Tag Archives: Perception

April 23, 2013 · 7:33 am

Poetry Tuesday: “Love. What Is This Word?”

Latte Heart

Got your coffee?  A cup of tea?   Here we go.

So the conversation begins (see yesterday’s post) with a sampling of my tetrameter (eight syllables per line, roughly) musings, a discipline I’ve continued each morning for over a year now.   I’ve decided to ignore whether or not these writings can properly be called poetry.   They are what they are, and I’d love to publish a bunch of them someday.  We’ll see.

This from a few days ago (picked almost at random for this post, the riffing coming after I’d chosen it), reflecting on the way we use the words “love” and “hate” in our language.   I think it’s hard to hear what people mean by the words they use.    The lack of nuance in these English words provides enormous opportunity for misunderstanding, murky feeling and thinking, and sometimes, manipulation.    These days, when people use the words “love” and “hate” in popular culture and in social media, my radar tends to wobble over toward curiosity and suspicion, wondering just what they mean, and I’m often sad to realize “love” and “hate” are being used–sincerely, most of the time–strategically, as rhetorical devices in some sort of power battle over policy.  Who most persuasively defines the popular meanings of the word “love” and “hate” holds the moral high ground.

Love.
What is this word?
Swelling of  heart and tear ducts
When hunger looks at we well-fed
And we, full of pity, feel sad?
Or need we feel at all to love?
A hand offered in bitter hate,
The hate made all of feeling rage,
But the mind o’ercomes it and bends,
And the muscle of the hand moves,
Out stretches itself, and lifts up,
And love and hate live together,
And the lift is all that matters.
Is it true of all hating, too?
Such warmth in our breasts for poor folk,
But eat we on, the muscle staying put,
Nothing stretching out, not at all,
And the poor, so appreciative,
So respectful of our warm glow,
Die as we shake our heads, all sorrow.
What are feelings that they serve us?
Action is the coin of the realm.
The kingdom of God does not bend
To mere emotional sweat, but
Works day after day, in all hope,
Against despair–Oh, poor feeling, that–
Believing goodness and thick joy
Will one day stretch out like that hand,
That muscle, and we will no more be torn.
Love of heart and love of muscle,
Love of first move and love of work,
Love of touch and hand and kiss,
And love of giving up our lives,
Knowing  we cannot keep them.
To hold the fist tight is to lose,
To die, to forget, to never love.
How severed at heart and soul’s joint,
And only Easter seasons heal,
Though we won’t know it until then,
Until death rolls us in its grip
And we fly to whatever waits.

Empaths value feeling.   Workers value action.   Muscle and heart go together, don’t you think?   What we do is our heart, and if we say we love, describing sincere feeling, sincere inclination of the heart, and yet we do not love, at least as understood by the loved, then which is true?  Do we love or not?  Have we loved or not?  Who gets to say?

If you’re wondering what I meant when I said “love” in the sentences before this, you may be getting the point.

Why is this such a big deal?   Because “love” is at the core of things.   God is love, we say.   Oh, no, he’s not, say others.  This is love.  No, this is love. If you loved me, you would do this.  If you loved me, you would feel this.  You would do this to show me you felt this.   And if the notion of God loving us is the big idea behind so much religious thinking (not only in Christianity, but other faiths as well), it seems to me it matters what we mean.

And, I suppose, for me, in the end, sadness creeps in when I realize that folks who originally sought love, trying to understand at a deep level, often get lost and end up shouting and warring, metal and/or linguistic guns at the ready.   How odd that we must war for love.

How odd that we must war for love.  

And of course, if we must war, people who sit thinking about these things while the battle rages make for easy pickings.   “Nice guys finish last” comes to mind.

“Move soldier, there’s a war on.”   

 

 

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August 15, 2012 · 6:40 am

Acting 101: For All of Us

Here’s what actors do, in one way or another.  Imaginatively, they work to enter the experience of a person, a character, imagining circumstances, beliefs, thought-life, sensory preferences, histories of relationships, and perhaps most importantly, what their particular characters are hungry for, long for, and have been living without.   They then shift their physical and emotional lives to somehow begin to interact with other players to present a story of what it means to be human in a very particular place with very particular cultural, historical, and personal factors in play.  (Note: Imaginative, sensory detail is important.  Where does the character’s particular hunger land in their body?)

One of the cardinal rules of acting is that you cannot judge your character and hope to enter into their hearts and minds.   Be it a murderer, a savior, a lover, or a hated foe, to judge the other as an actor is to kill the process of entering in.    People judge from the outside.   When you’re inside the head of the character, none of that judgment can be going on, because it’s not going in their heads.   Get it?   Whenever you watch an actor that somehow isn’t quite succeeding in disappearing into the character, one of the culprits to watch for is a position of judgment in the approach.

This is a process of play and of work.  It is imaginative, muscular work that takes time, energy, thought, research, conversation, experimentation, and failure.  We watch, we offer the work to others, we try to learn what we can about what it means to be human through these interactions.   Our work is to humanize the 2-D characters that lie on the writer’s page, enflesh them, give them voice, and hopefully, serve that character without judgment.

Will I play characters that are not like me?   Characters who hold opinions in politics and religion and sexuality and economics that differ from mine?   I hope so, or there won’t be much to do.

All of this is simply to suggest an exercise for all of us.   Especially if you’re not an actor, give this a shot.   Pick a person, a real human being (call them a character if you’d like) that sits on the opposite side of the fence from you on some piece of human living that you think is really important.   Perhaps it’s a person (in actor terms, a character) that you don’t like very much, that you’d shout down if you could, or maybe it’s someone you fear.  Pretend you got cast as that person, and now it’s your job to get inside their head, without judgment, to grasp what their hearts are like.   Where they came from, what they’re up to, what they see as important and necessary.    Where do their disappointments lie?   What are their heartbreaks?   What is the shape of their human brokenness?  What makes them laugh?   And what do they long for?   What do they want?

If you’re really gutsy, you’ll realize the only way to actually find any of this out is to move beyond your imagination and actually go ask them.   Befriend them, get to know them, differences and all.   Of course, the actor’s work is not try to change their characters.  The characters are what they are.   We will only understand them or not, enter in fully or not, offer our bodies as places for their stories to live or not, and finally, love them or not.

That’s all.

Let’s say you get all this good information about the character.   What’s the next step?   What’s the next piece of the work?  (You’re going to like this.)   Now your job is to figure out where all the deep, soulful things you found out about the other lie in you.   Because the work of the actor is not to find how the character differs from them, but to find where the places of intersection are.  How are we alike?   The assumption is this; all the soulful things that make one person unique are somehow also located in me, and all possibilities lie within us all.

Maybe call this the deep drilling into the old phrase, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

We are all the other.

Humanizing, isn’t it?

To restate the exercise: Be an actor.  Lay down your opinions for a minute and try to imaginatively enter the experience of those you oppose.  Your convictions may not change (changing anyone’s convictions is not the point), but I’m guessing the tone of voice, rhetoric, and conversation might.

And then, who knows what the possibilities might be.

All the world’s a stage…

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January 3, 2012 · 8:17 am

Thriving and the Now Factor

I was thinking about “thriving” on my way home from the gym yesterday, wondering about how to even begin talking about it.  What in the world is thriving?   The dictionary says this: “to grow or develop well or vigorously.”   That resonates, mostly because of my recent adaptation of the word “grow”, exchanging it for the words “change” and “transformation.”  (But that’s another blog post.)  Okay, to grow, I thought, but the notion of life’s hardness kept raising its head, that war (of art, of life, of spirituality)  that St. Paul and Stephen Pressfield remind us of.

What is human thriving anyway?

On the Christian side of things, the two great commandments are the primary orientation:  Love the Lord Your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.  Love you neighbor as yourself.   Christ said not to worry too much about the bottom layer of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs triangle, that God would come through with all that stuff if we just chased after his kingdom first.  And the study of what many Christians might call “Kingdom living” is a massive study in itself, and the faith is, that following along behind the Christ, acting as he did for his reasons, is the foundation of human thriving.

On the psychological and sociological side, lots of study continues about just what it is that makes human being and personhood, and what thriving means.  Back to Maslow’s hierarchy…looking at that triangle again, it looks pretty solid.   Survival is need, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and that famous “self-actualization.”   I also love the list of “capacities” of the human person found in Christian Smith’s What is a Person?  (Existence capacities, Primary and Secondary Experience capacities, Creating capacities, and what he calls Highest Order capacities.)   Thriving in that world would seem to be the growth and “vigorous development” of these various capacities according to our “core gifts”, which is another idea I encountered somewhere on the web yesterday.

Well, truth is, I don’t know that I know just what thriving is, but yesterday, on that drive home, somewhere on 5th Avenue between Northgate and NE 80th, the word “now” presented itself, and it occurred to me that the possibility of thriving inevitably presents itself not in the past or the future, but in the present.   In the now.  This very now.

This one.

Lots of spiritual writing these days focuses on the idea of “Mindfulness” and “Presence.”   (“Presence” is another big word for me, but more about that later, too.)   The past is gone.  Strange to say it, but the river from yesterday has moved on.  Memory and remembrance is so vital for living, but it’s easy to get lost in images of memory that may or may not be all that accurate anyway.  And who knows why our minds are so fond of the destroying memories, the ones where we failed, were humiliated, were lost, confused, abused, and made to feel so much less valuable than we are.   Our brains seem to be bent that way, and it takes grit and vigilance and a strong faith in God and grace (or something far bigger than that gnarly, negative brain) “to grow and vigorously develop” in the face of the onslaught of memory.

And the future…it’s coming, sure enough.  But very little of what I project into it has anything to do with reality.   My best shot and growing and developing vigorously is to take on what’s in front of me.   This moment, choose to act in faith.   This moment, choose to push back the dark.  This moment, choose to follow-through, keep the promise, make the best start I know how to, finish with the best “kick” I’ve got, and in this moment, do what I know to pour courage into those next to me in this now.   This moment, take the plank out, pray the secret prayer, seek the next step in kingdom life.   This moment, serve.  This moment, walk.  This moment, make some beauty.

Every now matters.  Every now is a chance.   Every now is dense with life waiting to be lived.

Now…

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November 9, 2011 · 7:33 am

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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June 21, 2011 · 7:50 am

Brain, Free Choice, and the Limits of Knowing: The Crisis of Knowing How We Know – 1

In August 1966, I was seven years old heading into second grade.  My memory of the guy that went up into the tower at the University of Texas to kill a bunch of people is vague, but it’s there.  Turns out, according to David Eagleman’s Atlantic Monthly article “The Brain on Trial“, Charles Whitman knew there was something wrong with him, and that something in his mind and thought-life had changed.  He’d been an average guy with an average life, but that day, he was anything but average.   When it was over, Whitman had killed 13 people, wounded over 30 others, and was dead, shot down by police.   Police then discovered he’d began the rampage by murdering his wife and his mother first.

An autopsy showed Whitman’s intuition that something inside his head had gone wrong was confirmed.   He had a tumor pressing on his amygdala.  And a damaged amygdala means emotional trouble that nobody signs up for, and that anybody will have an extremely difficult time resisting by willpower and making right choices.

I said yesterday that I want to spend the week reflecting on “how we know what we know.”  Eagleman’s article makes an interesting stepping off point because he reasonably, and with a certain balance, asserts that many of our behavioral drives depend heavily on the intricacies of our particular neural makeup.   In other words, our  brains’ ability to make “free will” choices is, to some degree, determined by (and limited by) the particular biology of our individualized circuitry.   Eagleman’s context for this argument is “equal treatment under the law” and the tricky judgments courts must make when faced with folks whose behavior is being driven, to varying degrees, by biological factors that call their blameworthiness into question.

The quote I left you with yesterday starts like this: “Many of us like to believe that all adults possess the same capacity to make sound choices. It’s a charitable idea, but demonstrably wrong. People’s brains are vastly different.”  (emphasis mine.)

Obviously, Eagleman is talking to us about behavior that is on the edge of social acceptance, and therefore “not normal.”  But the implications of the article run deeper.  If the criminal in front of me has frontal lobe damage he did not himself cause, what (or who?) is responsible for his actions?  Himself, or his damaged brain?  Can the core of who we are be separated from our biology?  Where is the “I” located that is being subverted by “my” neural circuitry?   And as brain studies continue to map the astonishing fragility and resilience of our gray matter, proving over and over that what we eat, do, think, and say alters moment by moment the neural pathways that facilitate every aspect of this thought-life we equate with “I” or “me”, it seems obvious to me that our perceived measure of thought-control is not nearly as certain as we think.

Here’s another quote to chew on:

“…we cannot presume that everyone is coming to the table equally equipped in terms of drives and behaviors. And this feeds into a larger lesson of biology: we are not the ones steering the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe. Who we are runs well below the surface of our conscious access, and the details reach back in time to before our birth, when the meeting of a sperm and an egg granted us certain attributes and not others. Who we can be starts with our molecular blueprints—a series of alien codes written in invisibly small strings of acids—well before we have anything to do with it. Each of us is, in part, a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history. 

For some reason, the scripture “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” comes to mind.

The upside of realizing you may not be as much in the driver’s seat as you thought?   How about humility, respect, and responsibility.  Humility toward our own certainty of things, respect for the essential mystery of the other, and a renewed sense of responsibility to take care of this fragile gift of life, so connected to how we care for our “selves”, by which we mean something that cannot exclude our biology.

To underline my point (and making sure I understand it myself) here’s the deal: Our “knowing” is being informed by sources beyond our conscious access and control.  Why we are designed in such fashion, I have no idea.  But my faith is that God knows this very well, and that the startling degree to which our knowing is limited is not a fault, but a gift.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about brain, mind, and body as it relates to health, healing, and the practice of alternative medicine.   If you want to read the Atlantic Monthly article that I’ll be referencing, it’s called “The Triumph of New Age Medicine.”

Take care of your brain today…

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