Monday: IDK

 

Uneasy. Nothing special but Time, looks to be an ordinary Monday morning developing out there, eh?, what's bothering me then? IDK, something. 

War in Ukraine heading toward stalemate and ultimate decline into Russia's favor. US reluctant to provide offensive missiles. If intending to prevail, it is sheer stupidity to fight a limited war against a country with comparatively unlimited resources. It's the same stupidity as expecting economic and other sanctions to be effective against a country with any sense of National Pride. Of course, war itself is stupidity, but that's hardly the point. I'm living in a world of idiocy. Is that it? IDK, but no.

Destin. I don't read Sean of the South every morning, but yesterday morning's essay about Destin caught my eye and burned a bit. There was a day & age in my own Time when Destin was a place just beyond the eternally landmarking twin mounds of orange sherbet on the Gulf side of US98, of a few cottages under the sturdy scrub oaks overlooking the Gulf, and a wide place on the left just this side of the bridge, a place plenty big enough to turn around, or stop for a coke, sometimes a cop car was parked there. Then you drove on across the bridge and marveled about the clear aquamarine water in various shades, where turquoise took on heavenly exorbitance, and you headed on toward Fort Walton. 

Anyway, Sean remembers too. I think it burns him even deeper than it does me. Like Sean, I also grew up among fishermen. And in and around a fish house, with Walt, my brother, when he grew old enough. 

It's Walt's birthday today, 1939, so he's 84. On Walt's third birthday, July 24, 1942, the five of us - - mama, our father, me, Gina, and Walt, parked at the Standard Oil filling station this side of Tarpon Dock Bridge, and a family friend came out with a cuddly puppy. Walt got to name him. Walt named him "Happy Birthday" and he grew up with us as Happy. There's lots to remember and many stories to tell. Happy Birthday, most beloved brother. 

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Democracy at stake in Israel, where the combined legislative/executive is determined to neutralize and subordinate the judicial. Autocracy. It's happening elsewhere too, including why anyone would vote to change America into an authoritarian one party state with an arrogant, haughty, vengeful ruler is beyond me. Maybe that's it, eh? No, I don't think so. Something, I can't put my finger on it.

Global warming. Wildfires. Torrential rains and flooding. Intense heatwave. Seemingly shifting tornado belt. Pandemic seems largely to have done its worst and passed on. But oceans warming such as to kill submarine life. And produce more violent hurricanes. Intensifying hatred and division politically, socially, personally. A religious nut would say we're living into the End of Days, which would be laughable if it weren't so. Is that it? No, I don't think so. What then? IDK.

All this stuff boils up inside, in the mind, and then settles back into its cave. IDK.

Yesterday's start of the week's daily meditations, Richard Rohr, Father Rohr's email. I meant to copy and paste it here yesterday morning, but after having risen about three o'clock, I took a nap after breakfast, from eight o'clock to nine o'clock, and ran out of Time for anything except to do my Count at the door and tune in to Bart Ehrman's podcast and set it so it would run all morning while we were at church, 

which it did, it was: Professor Ehrman was still holding forth when we walked in from church and while I mixed my martini - - no two are the same - - this one, ice, jigger gin, jigger vodka, half-jigger dry Vermouth (never done more than a half teaspoon Vermouth before, half jigger olive brine, shake it to bruise the living hell out of the gin, pour into a martini glass and sip. Linda commenting that everybody in Bart's audience was surely asleep, but I told her they were online, not in person. She asked me to put the podcast on mute, so okay. That's still not it, something's very uneasy inside me.

But here's that daily meditation:

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Thirty: Just This

From Fear to Connection

When leading morning sit for the CAC staff, Father Richard often turns to Just This, his small book on contemplative seeing and practice. This week the Daily Meditations share wisdom that arises from focusing on “just this.” Richard begins:   

Contemplation is a panoramic, receptive awareness whereby we take in all that the situation, moment, or person offers without judging, eliminating, or labeling anything. It is pure and positive gazing that abandons all negative pushback so it can recognize inherent dignity. That takes much practice and a lot of unlearning of habitual responses.  

We have to work at it and develop practices whereby we recognize our compulsive and repetitive patterns. In doing so, we allow ourselves to be freed from the need to “take control of the situation”—as if we ever really could anyway!  

It seems we are addicted to our need to make distinctions and judgments, which we mistake for thinking. Most of us think we are our thinking, yet almost all thinking is compulsive, repetitive, and habitual. We are forever writing our inner commentaries on everything, commentaries that always reach the same practiced conclusions. That is why all forms of meditation and contemplation teach a way of quieting this compulsively driven and unconsciously programmed mind.  

The Desert Fathers and Mothers wisely called this process “the shedding of thoughts.” We don’t fight, repress, deny, identify with, or even judge them, but merely shed them. We are so much more than our thoughts about things, and we will feel this more as an unlearning than a learning of any new content. [1]  

When we meditate consistently, a sense of our autonomy and private self-importance—what we think of as our “self”—falls away, little by little, as unnecessary, unimportant, and even unhelpful. The imperial “I,” the self that we likely think of as our only self, reveals itself as largely a creation of our mind.  

Through a regular practice of contemplation, we become less and less interested in protecting this self-created, relative identity. We don’t have to attack it; it calmly falls away of its own accord and we experience a kind of natural humility.  

If our prayer goes deep, “invading” our unconscious, as it were, our whole view of the world will change from fear to connection. We don’t live inside our fragile and encapsulated self anymore, nor do we feel any need to protect it. In meditation, we move from ego consciousness to soul awareness, from being fear-driven to being love-drawn. That’s it in a few words!  

Of course, we only have the courage to do this if Someone Else is holding us, taking away our fear, doing the knowing, and satisfying our desire for a Great Lover. If we can allow that Someone Else to lead us in this dance, we will live with new vitality, a natural gracefulness, and inside of a Flow that we did not create. It is the Life of the Trinity, spinning through us. [2]  

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[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Just This (Albuquerque, NM: CAC Publishing, 2017), 60–61. 

[2] Rohr, Just This, 66–67. 

Image credit: A path from one week to the next—Izzy Spitz, Wings (detail), digital oil pastel. Izzy Spitz, Tuesday Chemistry (detail), digital oil pastel. Izzy Spitz, Field Study 1 (detail), oil pastel. Used with permission. Click here to enlarge image. 

In the midst of color and movement we focus and are present to one point in a sacred sphere. 

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That's still not it, whatever it is. IDK. I'll just live into it today.

T