January 2, 2012

Thriving: A Good Hub of a Word

Themes for the New Year abound.   Commitment, focus, discipline, simplicity, gratitude, service…there are many ways to frame a reorientation of living.  Here’s the one I’ve settled on as a hub for the work of my various writing platforms.

Thrive.

Funny word, thrive.  Makes me think of “hive.”  Which leads me to images of buzzing and working and community.  (But let’s not buy into the one queen and a bunch of drones idea, though some of you might like that just fine.)   And honey.   Good stuff, in general.   But that’s just word association.  What does it mean to actually thrive?

Before I riff on the meaning of the word, though, I think I’ll riff on why I’ve settled on “thrive.”  It’s simple: it has life embedded in it, it suggests both action and being, and it’s what I want for my wife, my kids, and everyone I care about.   Jesus said, “I came that they might have life, and have it more abundantly.”  Sounds like thriving to me.   And as I reflect, and reflect on my reflections (I know, I know…save the navel-gazing comments for later), it all seems to be trying to answer questions about what it means to be human, and what it means for human beings to thrive according to their nature.   Questions of being and doing, of art and mind, of beauty and goodness, of relationship and faith–all of these point toward something beyond happiness (which is not a bad thing, by the way.  Let’s not be reductionist on how highly we value happiness).   For me, “thriving” doesn’t deny the physical and emotional weather that can go dark and stormy for certain periods of time, but rather orients us to how to meet those days with energy, grit, optimism, and faith.

Of course, there’s going to be a fight over who’s to say what human “thriving” is.  I saw one comment on a blog where a commenter argued that a successful killer might feel like he’s thriving if he hasn’t been caught and is enjoying his “work.”    And I suppose evil can thrive.   Shoot…I don’t want that to be true.    But human “being” and “doing” is not thriving if evil is thriving.   Evil destroys the kind of thriving I’m talking about.

But I don’t want to amend my thought by saying “good thriving” or “thriving according our nature.”  Messes with the simplicity of things.

For the moment, here’s what I mean, and around these ideas is where you’ll find me writing, blogging, tweeting, and Facebooking.  (Really…Facebooking?):  Humans are designed to traffic in lots of dynamic process and states of being.   Certain things add to life, lift mind and heart, add strength for the moments when we have to go to war, and make life seem worth living in a big way.  Other things tear at us, destroy our confidence not only in ourselves but in humanity itself, dog us with constructions of reality that present us with doom and gloom scenarios from this moment until the day we die.    The moment-to-moment negotiation in mind/body/soul/spirit between the additive things and the destroyers is what days are made of.

My commitment is to work to make my writing and artistic work land on the “additive” side.   What words can I find that might add to the possibility of your thriving today?

Is “thrive” a word that works for you?

What do we need to thrive?   I think I riff on this one for a quite awhile.

Did you see the sky this morning?   Gorgeous…

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January 1, 2012

Gratitude as Spiritual Practice

Gratitude as spiritual practice can be tricky.  It’s a bit like trying to help actors understand the difference in thinking about doing something or pretending to do something, and actually doing something.

What are we truly grateful for?

For me, gratitude is extremely powerful when you come to the place of awareness where your eyes open to the incredible mystery and blessing of actually being alive on the planet.   “But it all seems so normal,” we say, “and there’s a lot of crap anyway, right?   Yeah, I’m thankful, but life’s beating the hell out of me right now…what’s to be thankful for?  I don’t feel thankful, and yeah, it’s easy from where you sit, in that fat old world of blessing you’re sitting in.”   And we mouth the usual, “Thank you God for this or that, the meal, the family, and the church, blah, blah, blah,” and whatever else is part of usual prayer pattern and language.   All the while gratitude as I think of it is slipping out the back door of our souls.

Maybe it takes a certain kind of stopping.   A dead stop in the day.  A shift in awareness, an intentional stoppage to the grinding.  To zero in on one fact of existence that’s right in front of us…a raindrop, a streak of light, the weight of morning quiet, a series of black marks that make an intelligible word.    The patter of a loved one’s feet as they make their way toward you.   The spreading coolness of water in your chest after a long, thirsty drink.   The lift of spirit as a tenor soars across a high “G”.   Sudden news of the joyful achievement of a goal by someone you’d give your life for.   The escape valve of sobbing, that miraculous way God gave us to move the pain of living through our bodies so we can breath again.

I don’t know the answer to pain.  All the answers seem inadequate.   Gratitude as spiritual practice is no answer to the searing pain that lives on both individual and national planes.   But if the answer to pain lies somewhere in a matrix of thoughts, behaviors, attitudes, medicines, and relationships, then I would argue that at the very least, gratitude opens the doors between all those slippery factors so that light and comfort can miraculously squeeze its way in.

This very moment, what am I grateful for?  For the girl that just got up and now sits across the room from me, my companion of 30+ years.  For the first morning time of 2012, and the fact that God has not gone anywhere, and for my battered faith, still standing after a year of heart-wrenching questions.  For the Christmas tree reminding me of my kids and their recent visit.  For the love I feel in my heart, because there was once a time when I felt so very little.  For the faces of my friends flickering across the screen of my mind, for the fact that I miss them, and for the hope I have of greater things for all of them.   For the music that I’ll play this morning as I lead worship for the first time in a year, and for the angels of my imagination that will be there as they always are.  For the leftover scones from yesterday that wait for me at breakfast.   For growing courage to face what I don’t want to face.   For God’s incredible patience.   For learning how to be grateful.

I have no idea what God has in store in 2012.   But gratitude for whatever is coming is not a resolution.   It’s a commitment.

Make thanks a part of your daily bread.   Say it whenever you can, whenever it’s truly true.  And let flourishing increase…

Wishing you more peace than you can stand in 2012…

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November 9, 2011

How to Stay Astonished in Five Simple Steps

How’s the old Kathy Mattea song go?   “Standing knee deep in a river, and dying of thirst.”

My wife puts up with me, but it has to be annoying.

“Isn’t it funny that we ingest food,” I say.   Or, “It’s so strange that we have these orbs in the front of our heads that rotate, and that using them somehow results in us ‘seeing.’”  There may be any number of these “isn’t life strange?” statements from me during the day, at which point those aforementioned orbs in her head start rolling.

But I can’t help it.   The fact that we are here astonishes me.

That markings on a material can create communication.   That the seemingly gibberish sounds of other languages have structure and syntax, and that those language emerged at all.   That hearts beat without being plugged in.   For years.   That there is now feverish activity going on in garages and offices and bedrooms and kitchens all centered around creativity and invention that will one day yield future technologies that will put the work of Steve Jobs into a distant, remote past.   Geniuses are being born even today.   Starlight millions of years old will tonight just be arriving in my Seattle sky.  Every relationship is a miracle.   Balance, eye-hand coordination, home runs (in season, at least), and self-sacrifice…all astonishing.   Concertos, voices that can hit high C’s, the warmth of a home, the compassion that wants the warmth of a home for everyone, the impulse to not follow the cruel impulse those that insult and demean us seemingly deserve.    Bodies, processes, architectures, leaves falling, petals of brilliant color inching into being, the storehouses of snow prepping at the hand of God to inflict both beauty and suffering on a wintered country.

I know…we’re too busy to be astonished.

So here’s five simple things to turn up your astonishment on any given day.

  • 1.   Stop what you’re doing.
  • 2.  Breathe
  • 3.  Focus on one thing in front of you.
  • 4.  Reflect on the following:  how did it come into being?  What might the world be like if it was completely absent from everywhere?   What if the thing under reflection was perfected?  What is its goodness in your life?  Who should you thank for that goodness?    Why is there any goodness at all, that we should enjoy it?
  • 5.  Remember that your ability to “do”, to have agency, and to act–that thing that you stopped in step 1–that your breath that you thought about and noticed in step 2, that your ability to shift your mind into a focused point of reflection, musing, remembering, and imagining–steps 3 and 4–that all of this is frankly, miraculous.

We did not ask to arrive on the planet, and contrary to our beliefs, we do not control our exit.   The days are full of surprise, diving possibility (as Barbara Brown Taylor reminded me this morning), dangers, and moments of astonishing reality.

There is always something a bit healing about standing aware inside a miracle.

As you exhale, let your lips form a small “wow.” 

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November 8, 2011

Meditations on Malick’s “The Tree of Life”

I’ve been hearing about this film for awhile.  ”You’ll either love it, or hate it,” people told me.  A few people who know me pretty well figured it would be my kind of movie.   Anjie travels, and I’d been contemplating watching it without her, but I kept thinking, “No.  I’ll wait for her.”  So Sunday night, we finally sat and watched it, and my first thought was, “What a mistake not to have seen this in a big theatre.”   We live on a busy street, buses going by, windows rattling.  We kept saying, “What did he just say?”  and rewinding.   Pitiful.  There were a couple of other interruptions as well, but we finally made it through.

Why, O, why didn’t I see this in the big theatre?

Frankly, even on my television, with buses roaring by bent on spoiling the most intimate film I’ve seen in a long time, I loved it.  I’ll love it a lot more the second time I see it.   To say that I loved it doesn’t mean I was completely satisfied by everything.  (The people wandering on the beach didn’t quite take me where I think Terrence Malick was trying to get me to go.)  But overall, brilliant work.

Maybe I loved it because I’m in the middle of looking very hard at the two roads suggested by the film.  The way of the Father and the way of the Mother.  The way of Nature, and the way of Grace.   The layering of the metaphors is subtle and dense, and the non-linear approach to the narrative serves the meditative feel of the film well.   I’m sure its very frustrating for folks who want answers to certain questions (how did that one character die? What happened?) that Malick has no real interest in answering, but for me, the quiet, the images, the sweep of trying to grapple with the full mystery of things left me thankful for a filmmaker willing to take those kinds of chances in story-telling.  Of course, I was also wondering how it ever got made.

I know we say that God is above gender, but there’s just no question that our language plays into the masculine side of the equation.  God is a man to most of us.   If that’s not true for you in your bones, good for you.  But my suspicion is that most of us see, uh…Him, as a masculine presence.  I’m not particularly fond of gender-inclusive language translations, but I can sure see why some people are passionate about them.  I do not pray to Him as “Mother.”  Neither did Jesus, for that matter.  What that means in the great reality that is beyond my consciousness to perceive about the reality of God, I don’t know, but on the street where most of us do our living, somehow it matters.   In The Tree of Life,  the father is tough, harsh, realistic, and ultimately deals pretty honorably with his failures, both of career and son-raising.   The mother is strong as well, but dances in the air, plays, protects, and extends ongoing opportunity for grace and change and life.

The two roads live together in all of us, as they do in the character of the grown son who talks (so quietly) about the way his mother and father grapple inside him.    And though we all walk both roads to some degree, my suspicion is that most of lean one way or the other.   I lean toward the mother’s road, unquestionably.   Is it right?  Is it the best?  Is it more complete, more God-like, more Christ-like than the harsh, demanding, warring, scrapping father?   The world is what it is, and we must make our way through it.   Truth is, Malick gives us some great images of the ups and downs of both roads.   Brad Pitt’s strong portrayal of the Father gives us glimpses of the work of grace, and Jessica Chastain’s vision of the mother has backbone and power and her own ways of demand.

To say God is not male is, I think, the right thing to say, the true thing to say.   To live as if He’s not, struggling to unearth the practical differences our thinking makes along these lines is a far different challenge.

And then there’s Malick’s framing.   We get intimations on the beginning and ending of time, and the fact that we are here in the particular now, and small, and forever kinds of people.

Gorgeous, stunning, troubling, and oddly, welcome.     As all good meditations should be.

Let me watch it again.   Maybe I’ll have more to say…

 

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November 3, 2011

5 Positive Things Critique Can Do For You

I finished the 4th draft of my new play, and in spite of as much focused and deep work as I’ve done on a play and a group of characters, still missed the goal by a mile.  (Well, maybe more like a half-mile, but still.)  Not that there are not some good things about the play–there are–but on the whole, it is deeply flawed, especially as it relates to one character and her action, experience, and choices. Fortunately for me, I have professional friends and colleagues who are not afraid to look me in the eye and tell me, “This is wrong.”

It’s hard to swallow, but if you’re going to grow as an artist (and as a person), you have to listen.  There are times when the critics are wrong, and you just suck it up and move on, sticking to your guns. And there are times when the critics are dead right, and you know it in a flash.    Choices then follow, and how you respond will go a long way toward finding the kind of result (and by result, I mean the quality of the work) you’re looking for.

Here are five positive things that strong, you-blew-it-this-time critique can do for you.

  1. Gives you practice in humility.   My mistakes in the play run in two directions.  One deals with playwriting and character, the other with human understanding especially as it relates to culturally located skin color issues.   Funny…I often say to people that if I could ask God for one quality to acquire, model, and live out, it would be humility.   And I often do ask God for just that.    Well, these days, God seems more than happy to oblige me with opportunity to practice.
  2. Gives you practice in listening through the fog of emotion.    It’s hard to hear that you’ve just directed the most “tedious play I’ve ever seen.” (A directing mentor years ago.)  Or that your writing is “facile.”  (The Seattle Times. Ouch.)  Or that “I couldn’t find anything in that play that I liked.”  (A friend about a musical I wrote years ago.)  In each moment, for me at least, the brain sort of blows up, and the next few minutes are chaotic, as I try to make sense of whatever the person across from me is saying.   The amygdala hijack, some call it.   But when you ask people to explain what they mean by whatever it is you’ve said, you have to listen carefully to make sense of it.
  3. Forces your creativity to another level.   Frankly, once I became aware of the flaw, I was incredibly discouraged for a couple of days, wracking my brain trying to figure how to fix things.  Nothing came.   I went to bed Tuesday night thinking I might just have to chuck the thing, and told my subconscious mind to get to work on it, and then I went to sleep.   Then, Wednesday,  I had a very strong critique session with a good friend, who pulled no punches, and with clarity and passion, was enormously instructive.   When the friend left, I seriously considered giving up writing altogether (not really, but you know what I mean), but about a half-hour later, after telling at least two people on the phone I wasn’t going think about it for awhile, a very credible solution rose up in my mind, so much so that I immediately got to work fleshing it out.   Whether I can make it work this time around, who knows?  But the point is, without that deep critique, the new answer–which is clearly much better for about a thousand reasons–would not have occurred to me.
  4. Demonstrates in real time who cares about your work.   Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to take someone to the cleaners to prove you care about their work (all my friend are now lining up to have their turn), but when someone is willing to walk through that fire with you, risking who knows what (they have no idea how you’ll really respond, and sometimes there’s heavy cost), pay attention.   The person who is coming at you hardest may be the one person you need most to listen to, because they’re the ones who aren’t going to be satisfied with “good enough.”
  5. Gives you an opportunity to model a process that every body likes to talk about, but few like to practice.   I believe in the process of critique, but it’s hard to put into practice. Lots of times, my sense is that we just lie to each other to keep up appearances, and figure that the standards that identify good artistic work from not as good are squishy, hard to define, and just end up costing us friends and feelings.  What’s weird is that lots of times, that’s just fine.   We get by, and maybe never get to the kind of quality of work we wanted just because we never hear these good words:  ”You can do better.”
Critique can also be devastating.   After my friend’s comment on my musical years ago, it was about six months before I wrote anything again.   Sure…you get gunshy.  But it’s a war, according to Pressfield, and good critique is not resistance.  Your response to it might be, if you let it stop the work.   But truth is, even if it is devastating, we really only have two choices.  We can quit, or go on.   Quitting was taken off the list of options a long time ago.   Now it’s just about getting down to work.

By the way, I wrote this blog by creating the title, and then figuring out 5 things that might make sense.   Am I wrong?  Tell me about it.   Or give me some more positives about receiving critique well. There are probably a hundred.

“Here what’s wrong with this post…”  Go…

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