Feeling Emotion Conveyed by a Performer

Chopin’s Étude Op. 10 No. 3, Tristesse, performed by Derek Wang (11 years old).

The Musical Brain

The brain processes musical nuance in many ways, it turns out. Edward W. Large, a music scientist at Florida Atlantic University, scanned the brains of people with and without experience playing music as they listened to two versions of a Chopin étude: one recorded by a pianist, the other stripped down to a literal version of what Chopin wrote, without human-induced variations in timing and dynamics.

During the original performance, brain areas linked to emotion activated much more than with the uninflected version, showing bursts of activity with each deviation in timing or volume.

So did the mirror neuron system, a set of brain regions previously shown to become engaged when a person watches someone doing an activity the observer knows how to do — dancers watching videos of dance, for example. But in Dr. Large’s study, mirror neuron regions flashed even in nonmusicians.

Maybe those regions, which include some language areas, are “tapping into empathy,” he said, “as though you’re feeling an emotion that is being conveyed by a performer on stage,” and the brain is mirroring those emotions.

Regions involved in motor activity, everything from knitting to sprinting, also lighted up with changes in timing and volume.

Anders Friberg, a music scientist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, found that the speed patterns of people’s natural movements — moving a hand from one place to another on a desk or jogging and slowing to stop — match tempo changes in music that listeners rate as most pleasing.

“We got the best-sounding music from the velocity curve of natural human gestures, compared to other curves of tempos not found in nature,” Dr. Friberg said. “These were quite subtle differences, and listeners were clearly distinguishing between them. And these were not expert listeners.”

Dr. Daniel Levitin’s project found that musicians were more sensitive to changes in volume and timing than nonmusicians. That echoes research by Nina Kraus , a neurobiologist at Northwestern University, which showed that musicians are better at hearing sound against background noise, and that their brains expend less energy detecting emotion in babies’ cries.

Separately, the Levitin team found that children with autism essentially rated each nocturne rendition equally emotional, finding the original no more emotionally expressive than the mechanical version. But in other research, the team found that children with autism could label music as happy, sad or scary, suggesting, Dr. Levitin said, that “their recognition of musical emotions may be intact without necessarily having those emotions evoked, and without them necessarily experiencing those emotions themselves.”

Read the entire article here… 

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See also:

• How Musicians Communicate Emotion (NYT)
• A Brain on Chopin (NYT)
• Benjamin Zander on Music and Passion (TED)
• Musical Language (Radiolab)
• Evelyn Glennie Shows How to Listen (TED)
• This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin
• A Complete Experience of Listening

Open and Listening

Excerpt from "Corner Office: Mark Fuller," by Adam Bryant, New York Times, April 16, 2011:

Improv, if properly taught, is really about listening to the other person, because there’s no script. It’s about responding. I was noticing that we didn’t have a lot of good communication among our people (WET Design).

If you think about it, if you have an argument with your wife or husband, most of the time people are just waiting for the other person to finish so they can say what they’re waiting to say. So usually they’re these serial machine-gun monologues, and very little listening.

That doesn’t work in improv. If we’re on the stage, I don’t know what goofball thing you’re going to say, so I can’t be planning anything. I have to really be listening to you so I can make an intelligent — humorous or not — response.

So I got this crazy idea of bringing in someone to teach an improv class. At first, everybody had an excuse, because it’s kind of scary to stand up in front of people and do this. But now we’ve got a waiting list because word has spread that it’s really cool.

You’re in an emotionally naked environment. It’s like we’re all the same. We all can look stupid. And it’s an amazing bonding thing, plus it’s building all these communication skills. You’re sort of in this gray space of uncertainty. Most of us don’t like to be uncertain — you know, most of us like to be thinking what we’re going to say next. You get your mind into a space where you say, “I’m really enjoying that I don’t know what he’s going to ask me next, and I’m going to be open and listening and come back.”

We’ve got graphic designers, illustrators, optical engineers, Ph.D. chemists, special effects people, landscape designers, textile designers. You get all these different disciplines that typically you would never find under one roof — even making a movie — and so you have to constantly be finding these ways to have people connect.

So we do things like improv, and I think they really have developed our culture.

* * * * *

See also:

• Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up by Patricia Ryan Madson
• The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed by Adam Bryant
  

You Don’t Have That Kind of Time

"When I was 38, my best friend Pammy died, and we went shopping about two weeks before she died, and she was in a wig and a wheelchair. I was buying a dress for this boyfriend I was trying to impress, and I bought a tighter, shorter dress than I was used to. And I said to her, 'do you think this makes my hips look big?' and she said to me, so calmly, 'Anne, you don't have that kind of time.' And I think Easter has been about the resonance of that simple statement; and that when I stop, when I go into contemplation and meditation, when I breathe again and do the sacred action of plopping and hanging my head and being done with my own agenda, I hear that 'you don't have that kind of time,' you have time only to cultivate presence and authenticity and service, praying against all odds to get your sense of humor back."

~ Anne Lamott, from “Beyond Bunnies: The Real Meaning Of Easter Season,” with Michele Norris, NPR’s All Things Considered, April 18, 2011

Animated Prose

Using around 3,000 still images, Andersen M Studio has animated an extract from Maurice Gee's novel, Going West, for the New Zealand Book Council...

Colenso BBDO commissioned Andersen M Studio to create this stop-frame animation, which took around eight months to complete. The film was designed and animated by the studio's Line Andersen and photographed by her brother, Martin, who set up Andersen M Studio in 2000.

"The entire film is handmade, using only 10A scalpel blades and paper," explains Martin Andersen.

~ Creative Review (11.30.09)

See also: Altered books (Wikipedia)

I Don’t Know

Dawn
by Cloud Cult, from Light Chasers

The airport's clear for a landing.
The snow is melting on the garden.
All our anxieties are in a box I mailed to Pluto.
And I feel like the sun.
Gonna burn it all away.

We rest our heads upon one pillow.
Beg for falling stars to break in our window.
Outside the evergreens are blowing out their birthday candles.
And I feel like the wind.
Gonna blow it all away.

Pray to the 'I Don't Know' that made me.
Protect my Love, protect my friends, protect my baby.
I may have worries, but I'm not going crazy.
I feel like the rain.
Gonna wash it all away.

I can't breathe unless you're in my air.
I'm not here unless you're somewhere near.
When old age calls, we'll share a rocking chair.
And I feel like the dawn.
That light is getting near.

To Think Oneself into the Minds of Others

Excerpt from “Only Love and then Oblivion,” by Ian McEwan, the Guardian, September 15, 2001:

I suspect that in between times, when we are not consuming news, the majority of us are not meditating on recent foreign policy failures, or geopolitical strategy, or the operational range of helicopter gunships.

Instead, we remember what we have seen, and we daydream helplessly. . .

This is the nature of empathy, to think oneself into the minds of others. These are the mechanics of compassion: you are under the bedclothes, unable to sleep, and you are crouching in the brushed-steel lavatory at the rear of the plane, whispering a final message to your loved one. There is only that one thing to say, and you say it. All else is pointless. You have very little time before some holy fool, who believes in his place in eternity, kicks in the door, slaps your head and orders you back to your seat. 23C. Here is your seat belt. There is the magazine you were reading before it all began. . .

If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.

Redefining Apathy

Dave Meslin identifies seven barriers that keep us from taking part in our communities, even when we truly care.

Guide Her, Protect Her

A Mother’s Prayer for Its Child
by Tina Fey, from Bossypants

First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches.

May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it’s the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the Beauty.

When the Crystal Meth is offered, may she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half And stick with Beer.

Guide her, protect her when crossing the street, stepping onto boats, swimming in the ocean, swimming in pools, walking near pools, standing on the subway platform, crossing 86th Street, stepping off of boats, using mall restrooms, getting on and off escalators, driving on country roads while arguing, leaning on large windows, walking in parking lots, riding Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, log flumes, or anything called “Hell Drop,” “Tower of Torture,” or “The Death Spiral Rock ‘N Zero G Roll featuring Aerosmith,” and standing on any kind of balcony ever, anywhere, at any age.

Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes And not have to wear high heels. What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit.

May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers.

Grant her a Rough Patch from twelve to seventeen.Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, For childhood is short – a Tiger Flower blooming Magenta for one day – And adulthood is long and dry-humping in cars will wait.

O Lord, break the Internet forever, that she may be spared themisspelled invective of her peers And the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed.

And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it.

And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord, that I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 A.M., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back. “My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me. And she will forget. But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes.

Amen.

Listen to Tina Fey read from this essay on Fresh Air (April 13, 2011).

How Is It That the Innocent Survive

Excerpt from "Wicked’s Gregory Maguire on What Turns a Story into a Fairy Tale":

You might say that every fairy tale at its heart is the story of growing up, of a protagonist successfully navigating the treacherous path through the woods from innocence to experience without being eaten by the wolves. For children a fairy tale is about hope. They don’t yet know if they are going to make it. They read fairy tales as being about what might happen, that they might have the strengths to make it through the woods and fight the dragons, and end up in the castle with the princess or the prince. Adults look at fairy tales differently, because, if they are adults, presumably they have made it to that safety zone of having survived their childhoods. They look back at fairy tales with a combination of nostalgia––because don’t we all love something about our childhoods anyway, including the mystery of what was going to be on the other side of childhood––and a sort of clinical curiosity. We want to know how is it that the innocent survive when they are really so clueless. We love to read about how people became who they became, how Picasso became Picasso, or how Elizabeth Taylor became Elizabeth Taylor. As adults, let’s face it, even if we have make it to adult life, we are still not sure exactly who we are. To look back at the story of a fairy tale, which is to look back at the story of a path from cluelessness to potency, can continue to give us courage.

Erik Christian Haugaard, a Danish writer who is now dead, said in a speech once, “The Fairy tale always takes the side of the weak against the mighty. There is no such thing as a fascist fairy tale. A fascist fairy tale would be an absurdity.” There is something essential about that fact. The protagonist can’t be dominating or mean or the bully of the playground. There might be new fairy tales, but there are some eternals that have to exist. If they don’t exist, what we see is not a fairy tale––it is something else. The absolute requirement of a fairy tale may be that the protagonist has to be in some way less strong and more humble than other people in the story. But as long as that is in existence than the form of a fairy tale can change infinitely and it will always be recognizable by anyone who hears the words “once upon a time.”

See also: Director Joe Wright explains the surprising five films that inspired the making of Hanna.

Real Life

Phil Stutz describing the 96 Hour Academy Awards Principle to Kim Masters on KCRW’s The Business (April 4, 2011):

My rules of life are there’s uncertainty, there’s pain and it requires constant effort. You can’t abrogate those rules. I don’t care how many Academy Awards you’ve won. I find the high lasts roughly 96 hours. After that, the person’s a little bit stunned because life is going on just as it was, they just can’t believe it. And once in a while, they’ll really crash badly. The principle isn’t a treatment for it. I just try to warn them in advance. If they get nominated, I put them in the army to prepare.

*     *     *     *     *

Barry Michael describes the Realm of Illusion (New Yorker):

Our culture denies reality. It suggests that you can live in a world that is free of hardship. The media portray the beautiful people who inhabit this world. Their lives seem like glossy magazine photographs—airbrushed, like a “perfect moment” frozen in time. Phil Stutz was the first person I heard give this mythical world a name: the Realm of Illusion. We’re trained to feel like failures if our lives don’t resemble this ideal world.

But there’s a way to accept the imperfections of real life and still feel good about yourself: First, you must face the truth about reality.

Phil encapsulated this truth in the drawing above. The Realm of Illusion is depicted above the line. The stick figure is you on a quest for the perfect life (symbolized by the square with the dotted line). This realm is just an image. It has no more depth or movement than a still photograph.

Real life is below the line. Each circle represents an event (one project, one confrontation, even one day). The black dots inside each circle are turds. That means that no event is perfect; pain, uncertainty, loss are always with us. But, whether you consider an event a success or a failure, life will keep moving and produce another event. It’s this constant movement that gives life its creative power.

Look at the picture every morning. It reminds you that the Realm of Illusion doesn’t exist. No one’s life is without turds, no matter how successful people appear to be. Practice projecting yourself into the illusion at the top and then forcing yourself downward into the flawed (but alive) reality at the bottom. You’ll develop the following strengths:

1. You’ll become more accepting of yourself and stop judging yourself against an impossible standard.
2. You’ll deal with difficulties calmly and rationally as a natural part of life.
3. You’ll begin to feel a sacred kind of wisdom in events, even the bad ones. This builds faith.

See also: “Hollywood Shadows: A Cure for Blocked Screenwriters,” by Dana Goodyear, New Yorker, March 21, 2011

You Will See

“Go into your own familiar yard. It may be a beautiful garden. It may be only a weedy lawn with a few half-dead shrubs. No matter — if you throw back your shoulders and look up into the sky, you will see what else is yours.”

~ Evelyn Corley Buzbee, lifelong gardener

See also: Cabin Tiger Studio

[Thanks, Pat!]

Compassion for Fun and Profit

“The first step is attention training. Attention is the basis of all higher cognitive and emotional abilities. Therefore, any curriculum for training emotional intelligence has to begin with attention training. The idea here is to train attention to create a quality of mind that is calm and clear at the same time. And this creates the foundation for emotional intelligence.”

~ Chade-Meng Tan, Google’s “Jolly Good Fellow,” talking about how the company practices compassion in its everyday business and the Search Inside Yourself program.

Still Not Found

A Buddhist priest prays for the souls of the victims still not found in the rubble, Yamada, Japan. (New York Times)

See also: To Be Bothered and Perception, Intense City

Virtual Choir

“In a moving and madly viral video last year, composer Eric Whitacre led a virtual choir of singers from around the world. He talks through the creative challenges of making music powered by YouTube, and unveils the first two minutes of his new work, ‘Sleep,’ with a video choir of 2,052.”

Looking for Meaning in Objects

Excerpt from “Alive Enough?” on Being, April 7, 2011:

Krista Tippett (host): I'm utterly intrigued just by the way you describe your passion, your interest and concern, that you study this objective side of our encounters with technologies, that I'm concerned with— the human meaning of the objects of our lives. And just as we start, I wanted to ask you a kind of question I ask everyone, which is, was there a spiritual background to your childhood?

Sherry Turkle (author of Alone Together): Well, I think in my case the question didn't come from a spiritual quest. It came from a deeply personal psychological quest. My father — my biological father disappeared from my life when I was around two. My mother, my grandparents, my mother's sister, my aunt, didn't want me to know anything about him. And so, of course, I only wanted to know things about him and would search…

There were these places. There was a closet that had old books and trinkets and there was a junk drawer. There were just these places where the memories were kept. I would scour them for traces of him and finally I found one. I found a photograph of him in which someone in anger had rubbed out his face, but I found all kinds of information from that photograph, you know, that he wore tweed pants, where he was standing, what his lace-up shoes looked like, and I just think that some place in that quest of a child, the notion of looking for objects to fill in human meaning became very close to my heart in a very personal way.

As I became a sociologist, [I discovered] there's a fancy word for studying this; it's called bricolage. It's the science of studying meanings and the interplay of objects, and I realized that that's kind of what I'd been doing all the time. A little bit like Molière's, Monsieur Jourdain who'd been speaking prose all his life without knowing it, I'd been a bricoleur all my life without knowing it.

*     *     *     *     *

To make our life livable, we have to have spaces where we are fully present to each other or to ourselves, where we're not competing with the roar of the Internet and, quite frankly, where the people around us are not competing with the latest news off the Facebook status update. They may not have anything new. They may just be there being in a way that needs attention. I mean, people like to put things on Facebook--and certainly Twitter--that are happy. I've interviewed people who say things to me as simple as, you know, I don't even like to put that my dog died...because it doesn't seem the place. It doesn't seem the place for a lot of people to share negative things.

Anyway, I guess I'm saying that sacred space [are] the places in your daily life where you want to keep them for yourself and the people who you need to give your full attention to. I have very simple rules — so far as I have rules — for how to know you're close to one or in one or should be having one: it's dinner, it's sharing meals with your family, it's that moment at school pickup when your kid looks up and is trying to meet your eye. You know, you're looking down at your smartphone and your child is trying to meet your eye.

I have enough data from children who're going through this experience to know that it's a terrible moment for them. It's on the playground. Very bad when your child's on the jungle gym and is desperately trying to have you look at them, for them to be taking hands off the jungle gym to try to get your attention — accident time. I mean, be in the park. Be in the park with them. Spend less time there, but make it a space. Make it a moment. These are important moments.

*     *     *     *     *

See also: “Brainpower,” To the Best of Our Knowledge, 4/10/11

Wherever They Are

“Wildflowers don't move to find the sun's rays. God makes them fecund wherever they are.”

~ Frère Christian de Chergé, from Of Gods and Men

To Increase Flourishing

From Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being by Martin Seligman:

When I started my work in Positive Psychology, my original view was closest to Aristotle’s—that everything we do is done in order to make us happy—but I actually detest the word happiness, which is so overused that it has become almost meaningless. It is an unworkable term for science, or for any practical goal such as education, therapy, public policy, or just changing your personal life. Moreover, the modern ear immediately hears “happy” to mean buoyant mood, merriment, good cheer, and smiling. “Happiness” historically is not closely tied to such hedonics—feeling cheerful or merry is a far cry from what Thomas Jefferson declared that we have the right to pursue—and it is an even further cry from my intentions for a positive psychology.

To understand what “happiness” is really about, the first step is to dissolve “happiness” into more workable terms. When I wrote Authentic Happiness a decade ago, I thought that happiness could be analyzed into three different elements that we choose for their own sakes: positive emotion, engagement, and meaning. Positive emotion refers to what we feel: pleasure, rapture, ecstasy, warmth, comfort, and other such emotions that contribute to the “pleasant life.” Engagement is about flow: being one with the music, time stopping, and the loss of self-consciousness during an absorbing activity, experiences which contribute to the “engaged life.” The third element is meaning. I go into flow while playing bridge, but after a long tournament, when I look in the mirror, I worry that I am fidgeting until I die. Human beings, ineluctably, want the “meaningful life”: belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than you are. Happiness and life satisfaction, I thought, could be increased by building positive emotion, engagement, and a sense of meaning in life.

This is not enough.

I no longer think that positive psychology is about happiness, or about a quest for increasing life satisfaction through positive emotion, engagement, and meaning. It turns out that how much life satisfaction people report is itself determined by how good we feel at the very moment we are asked the question. Averaged over many people, the mood you are in determines more than 70 percent of how much life satisfaction you report. If positive psychology is to be more than a “happiology” of cheerful mood, we need to shift our focus to well-being. I believe the gold standard for measuring well-being is flourishing, and that the goal of positive psychology is to increase flourishing. Flourishing rests on five pillars, each of which we value for its own sake, not merely as a means to some other end. Positive emotion, engagement, and meaning are three of the pillars, but they cannot do the “heavy lifting” of supporting human flourishing by themselves.

Room to Grow

“Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”

~ Janet Fitch, from White Oleander

Maybe We Try Too Hard

"Maybe we try too hard to be remembered, waking to the glowing yellow disc in ignorance, swearing that today will be the day, today we will make something of our lives. What if we are so busy searching for worth that we miss the sapphire sky and cackling blackbird. What else is missing? Maybe our steps are too straight and our paths too narrow and not overlapping. Maybe when they overlap someone in another country lights a candle, a couple resolves their argument, a young man puts down his silver gun and walks away."

~ Naomi Shihab Nye, from Time You Let Me: 25 Poets Under 25

@WhiskeyRiver

Narratives of Grace

“We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage — almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.”

~ Thomas Cahill

No More Goals for You

Horoscopes For the Dead
by Billy Collins, from Horoscopes for the Dead: Poems

Every morning since you fell down on the face of the earth,
I read about you in the newspaper
along with the box scores, the weather, and all the bad news.

Sometimes I am reminded that today
will not be a wildly romantic time for you,
nor will you be challenged by educational goals
nor will you need to be circumspect at the workplace.

Another day, I learn that you will miss
an opportunity to travel and make new friends
though you never cared much about either.

I can’t imagine you ever facing a new problem
with a positive attitude, but you will definitely not
be doing that or anything like that on this weekday in March.
And the same goes for the fun
you might have gotten from group activities,
a likelihood attributed to everyone under your sign.

A dramatic rise in income may be a reason
to treat yourself, but that would apply
more to all the Pisces who are still alive today,
still swimming up and down the stream of life
or suspended in a pool in the shade of an overhanging tree.

But it will come as a relief to learn
that you don’t need to reflect carefully before acting
nor do you have to think more of others,
and never again will creative work take a back seat
to the business responsibilities that you never really had.

And don’t worry today or any other day
about unwanted problems caused by your failure
to interact rationally with your many associates.
No more goals for you, no more pressing matters,
no more money or children, jobs or important tasks,
but then again, you were never thus encumbered.

*     *     *     *     *

Billy Collins was selected as the author of the year by the Bexley Community Book Club and will be giving a reading at Bexley High School April 20 at 7:30pm.

Bach in the Forest

To showcase Japan's NTT Docomo's Touch Wood phone, a giant wooden xylophone was constructed in the woods of Kyushu, Japan to play Bach's Cantana 147 with a wooden ball.

[From DEVOUR]

See also: Lego Ship in a Bottle

Who's This?

Disappearing Act
by Elizabeth Ross Taylor, from Blackbird, Spring 2002

No, soul doesn't leave the body.

My body is leaving my soul.
Tired of turning fried chicken and
coffee to muscle and excrement,
tried of secreting tears, wiping them,
tired of opening eyes on another day,
tired especially of that fleshy heart,
pumping, pumping. More,
that brain spinning nightmares.
Body prepares:
disconnect, unplug, erase.

But here, I think, a smallish altercation
arises.
Soul seems to shake its fist.
Wants brain? Claims dreams and nightmares?
Maintains a codicil bequeathes it shares?

There'll be a fight. A deadly struggle.
We know, of course, who'll win. . . .

But who's this, watching?

[Thanks, Linda!]

Seeing a Song, Dripping with Color

“What happens during a Cloud Cult show is that I start with a blank canvas and the idea is that it is a visual instrument and that people get to see a song being visually rendered on stage each night.”

~ Scott West, Visual Artist & Live Painter for Cloud Cult

The Only Life You Could Save

The Journey
by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.                                                                           

It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Just Another Phenomenon of Consciousness

Excerpt from “Just One Breath: The Practice of Poetry and Meditation,” by Gary Snyder, Tricycle Magazine, Fall 1991:

Traditions of deliberate attention to consciousness, and of making poems, are as old as humankind. Meditation looks inward, poetry holds forth. One is private, the other is out in the world. One enters the moment, the other shares it. But in practice it is never entirely clear which is doing which.

In any case, we do know that in spite of the contemporary public perception of meditation and poetry as special, exotic, and difficult, they are both as old and as common as grass. The one goes back to essential moments of stillness and deep inwardness, and the other to the fundamental impulse of expression and presentation.

People often confuse meditation with prayer, devotion, or vision. They are not the same. Meditation as a practice does not address itself to a deity or present itself as an opportunity for revelation. This is not to say that people who are meditating do not occasionally think they have received a revelation or experienced visions. They do. But to those for whom meditation is their central practice, a vision or a revelation is seen as just another phenomenon of consciousness and as such is not to be taken as exceptional.

The meditator would simply experience the ground of consciousness, and in doing so avoid excluding or excessively elevating any thought or feeling. To do this one must release all sense of the "I" as experiencer, even the "I" that might think it is privileged to communicate with the divine. It is in sensitive areas such as these that a teacher can be a great help.

Read the entire essay…

Lost & Found

 

 

See also: Todd Bieber Finds Owner Of Missing Film From NYC Blizzard

 

[Thanks, Scott!]

Avoiding Interesting Jobs

 p schmidtt

"I consider myself kind of a reporter — one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write. For most of my life, I haven't had the structure of an actual job. When I was very young and decided I wanted to try to write as well as I could, I made a great list of all the things I would never have, because I thought poets never made any money. A house, a good car, I couldn't go out and buy fancy clothes or go to good restaurants. I had the necessities. Not that I didn't take some teaching jobs over the years — I just never took any interesting ones, because I didn't want to get interested. That's when I began to get up so early in the morning — you know I'm a 5 A.M. riser — so I could write for a couple of hours and then give my employer my very best second-rate energy...

You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about...I think about the spiritual a great deal. I like to think of myself as a praise poet....If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like."

~ Mary Oliver, from "Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver," O Magazine, March 9, 2011

To Really See It

• Official site
• Reviews

Wherever We Are

Residence/Inn
by Daron Larson

The hotel room is roomier
now that we’re older,
largely because of your frequent business travel
which rewards loyalty with extra comforts.

There’s even a small kitchen,
though nothing to eat,
and a living room with a couch
that can become a bed for guests.

I pull back the curtains to let the light in.
You’ve already managed to unpack
everything we’ve brought
and sort it all into the drawers —
a tendency I used to tease you about.

The bathroom counter is organized
(his, his).

The white towels hang perfectly undisturbed.
Our books and electronics wait on our nightstands
(yours, mine).

How can we ignore the similarity
between borrowing and owning?
Is it possible not to notice that
home is wherever we are?

When I get up in the middle of the night
to use the bathroom,
I take care to step over the dog,
even though she’s asleep in the kennel
not far from where we live,
hoping to wake from
the confusion of her disrupted routine.

In the morning, we make the bed.
You find coffee and read the paper
while I try to let go of my story
until the bell rings,
and then again whenever I’m able
after the sound trails off.

On the other side of the door
waits a blend of familiarity and strangeness,
not unlike every other door we have ever
closed or opened,
locked or walked through,
alone or together,
for as long as we both have lived.

Within this Structure, One is Free

“And in that moment I understood that everything I had gone to Thailand to look for, to search for, I had it already in my singing — the calm, but alertness,the focus, but awareness, and being totally in the moment. When you're totally in the moment, when I'm totally in the moment, the vessel of expression is open. The emotions can flow from me to you and back. Extremely profound experience.”

~ Claron McFadden, from “Singing is the Primal Mystery,” TEDxAmsterdam, November 2010

[Thanks, Kit!]

Infinitely Tiny Increments

Naked: A Gallery View from Eiko and Koma on Vimeo.

“A naked man and woman moving with glacial slowness on a mound of earth, feathers, sticks and vegetation doesn’t sound at all like an enthralling theatrical experience. But such is the almost inexplicable magic of ‘Naked: A Living Installation,’ by the Japanese-American duo Eiko and Koma, that watching two bodies inch toward and away from each other in infinitely tiny increments is an utterly absorbing, potent drama of time and space — endless in the moment, over before you know it.”

From “Poetry of Stillness, in a Moment Stretched to Infinity,” by Roslyn Sulcas, New York Times, March 30, 3011

Once Again Trees

“When you start on a long journey, trees are trees, water is water, and mountains are mountains. After you have gone some distance, trees are no longer trees, water no longer water, mountains no longer mountains. But after you have travelled a great distance, trees are once again trees, water is once again water, mountains are once again mountains.”

~ attributed to Ch'ing-yüan, from The Way of Zen by Alan Watts

People Perform Better When They Feel Committed and Engaged

Rich Fernandez, the Head of Learning and Organization Development at eBay, in conversation with Vince Horn, “Optimizing Awareness in Organizations,” Buddhist Geeks: Episode 211, March 14, 2011:

It’s almost as if with the evolution of technology and how we’ve optimized our machines, our software, our algorithms, our databases and data analysis capabilities. What comes next is optimizing our awareness and our consciousness and I think that’s increasingly something that is becoming paramount and evident in organizational life...

You know if we think about it, we all work from the age of 21 to the age of 67, 40 hours a week with a couple of weeks of vacation. That’s about 40% of our waking life spent at work -- ninety thousand hours spent at work and [during] that time we will spend most of our productive time, energy and attention.

And so cultivating the quality of the time and of the attention is increasingly paramount. That’s the case because it’s not only something that would be fulfilling for the worker or the member of the organization but it also is useful in terms of business outcomes.

Actually there’s a lot of data on this. In a workplace in which people feel committed, where they feel engaged, where they feel they’re able to really give the best of themselves and exhibit a lot of discretionary effort — when people have that level of commitment and a feeling of wellness they actually perform better.

Corporate Leadership Council and the Gallup Organization are studying hundreds of organizations and millions of employees. They’ve shown that people perform up to 20% better, for example, when they feel committed and engaged. And when they’re thriving they are 57% more productive and they are almost 90% less likely to leave organizations than others who don’t have that experience of well-being.

Well-being, mindfulness, living a sustainable work and outside life are actually differentiators in terms of how effective organizations are whether you’re mission be bottom-line driven, service driven or whatever it is that your organization is purposed for doing…

The consistent and dedicated exercise of mindfulness in the organization is kind of the underlying framework, if you will, that informs all these programs [at eBay]. Something that we’ve been doing at eBay is we’ve been bringing in mindfulness talks and [making] seminars available to employees as well as for some of our leaders and leadership teams…it’s impressive to see a room of 250 Internet employees, on at Thursday around 1:30 in the afternoon sitting in silence for 10 minutes.

See also:

• How Full is Your Bucket? Positive Strategies for Work and Life
• Awake at Work: Facing the Challenges of Life on the Job

Just Looking

(Thanks, But I’m) Just Looking
Peggy Levison Nolan
Dina Mitrani Gallery, March 10 — April 23, 2011

“Continuing her search for beauty and poetry in life’s ordinariness, Nolan exhibits various photographic formats illustrating her almost obsessive act of observing what is around her on a daily basis. She explores the concept of narrative in her series of photographs of the amaryllis flowers that grow in her backyard. This series, approximately thirty 8 x 8 inch prints, depicts her investigative way of looking, studying the everyday phenomenon of nature’s life cycles.”

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” ~ Marcel Proust

Each Unhappy Family is Unique

The Hedgehog (France) was my favorite film of the eight we saw over the weekend at the 36th Cleveland International Film Festival. Other favorites were Special Treatment (France) and Illegal (Belgium). My favorite documentary was The Children of Chabannes.

See also:

• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
• The Children of Chabannes

Humans Together

Cleveland International Film Festival March 24 — April 3, 2011

"In a world where there are no longer books we have almost all of us read, the movies we have almost all of us seen are perhaps the richest cultural bond we have. They go on haunting us for years the way our dreams go on haunting us. In a way they are our dreams. The best of them remind us of human truths that would not seem as true without them. They help to remind us that we are all of us humans together."

~ Frederick Buechner, from Beyond Words

Kindness is Contagious

Temporary Custodian of Beautiful Things

“I’ve been lucky all my life. Everything was handed to me. Looks, fame, wealth, honors, love. I rarely had to fight for anything. But I’ve paid for that luck with disasters. . .I’m like a living example of what people can go through and survive. I’m not like anyone. I’m me.”

~ Elizabeth Taylor, quoted in “A Lustrous Pinnacle of Hollywood Glamour,” New York Times, Mar. 23, 2011

And this from a recent interview for Harper’s Bazaar, “I never planned to acquire a lot of jewels or a lot of husbands. For me, life happened, just as it does for anyone else. I have been supremely lucky in my life in that I have known great love, and of course I am the temporary custodian of some incredible and beautiful things. But I have never felt more alive than when I watched my children delight in something, never more alive than when I have watched a great artist perform, and never richer than when I have scored a big check to fight AIDS. Follow your passion, follow your heart, and the things you need will come.”

Using Technology to Humanize the Classroom

“By removing the one size fits all lecture from the classroom and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, and then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom.”

~ Sal Khan, of Khan Academy

What’s Always Here

Excerpt from Natural Awareness: Guided Meditations and Teachings for Welcoming All Experience by Pema Chödrön:

There are various ways to say what we’re doing here. One of them is uncovering our natural wakefulness or open awareness. Not attaining it or achieving it, but relaxing enough to experience it—to tune into it. What’s always said is like tuning into what’s always here.

When you listen to sounds…

For just a moment, just listen.

Can you hear your heartbeat?

Or feel your heartbeat?

Can you hear your breath?

The idea is that your heart is hopefully always beating. You’re always breathing. But there’s no consciousness of it. In the same way, you’re not conscious of the sounds. We all know what it’s like to walk a city block or country street — or anywhere — and be so lost in thought that you don’t see anything that’s on that street — just enough to keep you from bumping into people or falling down. But you miss a lot.

So the practice is returning or tuning into this natural ability to be present and see and hear — to be conscious, really. You could call it a practice of being fully conscious as opposed to being unconscious. Which is a pretty typical state. Lost in thought. Wandering away.

The point I’m trying to make is it’s not about acquiring something, but uncovering or tuning into a natural wakefulness, a natural awareness, an open awareness that’s always been here.

Experimenting with Forms

“We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.”

~ Ray Bradbury

Listen to Your Life

"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace."

~ Frederick Buechner, from Now and Then

Who Needs Them?

Religious Consolation
by John Updike, from Americana and Other Poems

One size fits all. The shape or coloration
of the god or high heaven matters less
than that there is one, somehow, somewhere, hearing
the hasty prayer and chalking up the mite
the widow brings to the temple. A child
alone with horrid verities cries out
for there to be a limit, a warm wall
whose stones give back an answer, however faint.

Strange, the extravagance of it—who needs
those eighteen-armed black Kalis, those musty saints
whose bones and bleeding wounds appall good taste,
those joss sticks, houris, gilded Buddhas, books
Moroni etched in tedious detail?
We do; we need more worlds. This one will fail.

* * * * *

See also: Updike's 'This I Believe' Essay

[Thanks, Suzanne!]

A Philosophy of the Present

From “In Search of the Present,” by Octavio Paz (translated by Anthony Stanton), Nobel Lecture, October 8, 1990:

Reflecting on the now does not imply relinquishing the future or forgetting the past: the present is the meeting place for the three directions of time. Neither can it be confused with facile hedonism. The tree of pleasure does not grow in the past or in  the future but at this very moment. Yet death is also a fruit of the present. It cannot be rejected, for it is part of life. Living well implies dying well. We have to learn how to look death in the face. The present is alternatively luminous and somber, like a sphere that unites the two halves of action and contemplation. Thus, just as we have had philosophies of the past and of the future, of eternity and of the void, tomorrow we shall have a philosophy of the present. The poetic experience could be one of its foundations. What do we know about the present? Nothing or almost nothing. Yet the poets do know one thing: the present is the source of presences.

In this pilgrimage in search of modernity I lost my way at many points only to find myself again. I returned to the source and discovered that modernity is not outside but within us. It is today and the most ancient antiquity; it is tomorrow and the beginning of the world; it is a thousand years old and yet newborn. It speaks in Nahuatl, draws Chinese ideograms from the 9th century, and appears on the television screen. This intact present, recently unearthed, shakes off the dust of centuries, smiles and suddenly starts to fly, disappearing through the window. A simultaneous plurality of time and presence: modernity breaks with the immediate past only to recover an age-old past and transform a tiny fertility figure from the Neolithic into our contemporary. We pursue modernity in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence.

[Thanks, Whiskey River!]

Please

The Word That Is a Prayer
by Ellery Akers, from American Life in Poetry: Column 321

One thing you know when you say it:
all over the earth people are saying it with you;
a child blurting it out as the seizures take her,
a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital.
What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin:
at a street light, a man in a wool cap,
yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window;
he says, Please.
By the time you hear what he’s saying,
the light changes, the cab pulls away,
and you don’t go back, though you know
someone just prayed to you the way you pray.
Please: a word so short
it could get lost in the air
as it floats up to God like the feather it is,
knocking and knocking, and finally
falling back to earth as rain,
as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch,
collecting in drains, leaching into the ground,
and you walk in that weather every day.

Listening to Pi on 3-14

See also:

• How To Transform The Number Pi Into A Song (NPR)
• Celebrating Pi Day
• Pi on Wikipedia
• Clip from Pi by Darren Aronofsky

The Surprising Interplay of Basic Forces

A collection of direct quotes from reading today.

Found Poem March 13, 2011

I hold the cigarette in my mouth the entire time,
and with the feather boa involved,
there's a sense of danger.

Architects all want to be
philosophers or artists now.
I think they love to hate me.

It was an emotional catastrophe at the time,
being conceived from the inside out,
the fashion industry's disdain for
the great, unwashed masses,
enabling clients to buy shadows of shadows,
sixteen shades of gray.

Over and over complexity from the simplest of rules,
beauty from the surprising interplay of basic forces.
Those are the kinds of patterns that catch my attention.
That turned out to be a fatal miscalculation.

Why are you suddenly awake?

The kind of conversations that
I want to be having
occur best in daytime,
This is a little more challenging —   
and a lot better.

Seeing with Sound

Excerpts from “Blindness No Obstacle To Those With Sharp Ears,” All Things Considered, March 13, 2011:

Meet Daniel Kish. He's a man of many talents. He likes to hike, make music and write. He enjoys children and loves nature. He's an avid biker.

He's also completely blind.

How can Kish bike if he can't see? The method is called echolocation — Kish calls it "flash sonar." As he speeds along on his bike, he makes clicking sounds. As the clicks bounce back to him, he creates a mental image of the space around him. He's kind of like a human bat.

"It is literally a process of seeing with sound," he says.

Daniel Kish leads All Things Considered weekend host Guy Raz on a bike ride in Culver City, Los Angeles, Ca.

“I think that children are incredibly adaptable and intuitive. We know this. I work a lot with children, especially very young children. What I often tell parents when children lose their sight is — warn and support parents — to try and get themselves out of the way of the adaptation process, become more an asset to it than a liability. Because children will adapt if given support to do so and given space to do so.

…It’s the overall process of being willing to reach out into the environment and discover what is around them. If that discovery process is broken by introducing a situation that is not natural, such as keeping the blind child in a playpen or a crib or in the corner, or such as always guiding their hands around their environment or guiding their bodies around their environment — [you really just have to let them figure it out. Getting hurt] is part of it for any child…It is tough, but there’s still a kind of a priori difference. When a sighted child gets hurt we consider it to be unfortunate; when a blind child gets hurt we consider it to be tragic…We really need to divest ourselves of that double standard.

[At World Access for the Blind] our main focus is supporting individuals to access their environment better…It is about a philosophy that we call No Limits Philosophy which challenges us to challenge what we think we know. To challenge every boundary, every box, every limitation that we’ve either put up ourselves or allowed ourselves to be conditioned to accept.

… Conventional wisdom doesn’t favor blindness. Conventional wisdom basically favors the perpetuation of convention. Blindness is not conventional — it’s anything and everything but conventional. So we tend to challenge conventional wisdom to expand itself and accept that there are situations, circumstances which are not conventional yet which still warrant accommodation, consideration, acceptance, awareness.   

Typical?

National Geographic: Seven Billion

Let the Love Begin

Happy is the heart that still feels pain
Darkness drains and light will come in again
Swing open your chest and let it in
Just let the love, love, love begin

~ Ingrid Michaelson

• Ingrid Michaelson’s YouTube Channel
• Rekindle Warmth Toward Yourself and Others
• Mindfulness Strategies for Unpleasant Feelings

The Best Fashion Show is on the Street

• Bill Cunningham New York a film by Richard Press
• On the Street with Bill Cunningham, New York Times
• Wexner Center Member-Only Screening, April 14, 2011

Be Alive if You Can

"You are seeing everything for the last time, and everything you see is gilded with goodbyes — the child's hand like a starfish on the pillow, your hand on the doorknob, the dachshund's lurching off the forbidden couch when you come through the door. . .

You are seeing everything for the last time — the room where for years Christmases have happened, snow falling so thick by the windows that sometimes it starts to snow in the room, Christmas brightness falling on tables, books, chairs. . .

You are seeing everything for the last time — the gaudy tree in the corner, the family sitting there snowbound, snow-blind to the crazy passing of what they think will never pass. . .

And now, today, everything will pass, because it is the last day. For the last time you are seeing the rain fall and, in your mind, that snow, the child asleep, the dog making sheepishly for his pillow by the radiator. . .

For the last time you are hearing the house come alive, because you who are part of this life have come alive to it. . .

All the unkept promises, if they are ever to be kept, have to be kept today.

All the unspoken words, if you do not speak them today, will never be spoken.

The people, the ones you love and the ones who bore you to death, all the life you have in you to live with them, if you do not live it with them today, will never be lived.

It is the first day, because it has never been before, and it is the last day, because it will never be again. Be alive, if you can, through today, this day of your life. Follow your feet. Put on the coffee. Start the orange juice, the bacon, the toast. Then go wake your children and think about the work of your hands. . ."

~ Frederick Buechner, from Listening to Your Life

See also: A PBS Profile of Frederick Buechner

Losing Our Tolerance for Vulnerability

“In our anxious world, we often protect ourselves by closing off parts of our lives that leave us feeling most vulnerable. Yet invulnerability has a price. When we knowingly or unknowingly numb ourselves to what we sense threatens us, we sacrifice an essential tool for navigating uncertain times — joy. This talk [explores] how and why fear and collective scarcity has profoundly dangerous consequences on how we live, love, parent, work and engage in relationships — and how simple acts can restore our sense of purpose and meaning.”

~ TEDxKC, August 2010

Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work where she has spent the past 10 years studying courage, shame and authenticity. She is the Behavioral Health Scholar-in-Residence at the Council on Alcohol and Drugs and has written several books on her research.

Whether We Know It or Not

On Bowing at Strange Altars
from ScurrilousMonk

Whether we know it or not,
All altars are created out of the same need.

Whether we know it or not,
All altars express the same desire.

Whether we know it or not,
All altars ask the same question.

Whether we know it or not,
All altars honor the same mystery.

To Be Swallowed Up

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

~ Louise Erdrich, from The Painted Drum

@jonathancarroll

Help for the Chirpy

Planned Thrills

Excerpt from Timeline by Michael Crichton:

In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.

But where will this mania for entertainment end? What will people do when they get tired of television? When they get tired of movies? We already know the answer — they go into participatory activities: sports, theme parks, amusement rides, roller coasters. Structured fun, planned thrills. And what will they tire of theme parks and planned thrills? Sooner or later, the artifice becomes too noticeable. They begin to realize that an amusement park is really a kind of jail in which you pay to be an inmate.

This artifice will drive them to seek authenticity. Authenticity will be the buzzword of the twenty-first century. And what is authentic? Anything that is not devised and structured to make a profit. Anything that is not controlled by corporations. Anything that exists for its own sake, that assumes its own shape. But of course, nothing in the modern world is allowed to assume its own shape. The modern world is the corporate equivalent of a formal garden, where everything is planted and arranged for effect. Where nothing is untouched, where nothing is authentic.

Where then will people turn for the rare and desirable experience of authenticity? They will turn to the past.

*     *     *     *     *

See also: Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want by James Gilmore and Joseph Pine