Let's Be Astonished

Poet Mary Oliver provides us with this excellent guidance:

Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

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Here are some suggestions I would add:

Make the invisible dark force beautiful.

Create a song out of your moans.

Brag about your wounds.

Sneak gifts to your bad self now and then.

Dissolve the ties that bind you to hollow intelligence.

Train yourself in the art of unpredictability.

Play forever in time's blessing.

Lift up your heart unto the wild sun.

Distribute your favors to the vulnerable ones who can never pay you back.

Fall out of love with fear.

Make beautiful messes in the midst of ugly messes.





Listen to a musical spoken-word piece from the soundtrack for my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: "The Experiment"





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THE BODY WE HAVE RIGHT NOW

"This body that we have, this very body that's sitting here right now in this room, this very body that perhaps aches, and this mind that we have at this very moment, are exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, and fully alive.

"Furthermore, the emotions that we have right now, the negativity and the positivity, are what we actually need.

"It is just as if we looked around to find out what would be the greatest wealth that we could possibly possess in order to lead to a decent, good, completely fulfilling, energetic, inspired life, and found it right here."

—Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving Kindness





ECSTATIC PARTICIPATION WITH THE DIVINE

"Poetry is direct participation in the creative principle of the godhead. We only have false prophets (and so many of them!) because people forgot what prophecy is for: the ecstatic participation in the godhead and the exaltation of His/Her limitless Creation."

—Tim Boucher





ANOTHER WAY OF STORYTELLING

"I am inspired by another way of storytelling—not the linear, singular, 'breakthrough' and 'power over' brilliance of the 'hero' narrative, but the spiraling, juxtaposing, and interpenetrating 'power with' luminosity of the weaver in the act of telling.

"I imagine the weaver as the one who attends and intends while the hero extends; the weaver carefully untangles knots that need to be rewoven, while the hero cuts them asunder with his sword.

"Ursula K. Le Guin writes of an 'unheroic' fiction under the rubric of the 'carrier bag theory of fiction.' Using this term, adapted from Elizabeth Fisher, who writes in Women's Creation about the earliest cultural inventions likely being containers, slings, or net carriers used to hold gathered things, Le Guin decries the hero or 'killer story' as one that 'hid my humanity from me.'

"In its place, she celebrates a new/old story, a 'life story' that many people have told for ages, in the forms of 'myths of creation and transformation, trickster stories, folktales, jokes, novels.' It is the novel, above all, that she intends to reclaim from the usurping hero.

"So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of the narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn't any good if he isn't in it.

"I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag.

"A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, ­powerful relation to one another and to us."

—Nancy Corson Carter, "Spider Woman as Healer," Mytho­sphere





AREN'T WE PRIVILEGED?

"Aren't we privileged to live in a time when everything is at stake, and when our efforts make a difference in the eternal contest between the forces of light and shadow, between togetherness and division, between justice and exploitation? Oh, be joyful that you are a warrior in this great time!

"Will we rise to this battle? If so, we cannot lose, for rising up to it is our victory. If we represent love in the world, you see, we have already won."

—Doris "Granny D" Haddock, political activist





"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love."

—Reinhold Niebuhr





Psychotherapists say it's not only naughty but counterproductive to blame others for your problems.

A skilled practitioner urges her clients to accept responsibility for the part they've played in creating their predicaments.

The reason is as much pragmatic as it is ethical: When ­you're obsessed with how people have done you wrong, you have little ambition to change the behavior in yourself that led you into the mess.

While I endorse this approach, I also know that dogmatic adherence to it can warp your mental health as much as any other form of fanaticism.

That's why I urge you to enjoy an unapologetic Blame Fest. Choose a time when you will find fault with everyone except yourself. Howl in protest at the unfair slights people have committed against you.

Wallow in self-pity as you visualize the clueless jerks who have done you wrong. For best results, bark your complaints in the direction of no one but God, an inanimate object, or your mirror.





There's a three-mile stretch of Interstate 880 south of Oakland, California, that I call the Singing Highway. For reasons I don't understand, it generates low humming melodies every time I drive over it, similar to the guttural chants of Tibetan monks. Sometimes I swear I can even hear lyrics.

Once, as I was driving to the airport on the Singing Highway, I swear I heard the same lyric repeating over and over again: "a shortcut to the path with heart / a shortcut to the path with heart / a shortcut to the path with heart."

Where's the path with heart for you? What would it involve for you to take a shortcut to get on it?