My brother Greg sent me these interesting quotes from Peace Pilgrim as part of our conversation on "renouncing the fruit of action." Her Steps Toward Inner Peace is an excellent condensation of wisdom:
"Those who act on their highest motivations become a power for good. It is not important that others be noticeably affected. Results should never be sought or desired. Know that every right thing you do - every good thing you say - every positive thought you think - has good effect."
"Never think of any right effort as being fruitless--all right effort bears good fruit, whether we see results or not. Just concentrate on thinking and living and acting for peace, and inspiring others to do likewise, leaving results to God's hands."
"When you perceive the working of God's wonderful plan and know that all good effort bears good fruit, you cannot be discouraged."
College dorms are typically made of garishly colored cinder block; cinder block is cheap as is that horrid paint that can only be purchased at industrial surplus auctions. A consequence of this thrift is that student furniture must be freestanding, including one's closet; in addition to holding my clothes, it also served as a pillar supporting my lofted mattress as well as my refuge.
One of the ways in which I dealt with my stress and anxieties in those days was to crawl into this tiny space. I found the confinement comforting; it was absolutely dark and the oxygen would grow thin. So I would sit in there: curled up, hugging my knees, breathing hard, and meditating on the visions that would appear before my sensory-deprived eyes.
My Filipino roommate, Oliver, who was my roommate for the first two years of college released his tensions in a much more common way: drinking with his buddies. Sometimes he would come home happy and crawl into his bed. At other times he would come back angry and emotional, asking big philosophical questions about the meaning of life and his place in it.
One evening Oliver came home in one of his angry moods. He turned his Echo And The Bunny Man tape up loud, staggered about the room, and he eventually began kicking and punching my closet. And like Oliver, I had been having a difficult night.
"Dammit! Oliver, what are you doing?"
"Joe?! Where are you?"
"In here!"
"What are you doing?"
In the continuing theme of lifestyle/spiritual transformation, I'm reading Thomas Merton's, The Seven Storey Mountain. Merton is a famous Catholic author who wrote many books, of which his autobiography and journals seem to be most popular. In this book, he writes of his youth and of becoming a Trappist monk. While his dogged Catholicism and habit of falling into honorifics (e.g., "Praise unto him, whom no one can praise enough") can be annoying, it's still very worthwhile:
What do I make of so much suffering? There was no way for me, or for anyone else in the family, to get anything out of that. It was a raw wound for which there was no adequate relief. You had to take it, like an animal. We were in the condition of most of the world, the condition of men without faith in the presence of war, disease, pain, starvation, suffering, plague, bombardment, death. You just had to take it, like a dumb animal. Tried to avoid it, if you could. But you must eventually reached the point where you can't avoid it anymore. Take it. Try to stupefy yourself, if you like, so that it won't hurt so much. But you always have to take some of it. And it will devour you in the end.
Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begins to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that as it once the subject and the source of this pain, and his very resistance and consciousness is his greatest torture. This is another of a great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn on our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all of our capacities for good, turning hem against ourselves.
The self-creation of misery is reminiscent of Buddhist (the pursuit of pleasure is futile) and Hindu ("renouncing the fruit of action") teachings; genuine wisdom found in most spiritual traditions.
The view of falling snow
shimmers from the rising heat
of the radiator below the library window
We choose the meaning for the events of our lives. A couple years out from my initial RSI I interpreted it as a difficult but saving grace from life as a screen-jockey. But I still find myself in front of the computer much too often.
As aptly described in Richard Florida's excellent The Rise Of The Creative Class, like many of my contemporaries I still retain the compulsive need for interactivity and extemporaneous relations. Throughout the day I multitasking, query, interact, and tweak. I crave information, the update, and the control only a computer and the network can provide.
When I take a break from the computer, as I did this week, I can finally hear the chatter of these micro-desires: the thousand little questions that arise during the course of the day, the realization in the middle of the night that I could improve my blog script, or the need to see if I have the latest version of some program regardless of whether I'm even presently using it. It's a ceaseless compulsion, but easily satisfied, all I need to do is sit in front the computer and I will get my first and little fix; it's not much of its own accord, but doing anything on the computer generates three other tasks to tick off and yield a tiny dose of serotonin to the brain.
So what do my present pains tell me? I hesitate to even say, but I suspect it is life reminding me there's much beyond the screen. To be content is to be of service, of genuine use to others. How do I implement this? I don't know, but I fear that life will continue to ever more aggressively press its point until I figure it out.
This week while watching an interview with Minister William Sloane Coffin, (former Freedom Rider, Vietnam protester, and Senior Minister of the Riverside Church), I felt touched by his eloquence and wisdom, particularly with respect to his own imminent death. Afterwards, I wondered how I could be so impressed by some religious figures, yet absolutely repulsed by others? Does the Buddhist monk quietly meditating and the evangelical minister screaming on the street-corner even belong in the same category?
During my religious crisis as a teenager, I declared myself an atheist because of my perception of the rote, bigoted, and superstitious character of religion. It took almost a decade for the harsh tide of atheistic skepticism to subside so as to notice and appreciate faith once more. That doesn't mean I'm no longer an atheist, nor that I'm very fond of organized religion; I simply rediscovered faith as an act of conscience.
What I've come to realize with respect to "religion", is that it is a complex phenomenon. The term is used to describe one or more of many beliefs and practices. For example:
Beliefs about:
Practices of:
At the start of this year this site was serving 1.3GB of data a day! I was flattered that Google thought so much of my photographs that it would return them on the first page of many queries, but that's just too expensive. So no more Google-Image. Now, my bandwidth usage is almost 1/10 of what it was.
I sent Ashley $1 towards her continuing education, she was kind enough to email me a thank you! She reports that it cost her $12 to run the ad, and has only received $6 so far. Ain't that the way of life.
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i'm your guide
on my palm
on my diva
in my bag
in my logs