Insight Trails

Possibility

By Jon Berry

THE OTHER EVENING, WHILE OUT FOR A RUN, I CAME ACROSS A NEIGHBOR and her three, little cherubim daughters going up to a nearby woods to leave rose petals and cookies for the fairies for the summer solistice. Made sense. In these dense, misty June evenings, the world is thick with possibility. If nature can produce fireflies, with their strange, flashes of fluorescent yellow-green, why not fairies?

    Plants, fed by early-summer heat and humidity, seem to grow at will this time of year. A vine will reach down and snag you when you're out for a walk, if you're not careful. Back home, the tomato plants are exploding over their baskets, the first fruit taking shape – tennis-ball-size early girls, long-teary-eye plums, squat, chubby heirlooms, perfect, round little cherries. The basil, impatient (“Good luck if you think we’re going to wait for the tomatoes”), is practically begging to be harvested. The roses are on their second of what likely will be a continuous series of blooms running well into autumn. They give the lie to the old line about the bloom being off the rose (“Just wait; more’s coming”).

    Surprises often lurk in early summer’s possibilities. A handful of lettuce plants, having managed to survive the winter’s snows, have been supplying salad greens for a few weeks now. Nearby, potato plants are elbowing their way into the masses of bush beans, their long, vine-y arms clamoring up above the beans to get their share of sunlight (“Us, too!”). How these volunteers got over there, who knows. Last season, the potatoes were on the other side of the garden.

    A family of foxes has taken up residence just up the road. A friend posted onto Facebook a photo of a mother deer and two fawn breakfasting in her yard. Groundhogs, skunks, and possum make daily rounds.

    It’s not quite a Disneyesque peaceable kingdom. The other morning, walking to work, I was stopped by a shower of feathers floating down from the sky. In wonder (“A sun shower of feathers?”), I looked up and saw a red-tail hawk, high up in a tree, making a meal of a blue jay. A few days earlier, a young eagle swooped in front of me across the new path along the Hudson River while I was out on a run, an awe-inspiring vision from one of my favorite poems come to life (“air, pride, plume, here, Buckle!” Hopkins, “The Windhover”).

    Sometimes it’s easy to dismiss the possibility of possibility in our own lives. The pileups of missteps, mistakes, setbacks, and traumas can condition us to decide that things will never change; this is just our fate, same-as-it-ever-was. But nature tells us differently. Change is the constant; you just need to grab on.

    The ancients knew this. A few weeks ago, I went to an Open Center lecture in the city on Algonquin spiritual traditions. It felt frankly odd in the moment, getting smudged with sage smoke, listening to a Native American chant, while looking out a window onto Manhattan (nee Mannahatta) street of honking taxis, rumbling trucks, and on-the-make executives.

    But the night’s ideas have stayed with me. The Algonquin spiritual world was thick with spiritual forces: Geezoolgh, the supreme being; Kitche Minitou, the great spirit/mystery; Kichelamukong, who “dreams us into being”; the 12 levels of the clouds; the grandmothers and grandfathers of the four directions; regional spirits; mother earth; animal spirits; ancestral land spirits; et. al.

    Spirits were not “out there” but active presences. They guided you toward principles like Tchichan Kweewee (literally, “great spirit, watch over me”), being open and trusting of the world and finding inner peace wherever you are, and Madnach Afulams (“right way to live”), learning skills and tools to make your way through life.

    Serendipitously, this idea that nature is not apart from us but with us, and within us, also came up this week in readings I’ve been doing on Celtic spirituality. The Celts believed nature was an animating force. “I arise today, through the strength of heaven, light of sun, radiance of moon, splendor of fire, speed of lightning, swiftness of wind, depth of sea, stability of earth, firmness of rock,” proclaims “St. Patrick’s Breastplate,” one of the oldest Celtic prayers.

    To the ancient Celts, writes John O’Donohue, nature was both “presence and companion.” Within nature, the Celts drew nourishment and felt their “deepest belonging and affinity.” The experience of nature engendered “warmth and wonder.”

    Joseph Campbell says the goal of life is to “match your nature with Nature.” “Follow your bliss,” his famous dictum, begins with journeying within. “Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain,” says Campbell. “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” “Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again and again.”

    Sometimes, that can mean just stopping and taking life in. I never realized until recently that the oft-quoted epigram at the end of Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day” – “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” – a favorite go-for-it, just-do-it challenge of life coaches – in fact, follows a description of a quiet day strolling through fields, falling down into grass, and asking open-ended questions (“Who made the world…the swan…the bear?”). The day’s highlight is watching a grasshopper “eating sugar out of my hand.” “Tell me,” the poem asks, “what else should I have done?” Sometimes, the call is not to do but to just pay attention.

That’s I.T.

For the full text of Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day,” click here.

For the full text of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “The Windhover,” click here.

The excerpt from “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” and quote from John O’Donohue are from O’Donohue’s winsome book Anum Cara. For more information or to buy a copy, click here.  A fuller version of “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” appears in Thomas Cahill’s wonderful How the Irish Saved Civilization; for more information, or to buy a copy, click here.

The lecture on Algonquin spirituality was part of a series by Evan Pritchard at the Open Center. For more, visit his website; click here. For more on the Open Center, click here.

 

Callings (and their Discontents)

By Jon Berry

FOR TWO YEARS IN MY 20S, I WORKED AS A REPORTER FOR a small, weekly newspaper in northern California. Geographically, it was a modest enterprise, extending about 20 miles north-south, and from the coast to a few miles inland. But within it were the most fascinating people – hippies, ranchers, activists, artists, eccentrics, oyster farmers, rock stars, old Italian families.

    Every week turned up amazing stories – from heated protests against offshore oil drilling to recipes for barbecuing oysters; from a local angle on the repressive Pol Pot regime in Cambodia to the wild politics of California pot growing; from new ideas for preserving farmland to a breakthrough first novel from a writer who has gone onto great fame.

    Over the past few years, I’ve been experimenting in this space with creating a small-town newspaper approach to spirituality, both in the workplace and in my actual, physical community, through Q&A’s with people doing interesting, spiritual work, and personal essays on my travels through New York. At times it seems like a far-fetched venture – particularly when I glance over to the file cabinet drawer holding the bills coming due.

    But a series of messages this week has made me wonder whether the question that’s been holding me back – how do you pay the mortgage? – frames it all wrong. Better, instead, to ask: What do you really need?

    Bill Cunningham is one of the most important people in the world of fashion. And he’s done it, basically, with just three things: A camera, a bicycle, and an unwavering interest in fashion. For decades, Cunningham, now in his 80s, has been bicycling up and down Manhattan, photographing fashion in the street and among society’s elites for two weekly photo features for the Sunday New York Times (“On the Street” and “Evening Hours”). 

    He leads a monk’s life. For most of his career, he lived in a modest artist’s apartment above Carnegie Hall with no kitchen and a communal bathroom. His apartment mostly served as storage space and crash pad. File cabinets of photos and negatives dominated the space. He slept on a mattress stacked on storage crates.

    Money? Not important. “Money’s the cheapest thing. Freedom is most important,” he cheerfully declares in Bill Cunningham New York, an absolutely revelatory new film on his life and work. Material comfort? “Who the hell wants a kitchen and bathroom?” He patches his discount-priced rain poncho with duct tape. He wears a sturdy, utilitarian, blue French street-sweeper’s jacket (bought on work trips to France). He goes for simple bikes (sometimes used) – a good thing, since, by his count, he’s had 29 bikes stolen over the years. 

    Cunningham goes to church. But his spirituality – what breathes life into him – is his work. He has passionate points of view. “The best fashion show is in the street. Always has been. Always will be.” And clear ideas about approach. “I let the street speak to me. There are no shortcuts…. It isn’t what I think, it’s what I see.” He has a philosophy. “It’s as true today as it ever was: He who seeks beauty will find it.” And a political perspective. He’s championed outsiders from ‘60s hippies to the gay pride parade to whatever is in the moment with youth.

     While he’s witty in an old-Boston way (reflecting his family’s roots), and charming (confirmed by a neighbor of mine in her 60s who has worked with Cunningham, who says he always calls her “Child!”), Cunningham has a gimlet-eye realism. “Fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life.” He has a reputation for integrity. He once quit a magazine job after an editor changed the slant of a story to make fun of his everyday subjects (which mortified him). He refuses food, drink or any kind of favor on the job. But, he allows, “to be honest and straight in New York, that’s Don Quixote tilting at windmills.”

     And he has fun. He’s been interested in fashion seemingly forever. He jokes at one point that he spent most of his time in church as a child “looking at women’s hats.” He made women’s hats for a while before going into journalism. “I don’t work,” he says. “I only know how to have fun every day.”

    Charles Mingus, one of jazz’s legends – for, among other things, his temper (at the Village Vanguard jazz club, he once got so mad, he thrust his bass up in the air, smashing the light above him; the fixture ever after was known as “the Mingus light”) – added a coda in a film I saw a few nights later. “Play yourself,” he would tell his musicians. Don’t be someone else. “Be who you are.”

    It’s altogether too easy to focus on obstacles instead of following the rules of Mingus (“play 
yourself”) and Cunningham (“freedom is the most important thing”). For his book Callings, Gregg Levoy created a list of “strategies of non-compliance” with callings that I love (and regularly need to be reminded of). They range from “waiting for the Perfect Moment” (aka my good friend once the mortgage’s paid off…); to “hiding behind the tasks of discernment” (as in, just one more workshop…); “telling yourself lies” (I’m just not [fill in the blank] enough…); “distracting yourself with other activities” (hello, email…); “turning a call into a Big Project, intimidating yourself into paralysis”; “choosing a path parallel to the one you feel called to”; “self-sabotage”; “playing sour grapes”; and convincing yourself you’re “unworthy” of a project. For the most part, these are just stories we tell ourselves.

    Sometimes, says Judith Pruess, in a Friends Journal article passed along to me recently, we delude ourselves into being “too practical.” We figure out lines of work we can enter “without too much trouble,” which pay the rent and hold “some” interest. We fall into the “trap of compromising ourselves for money” rather than focusing on the “single most important task in life” – what to do with our “one precious life.”

    These are not new ideas. Pruess’ article was written in 1996, Levoy’s book in 1997. Digging around on the Internet, I found a 2002 first-person story by Bill Cunningham in The Times saying many of the same things he does in the new film. Levoy quotes the warning against self-deception by Simone Weil (1909-1943), “The danger is not that the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but that by a lie it should persuade itself it is not hungry.” Hundreds of years before Bill Cunningham, Shakespeare’s Hamlet proclaimed, “Oh, God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.” Samuel Johnson said, “Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.”

    Last year, researching a paper for seminary, I came across a snippet of a quote from the journal of the 17th-century Quaker businessman. Having “got a little money” from his work, “a little being enough,” Thomas Chalkley writes that he’s decided to devote the next period of his life to spiritual work and service.

    How much is “a little money”? What’s “enough”? The answers, it seems, lie less in what we have to pay than what we have to do.

That’s I.T.

For more on the film Bill Cunningham New York, including to view the trailer, click here. To see Cunningham’s recent work – including video clips combining his smart, and often beautifully captured photos, with his whimsical commentary – visit The New York Times resource on his work; click here. (The movie poster and photos of Bill Cunningham in this article are from the movie website; the "On the Street" logo is from The Times' website.) For a 2002 first-person article by Cunningham in The Times, "Bill on Bill," click here. Warning: some of The Times articles may not be available to non-subscribers.

For more on 1959: The Year that Changed Jazz, produced by the BBC, from which the Mingus quote was taken, click here. The film appears to be coming to the U.S. in limited distribution, and hopefully will be available in video soon. Covering four of the seminal albums of all-time – Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, Dave Brubeck’s  Take Five, Mingus’ Ah-Um, and Ornette Coleman’s Shape of Jazz to Come – it’s a good starting point for educating yourself on modern jazz.

For more on Gregg Levoy’s book Callings, or to buy a copy, click here.

In Praise of Falling

By Jon Berry

 “HOW OLD IS THAT KID?” We were four miles into the Leatherman’s Loop trail race Sunday, running through a woods in Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Westchester County, NY, when the guy next to me asked the question. “Good question,” I replied, and turned back to ask. “Hey, how old are you?”

    And in an instant – just as our tow-headed, skinny, young friend chirped “11!” and we marveled back “Wow!” “Nice job!” – it happened. My left foot hooked under a tree root and I toppled forward like a felled tree – knees, chest, elbows, hands – in the first of what turned out to be three full-frontal face-plants. Luckily, I had an all-dirt landing; no rocks. I got up, made a joke (“Well, that’s out of the way”), and started anew.

    Rule #1 of trail running says you never, ever take your eye off the trail in front of you. But in 6.2 miles fording up-to-your-chest stream crossings, crossing suck-your-shoes-off mud flats, scrambling up and down hills, and hopping over more fallen trees, rocks and roots than you could imagine, at some point, inevitably, you forget.

    Falling is part of the experience. It wasn’t the first time recently that I heard that idea. A week before, going to church with my dad and brother in Indiana, we heard it in the Easter Sunday sermon. An “unwillingness to fall” is normal, the pastor said; no one likes to fall. But falling is “the central truth of the Christian gospel”: “Life springs from death,” not only in the Christian belief in resurrection but from “the many little deaths” of life. My friend Bill, who is Jewish, says the larger spiritual lesson of death-and-rebirth has made Easter his favorite Christian holiday.

    In falling, we come face-to-face with our smallness. And that’s OK. We gain humility (I love that "humble" and "humus" -- dirt -- have the same root). We learn. We move forward.

    In his new book, In the Valley of the Shadows, Biblical scholar James Kugel calls this recognition of smallness the starting point of belief. “Religion is first of all about fitting into the world.” We may think we're masters of our destiny. But we’re still subject to forces we can’t really conceive. And, in our “modern, clumsy” way, we moderns are in some ways less adept at relating to those forces than people in ancient times. Faced with the unexpected (as Kugel was, with a cancer diagnosis that, fortunately, he survived), we realize like the author of Psalm 102 that “all things tatter and fade like a garment” in the face of a power that stays “the same,” whose “years never end.”

          There’s always something larger. As the singer-songwriter Steve Earle says in the song that seems the centerpiece of his new album, “God ain’t me.” It’s not an easy concept to grasp in New York, where people can seem so big and the world so small. It’s one reason I go back to the farm country in Indiana where my family's from; you can almost feel history unpeel there, today’s sights and sounds giving way to the Great Depression and my Dad and his brothers damming the nearby stream to go swimming; travelers on the Civil War-era underground railroad stealing their way to freedom across these fields to the Quaker safe houses in New Garden; and hundreds of years earlier, Native Americans coming to the swampy woods here to hunt. Sometimes it all seems to be alive at once -- a feeling that is as awe-inspiring as any I know.

    Being small means surrendering, at least once in a while. Try as we may, we can’t control everything. "We're not in the outcomes business," as a friend says. That pretty much describes Sunday's face-plant #2. Coming down the last little slope of the race, I carefully put my foot down into gloppy, black mud – and the foot just slid back and I went down with a plop. I laughed again, and looked around. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day. The mud felt all right.

    So we try with our might but remember above all to enjoy the day (hello again, Ecclesiastes). That essentially seemed to be the message before the race from Danny Martin, the former Catholic priest who is the Leatherman’s spiritual director. He urged the runners to look on the day as an exercise in sustainability: All the environmental good works we do will mean nothing if we don't take the wonder of the earth into our hearts. It was a fitting preamble to the Irish/Navajo blessing he then led us in, that there is beauty before us, behind us, below us, above us, and within us.

    An hour later, arriving at the last, largest, deepest stream crossing, aka the “Splashdown,” just short of the finish line, it seemed only right, then, to end the day not with a ginger wading-across but -- why not?! -- to instead stretch my arms high, let out a "whoop!" and take a big, arcing water-face-planting dive forward…

That’s I.T.

For more on the Leatherman’s Loop, click here. Coverage of this year's race, including photos, are on the site. The Navajo/Irish blessing is in the FAQ section. Or go back to my Feb. 27 post, "A Spring-Seeking Blessing" which quotes it (amazing how this year's endless winter did turn to spring); click here.

To read the full transcript of "Our Own Resurrection," the Easter Sunday message at West Richmond Friends (IN) Meeting, delivered by Kelly Burk, director of religious life at Earlham College, click here. The quotation she cited is from the book Leaving Church, by Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor.

For more on James Kugel’s In the Valley of the Shadows, or to buy a copy, click here.

For more on Steve Earle's new album, "I'll Never Get Out of this Life Alive," or to buy a copy, click here. To view Joan Baez's cover of "God Is God," click here.    

Spiritual New York: The Widening Circle

By Jon Berry 

WHAT DO YOU CALL A LAPSED PRESBYTERIAN WHO makes an offering to a Buddha in her Manhattan apartment before she leaves for a business trip? Or the man who puts his Jewish identity aside for a moment when he passes St. Patrick's Cathedral to go inside and light a candle? Or the practicing Catholic who feels most spiritually connected not inside a church  but sitting at Jones Beach watching the waves come in?

    My answer is: Friends. People I learn from and lean on, and whom I try to reciprocate in their times of need. Fellow travelers in spiritual New York.

    Over the years, they – and the many more like them in what has come to be an ever-widening circle – have come to embody a saying I love: “Your problems are only as big as your God is small.”

    I tend to use the word “God” carefully. I don’t have a good, day-in-day-out, working definition of what the word means. Frankly, I hope I never do. Sure, it’d be nice if God had Louis Armstrong’s voice – and, while we’re at it, preceded every pronouncement with the 1-minute, 35-second trumpet solo that opens Louis’ version of La Vie en Rose.

    And yes, in my mind’s eye, Satch is sometimes accompanied by a fleet of angels who look just like Bruno Ganz in Wings of Desire, coifed in long, ponytailed hair, wearing long, dark overcoats, and quoting Rilke. Better than a burning bush.

    But, in the end, some things should be beyond our creaturely grasp. Otherwise, where’s the adventure?

    That said, there is a feeling that I get when I’m part of a group that is gathered in what the Buddhists call lovingkindness, Christians call “the beloved community,” and, in 12-step, is described as the healing and recovery found in the group. In these times, I feel part of something good, loving, and right that is larger than myself.

    Likewise, there is a sense I get when one of those fellow pilgrims says something – be it the trembling words of worship, or a mischievous gleam over coffee – that is a wisdom I’ve known, but never heard; that is truer than I had imagined; or seems to have been plucked right from my soul. As the old Quakers said, “that Friend speaks my mind.”

    At such times, I see how a more spacious spirituality can make the hardest problems seem smaller. It may not be La Vie en Rose. But it works.

    This was such a week. The more I put myself out there, the more that spaciousness got played back to me. It came through in new experiences – leading a group to the East Village to join 40 New Yorkers singing (actually, often, roaring) the ever-expanding, thrumming harmonies of the rural American tradition of Sacred Harp.

    There were new lessons – a lecture in lovingkindness meditation at Tibet House. (Tip: Choose 2-3 wishes. Direct them first to yourself, then extend them to others. “May I be happy. May ____ be happy.” “May I live with ease. May ____ live with ease.” “May I find peace.” “May ___ find peace.” “May I be healthy and whole. May ____ be healthy and whole.” Try it at home. Then try it in the subway, a supermarket, or walking down the street – remembering to not walk too slow. This is New York, after all.) And there were trips to familiar havens – silent wors hip among Friends on Sunday; three12-step meetings. 

    But what I’ll most remember is many conversations with friends, asking them about their practices, how they handle situations, what they lean on.

    There’s a perception in the wider world that New York is a spiritually bereft city. Being the center of the financial empire (Wall Street), media empires (The Times, The Journal, the news networks), and, yes, may as well, baseball’s evil empire (the city’s beloved Yankees), the thinking goes, rules out having a spiritual center.

    It’s like the conventional wisdom that I read in the press, and sometimes hear in seminary, that the loosening of Americans’ religious affiliations, and the rise of new practices like yoga and meditation, have somehow made this a less spiritually serious country. Some see us as a nation of confused, feckless spiritual grazers in need of being corrected and brought back into the fold. I don’t agree.

    Rather, in the personal stories I’ve seen play out in New York, I see something close to the non-polemical, open-minded, trial-and-error building of spiritual “toolkits” that Quaker blogger Diane Reynolds, quoting recent readings of hers, wrote about last week. In the stories is a spiritual experimentation like the essay’s description of “the creative and improvisational nature of jazz,” more about “invention than perfection.”

    My friend goes into the church and lights a candle because, “it can’t hurt” and, in fact, feels right. With an adult child in recovery from heroin addiction, he’s earned the right, I’m persuaded, to try whatever he thinks can help. My other friend goes to the beach because every pore in her body tells her that’s where she will find serenity; invariably, she does.

    And there’s the friend who, with her mom, was attracted to the century-old Buddha they saw in the store in upstate New York. As her mother grew ill, they bought the Buddha. When her mom passed, the statue came to my friend’s apartment, where it now has a special place of honor (photo below). When she leaves the offering of coins to the Buddha before heading off to the airport, she is, in essence, redrawing her connection to her mother.

    Along the way she’s acquired more Buddha’s, as well as a few Shiva’s and Ganesh’s. She carries a tiny, smiling Buddha in her purse. “It sounds silly. But it makes me feel good to know he’s there,” she laughs. “I’ll stumble across him, and feel relieved.”

    In their own, idiosyncratic (the root of which literally means “mix it oneself”) ways, I’ve come to see these friends as like the early Quakers who said they knew spiritual truth “experimentally.” They’re following the Buddha’s advice to his followers to take nothing on his word, but to test everything and find truth themselves.

    Their personal striving after new images seems to me not so different from the absorption, in a different age, of the ancient pre-Colombian Nahuatl metaphor flor y canto, flower and song, into Christianity – the notion that beauty is a blessing, a reflection of the divine – and that we are to respond to it with flower and song of our own.

    In breathing new life into their beliefs, I think, they are enacting a conception of God that I read a year ago in seminary, and that could grow into my definition: that “God is the communion of all things fully alive.”

    The journey to connection is not easy. Many of my friends these days have been to the place Dante describes when he writes, “In the middle of the road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.” They’re proof of what the poet David Whyte, who often quotes the Dante image, says: “Every courageous life is lived in the grit and difficulty of existence.”

    They have lived on the other side of the equation “there but for the grace of God go I” – the place others dread going – and have found that grace is evident – in fact, can be more abundant – on the other side. The least I can do is listen.

That’s I.T.

Steady, wise, and touched with joy and wistfulness: That's how I hear Louis Armstrong's La Vie en Rose. Have a listen by clicking here. Who knows, you, too, may hear angels sing from above. Let me know what you think -- and whether another voice or instrument better captures the Eternal to you. 

I’ve written often enough about 12-step, it’s probably time for a link. Here’s one for those who interested in learning more about Al-Anon, the amazing, six-decade-old fellowship for those impacted by others’ alcoholism and addiction. Here’s a link Al-Anon/Alateen World Service Organization. It includes questions to consider if you think you or someone you know could benefit from Al-Anon, and lists for finding meetings around the country. 

Given how often I write so about the silent worship of Friends, it’s also time for a link for those interested in learning more about Quakerism, my other spiritual base camp. Here are links to Friends General Conference (where you can find newcomer info and directions to meetings) and Friends Journal, the magazine of "Quaker thought and life today." 

The Quaker Blog I referred to is Emerging Quaker, by Diane Reynolds, a journalist by trade, now a student at Earlham School of Religion (where I've studied). The essay I cite is “Utopia.”

Learn more about Sacred Harp by clicking here; find out about New York area sings here.

The idea that "God is the communion of all things fully alive" is from Elizabeth Johnson, in her book Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God. Click here to learn more.