, so the following is a sample of the random quotes that spoke to me for whatever reason:

• "...you feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it terrifies you." John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me
• "As one comes back to the books after years of absence they pour out, even against our expectation, the same store of energy and heat, so that we want more than anything to idle in the warmth as in the sun beating down from the red orchard wall." Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
• "Mr. Tupman had saved the lives of immeasurable unoffending birds by receiving a portion of the charge in his left arm." Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
• "By telling stories, you objectify your own experience." Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
• "And now I felt that it was not enough; I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon." Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
• "I felt as if I'd stepped on the place where the last stair ought to have been, but wasn't." P.G. Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves

The Good News of Resistance, 4.22.2017

1.

A while back, I was sitting outside at RISE with a young Irish-Jewish American friend who asked me, when I showed her a particular chapter in Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine, “Who is Abbie Hoffman?”  It was a pleasure to send her such excerpts from his autobiography:

“Later, when I, as well as others, marched on Washington or Chicago, we carried with us the lessons that the local power structures had fought us tooth and nail—that racism was ingrained in the system. We also realized that the lessons came in spite of our formal education. (My critique of democracy begins and ends with this point. Kids must be educated to disrespect authority or else democracy is a farce.)”

“There are lots of secret rules by which power maintains itself. Only when you challenge it, force the crisis, do you discover the true nature of society. And only at the time it chooses to teach you. Occasionally you can use your intellect to guess at the plan, but in general the secrets of power are taught in darkened police cells, back alleys, and on the street. I learned them there.”

“By 1970, my ‘plan’ to stop the war was to disrupt life on the home front. I did not see going to jail as the best use of my time.”

2.

Clara  Bingham has done a riveting oral history of many of Abbie Hoffman’s peers  from the Sixties, focusing in particular on the year 1969-1970 in Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year  America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul.  Here’s her thesis: “Whether rebelling against the draft, the atrocities of the war, police and FBI repression, the conformity of the 1950s, the sexist, racist establishment, or all of the above, the movement in the final years of the sixties threatened the entire power structure of American society and transformed the country.”  Bingham’s book will remind baby boomers and instruct their grandchildren as to how people’s experiences then may still speak to the wars being waged in our name today.

The Good News of Ahmed Kathrada and His Words, 4.20.2017

My friend Patricia Geier shared this short film on Ahmed Kathrada, who spent 26 years in prison alongside Nelson Mandela.

The Good News of Publishing a Novel, 4.19.2017

At Amazon.com, I see that my friend Jason Makansi’s novel, The Moment Before, will be out in November.

On Daniel Berrigan

1.

Some of Daniel Berrigan’s Whitmanian multitudes:  Brother, uncle, jailbird, correspondent, chef, Jesuit, retreat master, playwright poet, peacemaker, mentor,  reader, teacher, prophet, son, friend, logophile.

2.

In our age they they talk about the importance of presenting Christianity simply, not elaborately and grandiloquently. And about this subject they write books, it becomes a science, perhaps one may even make a living of it or become a professor. But they forget or ignore the fact that the truly simple way of presenting Christianity is—to do it. — Soren Kierkegaard

3.

It is not easy for the rich to allow themselves to be touched by the poor, to enter into communion with them, to let themselves be stripped of luxury and comfort. … To love is to reveal the hidden beauty in the hearts of all people, to trust them and to call them forth to greater trust. To love is a way of looking, of touching, of listening to all: taking time with them, especially with those who are broken, depressed, and insecure, revealing to them their importance.—Jean Vanier

Ninety Years Alive on Earth

On Thich Nhat Hanh, At Home in the World: Stories and Essential Teachings from a Monk’s Life.  Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2016.

Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh is a survivor.  Narrowly missing death in South Vietnam  on more than one occasion during the 1960s, he had many students killed in the bloodshed during the American War. He and other Tiep Hien Buddhists could not return to their country for fear of persecution, or worse. Uprooted, he ended up living in France,  where he and friends slowly began to rebuild their  lives.

At Home in the World, published in 2016, offers snapshots of nine full decades of Thich Nhat Hanh’s life.  It bears keeping in mind that his country  was living under a French colonial occupation regime, followed by U.S. intervention and invasion.  He and his friends knew what it was like to live under the U.S. bombs.

The Good News of Pregnancy, 4.10.2017

Eileen McGrath Mosher responded to my out of the blue text with word that she is expecting her third child this September.

Adah, Eileen, Brent, Eamon

The Good News of the 1st Law: Breakthrough and Community

This comes from an experience living in community last year during a year of service out in California.

1. Breakthrough may or may not occur. It is unpredictable. How it happens is mysterious. All we can do is work toward breakthrough.

We didn’t quite know what we were doing, nor did we continuously make efforts to actively engage one another. Community is funny that way--we could co-habit a space, share meals, tells stories, show emotion, but still not understand what the other was saying. What we did well, maybe one of the only things we did well, was continuously show up for one another. When work was draining, we were annoyed at the poor job someone did at their chores, or interpersonal differences colored our conversations, we still managed to show up whether we were open to receive or not. The act of presence mattered.

My position midway through the year was one of defeat. How could we possibly be an open, loving, nurturing community if we were so different? If we were on so many opposite sides of different spectrums and belief systems and ways of living our lives? It didn’t seem possible, it still doesn’t seem--months removed--like it actually happened. But there were pockets of light and true consensus and mutual growth.

I believe that it was through our shared contemplation and experience of the divine that led us to a place of peace. A ceasefire, a new hope for our co-creation of this entity we called community. Through our weeks spent on the road climbing up snow-covered mountains, hiking up heaven’s stairs through the mist, watching the sun rise and set over some of nature’s greatest majesty, or driving on the edge of a cliff screaming ourselves voiceless to crappy early 2000s pop-rock music, we came together through a shared experience of the glory of this world. Through a deeper experience with the great mystery, we mysteriously were able to meet each other in a place of mutual awe and love for our earth, our experience, and each other.

Was it a breakthrough? It’s still unclear. Yet, we worked for it in our own unexpected and mysterious way.

Perhaps this is the good news waiting to be birthed in our torn and battered world. Through showing up for one another and mutually contemplating a sunset, we can start to understand the humanity in one another and less the stark polarizing differences. This naive approach is simple, but perhaps it’s the only place to start.

The Good News of Yoga

From a few weeks ago...my writing and posting have not yet caught up to one another but I'm slowly working to mend that! This one is inspired by Mark's gathas.

Sunlight streams through the broken window at the far corner of the room

Anxiety, lack of motivation, and laziness propel me downwards into my cocoon of sheets

But the inner fire within begs to be stoked and cultivated

I roll with blurred vision onto my mat and start the cycle of breath

Breathing in I acknowledge my lack of perfection

Breathing out I acknowledge my continual showing up for myself on the mat every morning

Muscle peels away from muscle, bones creak, signew is stretched, soreness ensues

The divine mix of effort and ease, focus and stillness, control and rootedness

“Root to rise” they say...rising and falling from the core of my being which gives me life and holds me up through every day, every experience, every conversation, every joy, every challenge

Breathing in I am grounded in love and acceptance

Breathing out I profess gratitude for the center that guides me everyday

A wind blows and my strong, rooted tree topples

Legs may not stretch as far as they did yesterday, and there is definitely tension that could be relaxed

The body begs me to give up, to cease my practice

Doubt and critique bubble up and for a few moments they are all consuming

Breathing in--it’s so hard to breathe in--I try and accept this place

Breathing out I try to tune out the inner critic

The time come when the breath quiets, stretches last longer, and serenity settles in once again

The chaos of unmet goals falls away, since it is truly not the focus of why I show up everyday

Cultivating a practice takes time, just as change--both internal and external--takes time

Have patience for that time

Breathing in I accept where I’m at today

Breathing out I smile

The Good News of Opening, 4.9.2017

I asked Kine and Puck if they'd be willing to open their home on campus to host Share the Wealth with Marilyn Vazquez and they agreed; warm hospitality was also extended by tennis teammates Sarah and Bekah. They had the following response to Marilyn's time with us: "We were very grateful to gather and listen to Marilyn (Maryville student) sharing her life story as an undocumented immigrant. Her compelling story had a huge impact on us and truly opened our eyes and minds towards adversities that people like Marilyn have to deal with every day! Tennis is a very mental sport, but hearing about such powerful life stories teaches us more about mental toughness than every tennis lesson ever could!"

The Good News of Remembering a Friend, 4.8.2017

In 45 minutes I wrote three post cards, two letters and one note to a friend on the East Coast; I’ll post one a day for the upcoming week.