This post is part of a series exploring how we humans interact with time. So far we’ve figured out that our latest iteration of strategies for dealing with time, Clock Time, is starting to wear down a lot of us post-moderns into frazzles. The whole purpose of Clock Time is to enable us to get more and more things done. The Achievement Junkies among us are having a field day. The rest of us are finding that if we are…
I am re-reading Rachel Naomi Remen’s book, MY GRANDFATHER’S BLESSINGS: Stories of Strength, Refuge and Belonging. This lyrical book of the collected, very short musings and reflections by a born storyteller and wounded healer who has spent much of her life as a holistic medical counselor for people with chronic and terminal illnesses is one of my go-to books for getting myself back to clarity about how to deal with the vagaries of Life-Its-Own-Self and with our own mortality. The…
Despite assorted life-coach advisories and dictums, I have never actually found the search for and contemplation of my own self particularly interesting. When you’re adept at making (and living) in stories and poems, searching for your one “true” self seems like a waste of time. Delphic pronouncements about the importance of “knowing thyself” are fine, but then there’s that New Age-y corollary that says you have to also embrace and love that self unconditionally or something. This last bit is…
The thing about living your life as a poem or a story or any other kind of art is that there’s got to be a theme to the thing. (It’s one of the rules, according to grade school English and art teachers when it comes to analyzing some bit of self-expression.) This online dictionary I am looking at tells me that a theme is “an idea that recurs or pervades a work of art or literature.” It’s how you make…
Probably we’ve all heard the teaching stories – the ones that make us all nod as if we know something, the ones that make us mutter aphorisms and wisdom-words at each other about the consequences of greed and getting more and more. The stories are usually about some guy sitting all alone in a big old mansion on a hill somewhere. He has everything and yet he feels like he has nothing. (Usually the tale is about a guy, but,…
As a Perfectionist in remission, I am here to tell you that wabi-sabi — a Japanese way of seeing the world — works as an antidote to the never-good-enough, shiny-new-thing madness induced by the classical hyper-focus on perfection and the kind of seamless orderliness that arises from the mathematical, mechanical precision that evolved in the super-industrialized Occidental West where more is always better. I grew up in a pineapple plantation camp on Molokai. Many of my neighbors were Issei, first-generation…
