Uncategorized | Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray)

1. When We Remember To Be Alive. “In praise of the late award-winning composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto” from Frederick Joseph. Because this: “We have been conditioned to believe that speed is synonymous with progress, that a life lived in haste is a life well-lived. But as we take in the world around us, as we cast our gaze upon the brilliant mess that is our human existence, we must pause and consider the wisdom of our now ancestor, Mr. Sakamoto, who understood the virtue of stillness and the importance of deliberate contemplation. For it is only in the calm of such moments that we may truly appreciate the poetry that lies hidden within the seemingly mundane.”

2. Wisdom from Lucian James’s latest Kō Strategies Newsletter (a reminder which felt perfectly timed): “Do you know the concept of ‘killing the Buddha’? It’s a recommendation with which Linji Yixuan, a 9th century Zen monk, used to shock his disciples, ‘If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him’, he would say. What does that mean? It means that we shouldn’t blindly follow any set of ideas or ideologies – including those of Buddha, but follow our own ideas, and stay flexible. We need to avoid the trap of falling into fixed, old ways of seeing, and outdated ways of thinking. Ultimately, killing the Buddha means that your best teacher will always be yourself – not any kind of guru, in any kind of guise. When you kill the Buddha, you see from your own perspective, you’re undivided against yourself, and you see more clearly.”

3. How Corporations Attempt to Co-opt Buddhism.

4. Wisdom from the latest Wellread newsletter: “The many accelerating crises we are facing are coming at us fast and furiously. And while they can feel ‘too big to fail’, they also affirm our interdependence. Thriving in the face of this will demand a commitment and capacity that none of us can muster on our own. We will need the depth of our courage and the width of our connections if we stand a chance against extreme inequality, mutating pandemics, climate calamity and mass migration. We must reach outside ourselves, across divides, beyond borders and towards one another – not just to ensure our collective survival, but to realize our full potential. Here’s how you can play your part:

Locate yourself. We are all a part of this mess we are impacted and implicated in different and disproportionate ways. Locating yourself allows you to show up with skill and find your right role and responsibility in whole of who we are.

Pull the thread. From your location, how can you disrupt and dismantle the spaces and systems you are a part of? Personally, ho can you pull the threads of your conditioning so as to make more space for freedom and possibility?

Weave a new world. Even while systems collapse, new worlds emerge. What is the world you are dreaming into being? How can you help bring it into being?”

5. Miniature Figures Carved in Wood Cradle Colorful Silk Lace in Ágnes Herczeg’s Tender Sculptures.

6. New decisions based on new information from Seth Godin.

7. They Don’t Give a F*ck from Robert Jones, Jr. Because this: “I’m exhausted from repeating myself about the rank evil and hypocrisy of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, and its collaborators and supporters from every demographic.

One of the things I’m tired of repeating is how much they don’t care. They don’t care that they are evil. They don’t care that they are hypocrites. They don’t care about justice. They don’t care about fairness. They don’t care about democracy. They don’t care about the Constitution. They don’t care about civility. They don’t care about our outrage. They don’t care if we march. They don’t care if we protest. They don’t care if ‘we go high’ (they prefer it, actually; we go high, giving them all the room they need to keep going lower and lower, while we go so high that we eventually run out of air). They don’t care about morality. They don’t care about religion. They don’t care about children—not theirs and most certainly not ours.

THEY. DON’T. GIVE. A. FUCK.

All they care about—all they really care about—is money and power. PERIOD. And they will do anything—ANYTHING—to hoard both. Even if—especially if—they have to step over our bones to do it.

The only question left to answer is: Knowing this, what is our counter-strategy? Because it can’t be repeating what’s already failed.”

8. photography is more than a pretty picture from Karen Walrond on Chookooloonks.

9. Movies I want to watch: Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now (Netflix) and Rye Lane (Hulu). In related news, from Lion’s Roar, Twelve New Films That Highlight the Best in Humanity.

10. Mae Martin: SAP on Netflix. This was SO GOOD.

11. You Made It Weird, Pete Holmes’s Podcast, which you can also watch on YouTube. Recent favorite episodes: Mae Martin and Ms. Pat.

12. Underwear Science: Has anyone who designs underwear ever looked at a fat person?

13. The Broadest Portal to Joy. “All sorrow is, on some elemental level beneath cause and circumstance, an act of forgetting our connection to life, to one another, to the grand interbelonging of existence. All joy is the act of remembering — the hand outstretched for reconnection, for felicitous contact between othernesses.
This awareness emanates from poet and gardener Ross Gay’s essay collection Inciting Joy — a tendril unfurled from his infinitely life-affirming Book of Delights.”

14. What Really Makes Us Happy on Lion’s Roar. “As a Buddhist teacher, psychiatrist, and leading researcher, Dr. Robert Waldinger studies life from three very different perspectives. But he says they all come to the same basic conclusion about what really makes our lives happy and meaningful, and what doesn’t.”

15. Good stuff from Austin Kleon: Don’t worry about style, and On plagiarism: What kind of person are you going to be?, and Owl babies!

16. The Best Xeriscape Alternatives To A Traditional Grass Lawn.

17. What Diet Culture Stole From Me—and Why I Took It Back.

18. Picking up trash for fun. (video)

19. The Path of Joy and Liberation on Lion’s Roar. “The Buddha’s four noble truths include the truth that the eightfold path is a way out of suffering. It’s not just the path to happiness, says Sister True Dedication. It’s happiness itself.”

20. Small acts of kindness matter more than you think.

21. My Perfect Life from Danny Gregory. I really needed this reminder. Maybe you do too, kind and gentle reader.

22. Bobby Dazzler, Sarah Millican’s latest comedy special, which can now be purchased and streamed for about $12.50.

23. The Art of Lying Fallow: Psychoanalyst Masud Khan on the Existential Salve for the Age of Cultish Productivity and Compulsive Distraction.

24. A Taxonomy of Gay Animals.

25. When Did People Start Brushing Dogs’ Teeth?

26. Sorry for getting old. “In the protracted superficiality that passes for existence in US-style capitalist society, skin wrinkles and other perceived female defects are cast as failures of the individual. And according to capitalist logic, such failures can only be rectified by buying beauty products, paying for cosmetic adjustments, or otherwise contributing to a landscape fundamentally dedicated to corporate profit rather than human wellness.”

27. Florida School Deems Michelangelo’s “David” Pornographic | The Daily Show. (video)

28. Recipes I want to try: Classic Bean And Cheese Pupusas and Peanut Butter Energy Bites.

29. Japan’s ‘evaporated’ people: Inside an industry that helps people disappear. (video) “In Japan, as some 80,000 people go missing every year, according to data from the National Police Agency. Some are later found, but others vanish completely, becoming what’s described as an “evaporated person” or johatsu-sha. The phenomenon is common enough to have an entire industry built around it of specialists who can help you disappear in the night. In this SCMP Film, we go inside a neighbourhood that’s a powerful draw for those who want to stay hidden and meet a yonige-ya, or night mover, who braves stalkers, gangsters and knife-wielding exes to spirit his customers away to safety.”

30. Harvard-trained psychologist: If you use any of these 9 phrases every day, ‘your relationship is more successful’ than most.

31. Commonplace Podcast Episode 109: Joy Harjo. “Rachel speaks with Joy Harjo, internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation about jazz, grief, second sight, teaching, and so much more. Joy Harjo served three terms as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022 and is the author of ten books of poetry.”

32. Couple takes cabin living to the next level with their seriously epic cabin designs.

33. Mostly through images, a daughter grieves her mother in ‘Ephemera.’

34. 60 Second Docs: Vanishing Rock Art | Jon Foreman. (video) In related news, Densely Arranged Stone Gradients Sweep Across the Sand in Jon Foreman’s Extraordinary Land Art.

35. Jeff Cruz Hoop Dance. (video)

36. Taken Flight, “the collected works of the late poet, Bennett Nieberg. The collection explores topics of transgender identity, socio and gender politics, coming-of-age, familial trauma, and mental illness. As Andrea Gibson writes in the foreword, ‘… a gorgeous and devastating prayer for their own survival, as well as a prayer for our world.’ Andrea also shared this piece from the book that is so beautiful, brutal in light of their passing: “I have heard stories/of grudges let go on deathbeds/a final grip loosening/all i know is i want to be buried/with my arms already open.”

37. 4 tips for saying goodbye to someone you love.

38. California’s superbloom is so big and bright, it can be seen from space.

39. Stunning bonsai trees with their leaves composed of hundreds of tiny paper cranes by Naoki Onogawa.

40. Book recommendations from me: Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto and Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Rain continues to flood California, the long standing drought easing but the water coming way too fast. Elsewhere crocus or even daffodils are pushing out of the earth, seeking the light. Where I am, where some years at this time we get snow, even the occasional blizzard, it’s the arrival of the robins that bring the promise of another spring. There’s a flock of about 20 on our street, drawn by the crab apple trees and our compost pile and the rich soft dirt out front waiting to be planted after the threat of frost passes. I’ve always loved them more than other birds – something about their smoky head, back, wings, and tail; the ring of gold around their dark eyes; the pumpkin color of their breast and belly; their song.

They’ve always been a sign of spring. I was sad that they weren’t coming to my feeder, stuck to the window over my writing desk, but they are more wild in that way, eat both what’s been left behind and what is waking up, making their own way regardless of if we are here or not, fill the feeder with seed or not. We’ve had two nests of bright blue eggs in the 20 years we’ve lived in this house. It seems to always start with four, no more and no less. The first nest was in our backyard, in the narrow leaf cottonwood that’s no longer there, inadvertently protected from predators by the simple presence of our dogs. All four eggs went from hatching to flying out of the nest in just two weeks. I hadn’t realized that it all happened so fast and still remember the sweet way that my dogs Dexter and Sam quietly watched the final hatchling as it hopped around the yard, working up the courage to fly away from everything it had known thus far in its tiny brief life. babybird

The other nest was in the front yard, in our lilac bushes. A hail storm happened early on and we worried they’d be crushed, were so happy when the storm passed and they were all there, still intact and bright as ever. And yet, their nest was in a spot where the neighborhood cats could reach them, with no protection from the dogs. Only three of the eggs hatched, and as far as we could tell, no one was left to fly out of the nest at the end of those short two weeks. The nest remained there for a few years after, empty and waiting, until a wind storm blew it down and smashed it on the sidewalk below. This is how life is, isn’t it? The good news and the bad. The beautiful and the brutal, the tender and the terrible. We are here for it, for both, for all of it.

I don’t know what the outcome of my upcoming surgery will be. It’s technically “elective” and as my surgeon kept reminding me, “You don’t have to do this.” I can’t know for certain on this end of things if it’s the right thing to do, if it’s necessary, or if it will help, if anything will be different, better or worse because of it. That’s the worst part of big choices – they’ll have a big impact on your life but you never have all the information you need, can’t know all the various causes and conditions involved, so you make the choice partially blind. You step into something and it could be exactly where you wanted to land or it could be stepping into a wad of used chewing gum or a pile of dog shit. You have to pick without knowing exactly what it is you are agreeing to. It could turn out to be a disaster, a terrible mistake, but you can’t know until you make it. You hope it’s better than where you are, that it will be an improvement, but you won’t know until it’s over, and in this case, there’s no going back.

When I met with the surgeon, he was like a Zen monk – the smile, the calm, the equanimity, the wisdom and skill from decades of practice. I felt like a student who’d been giving a koan to solve (as in “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”), a riddle with no clear solution, and he was the teacher, there to witness but not give me the answer. I kept trying to trick him into telling me what to do, wishing he could promise me something, tell me it would all be okay, that I was doing the right thing. Instead he kept giving the decision back to me, placing the choice back in my lap, into my waiting open hands. I had to make the choice, even with all the “not knowing,” the doubt and unanswerable questions. I schedule and plan and prepare having no idea what the outcome will be.

In a scene from a movie I saw recently, a dad and daughter are talking, and the dad says, “Everything will be okay.” The daughter responds, “That’s bullshit, you can’t know that.” He goes on to explain that at some point the chaos settles, and it’s that state, that moment of being he’s referring to when he says things will be okay. I suppose you could also say “this too shall pass” or “everything is temporary” – so many things in life are like this, the good news and the bad news are really the same thing. The depth of the grief is equal in measure to how much you loved what you’ve lost; or when bad things happen, they pass and good things follow, or the other way around; or every relationship ends badly, even the best of them, because they will all end (because we all do, eventually), one way or another – the good news and the bad.

So many of the decisions we have to make are based on gut instinct, a feeling, a guess that we make without all the facts. We don’t know how things will work out. You can spend hours researching and reading all the reviews and recommendations but at some point you have to pull the trigger, take the leap, shit or get off the pot.

I feel like this dilemma, this contradiction, lucky and sad, tender and terrible, beautiful and brutal, is where I live, where we all live. In a liminal space while simultaneously at the center of things, the emptiness is luminous. It can be confusing or I can surrender to it and float. This experience of living doesn’t come with a map or a guide, or maybe it does. Maybe the answers are everywhere if you’d only look, open our eyes and listen. The birds singing at the feeder are giving you the answer. The river bubbling over the rocks is telling you everything you need to know. The way your dog sighs and stretches in the sun is the meaning of life. You try your hardest to make it more complicated but it’s enough, just like this, tart like a lime, sharp like teeth. Bite into it and you’ll see. You can have the fruit and what you don’t use goes into the compost pile. From there the squirrels and the mice will be fed, and the occasional snake might feed on the fat mice. What’s left will break down and in the spring, it will feed the garden and the garden will bear fruit that feeds you and the birds and the bees and all the rest, and the whole thing starts all over again.

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It’s like this, this is how it goes. You don’t have to try so hard. You can pray and sing or weep. You can walk out the front door and keep on walking until you reach the river. Promise me you’ll listen to what the owls have to tell you. Follow their call in the dark of morning until you see them high up in the trees and when the dog nudges your hand to remind you he’s there, thank the owls and the trees, the ground and your feet, and keep walking, remembering that of all the paths we could have taken, we’re briefly here and walking together. That’s the good news and the bad.