” Let my spear lie idle for spiders
to weave their web around it.
May I live in peace in white old age.
May I sing with garlands
around my white head,
Having hung up my shield on the
pillared house of the goddess.
May I unfold the voice of books,
which the wise honor.” – Euripides
Here’s the thing. No one likes to be criticized. Everyone wants to be loved for everything they do. We spend a lot of time trying to not have one happen and make the other one happen. Guess which one?
As someone who has buckled and often become paralyzed or given up due to criticism, this is no sort of glib post. Criticism can be a killer. It can stop people in their tracks and make them scurry away in the dark of night burying their ideas and work never to be seen or heard of again.
My mother, who for reasons of never feeling like she was good enough, was off the charts critical towards her children while we were growing up. It bred in me a weird combination of unsure of myself and highly motivated.
In undergrad, I got a BFA, so I was subject to weekly public critique’s for 5 years. Now I’m in grad school getting an MFA and am subject to the same sort of public critique. It’s the method of all forms of art and arts education. The critique. And what’s funny about that, is that artists and writers seem preternaturally sensitive to criticism.
Traditionally, you sit there and aren’t allowed to speak while people discuss your work. I usually doodle elaborate designs in my notebook that end up looking like spaceships and subway graffiti, to calm my nerves and not leave my body and keep my face color this side of magenta.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand about criticism:
* It’s unavoidable.
* It doesn’t mean our work is bad and worthless.
* Sometimes people criticise because our work has hit a spot in them that triggers them and they criticise to protect that unhealed spot.
* When we push the bounds of our own original thought, there is more a risk for structural failure and people mostly want things tied up in a nice neat bow (even fellow artists).
And I will end with the most important thing of all that I have learned about criticism:
IT DOESN’T MATTER. (It really truly doesn’t. Think about that….)
HAVE THE COURAGE OF YOUR CONVICTIONS.
“I don’t know why life isn’t constructed to be seamless and safe, why we make such glaring mistakes, things fall so short of our expectations, and our hearts get broken and our kids do scary things and our parents get old and don’t always remember to put pants on before they go out for a stroll.
I don’t know why it’s not more like it is in the movies, why things don’t come out neatly and lessons can’t be learned when you’re in the mood for learning them, why love and grace often come in such motley packaging.
But I was reminded of the lines of D.H. Lawrence that are taped to the wall of my office:
What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.”
- Annie Lamott
A couple days ago, I came home to find that I had left my office window wide open. Strong winds had reduced a 2 foot high stack of papers to hundreds of single sheets scattered everywhere in the room.
Ankle-deep like snow all over my office. The place looked ransacked.
During the clean-up, I came across quite a few things that I hadn’t seen in awhile.
One of the things I came across was the September 24, 2001 issue of the New Yorker magazine. It was the first issue after 9/11
On the very last page, was the following poem, which moved me again and maybe even more so thinking about the state of our world which has taken a hard right turn in the last 9 years.
It seems that the suffering of sentient beings and the earth, is on turbo.
I personally think it’s a time now, more than ever, that we need poets. And artists of all kinds. They are the superhero’s that can steer this boat back onto a course that is more sane and gentle and humane.
Don’t give up on this world. And to me, that means staying connected to the soft spot in ourselves, continuing to disarm ourselves internally, and taking any kind actions that we can toward the greater good of restoring and cultivating peaceful abiding.
Here’s the poem:
TRY TO PRAISE THE MUTILATED WORLD
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
- Adam Zagajewski (Translated, from the Polish, by Claire Cavanagh)
PHOTO COURTESY OF CRAIG BIALICK @Ogmin
In the 19 years that I have been a student of Buddhism and have practiced meditation, the most common way I have listened to teachers describe the nature of our minds is that it is like a vast blue sky.
Thoughts and emotions (really intense thoughts), they teach, are like clouds or storms passing across the vast blue sky.
When a storm front or clouds are passing through, the blue sky is still there, its essential nature remains the same, but it is covered over for a time.
In the same way, the essential nature of the mind doesn’t ever change, but sometimes, our thoughts and feelings can make us feel less than clear and calm.
My sister, @jillwiles, took this photo this morning from her house and the caption read:”A front was moving in this morning”
It reminded me how we experience our relationship with our own minds.
Sometimes we can see things coming on the horizon, sometimes things hit us out of the clear blue, sometimes we feel foggy, sometimes we experience our minds as open, vast blue yonder, not a cloud for miles.
Our minds are a lot like the weather.
And like we are looking at this photograph right now, we can watch what arises in our minds and simply notice it.
In a culture of do, do, do, it really is a very powerful thing to simply notice what arises within you and simply be present with it and watch it.
Things are always moving. Each thought and emotion, like clouds and storm fronts, has its own timing for how long it will stay around before finally moving on.
This is a photo from a meditation retreat that I was on a few years ago in Colorado and it reminds me of the sense of internal space we have available to us in blue sky mind.
Keep the vision of the vast blue sky alive within you.
Each Martin Luther King Day I find myself excited.
It’s a day for me to contemplate freedom.
What does it mean to be free?
What does it mean for me to be free within the context of the life I have now?
How can I free myself from the trappings of my mind in my beliefs and perceptions that are tainted with wounds from the past?
What qualities must I cultivate and possess as someone who is free?
I have experienced my own specific share of not being free in my life. I have been discriminated against because I am a woman and because I am gay. I have felt ashamed and silenced about things that have happened to me and about who I am.
While this is not anywhere near the level on a global scale that other people in the world go through in terms of not being free, each person’s pain and suffering is relative, so I cannot minimize my own suffering while maximizing others, even though on a basic level I understand that I am not starving or thirsty, and am therefore in a better position to actually access/experience true human freedom.
We must each engage the ways we are not free where we live with what presents itself. We don’t have another life to work with.
Two of my heroes are Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. When I think about what it means to be free, I think of these two people.
Dr. King is my example of the power of well-thought-out passionate words and maintaining one’s dignity in the midst of injustice that could leave one speechless and crazy. You seldom see him without a tie.
Nelson Mandela is my example of the whole often confusing idea of forgiveness. His work with Desmond Tutu on the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa has had a powerful influence on my own life like no other singular idea. You seldom see him without a smile.
In Architecture and in Yoga, there is a saying; “Form brings freedom.”
When I think about King and Mandela, I see in them a one-pointed focus as to what their lives were about. They kept their eyes on the ball and on the prize. They embodied in speech and action the very principles they believed would set millions of people free.
Freedom is a natural human proclivity. All of us want to be free. We all know people who are willing to give their life so that others can be free.
There is a discipline to freedom. Of staying with the thing until the rock moves. Of not giving up, remaining as best as we can, open-hearted and present in the face of injustice. Of continuing to work with ourselves and others in a way that serves the greater good.
As King and Mandela know, freedom is not a singular thing. We are interconnected.
No one is free until all are free.
May it begin with me and my life. May I free myself so that others may be free.
In Buddhism, we have several practices to help ease the pain and suffering of others.
They are called things like Tonglen, and Maitri, and Lovingkindness.
In all of these practices, one places one’s awareness and thought and heartfelt feeling on another person and their situation.
We imagine the details of what they are going through and try and really feel it, and then send them our own sense of well-being.
As best as we can, we close the gap of emotional distancing inside ourselves that we often create to make ourselves feel safe or protected or to maintain our good mood.
We aren’t afraid to maybe not feel so chipper in the light of the often massive scale of the kind of suffering others have to go through on a daily basis who live in the realms of the world where poverty, sex trafficking, genocide, war and natural disasters take place.
The point is not to be overwhelmed. The point is to let your heart really genuinely break for the specifics of other sentient beings conditions.
To feel deeply for others and send them our wish for their suffering to cease, is a natural aspect our our good human heart/minds.
This moment of castrophe in Haiti gives us that opportunity.
As Nicholas Kristoff tweeted this morning, “Today we are all Haiti.”
“Be like water,
Flowing everywhere
Without striving,
Benefitting all
Without contention.
Live in touch with the earth,
Meditate deeply in the heart.
Be generous in relationships,
Truthful in speech,
Consistent in leadership,
Competent in work,
And timely in actions.
The path of peace
Is forever honorable.”
-excerpt from the Tao Te Ching
Photo taken by my sister Jill from her house this morning.
last week my girlfriend’s sister and her husband had their second child. a baby girl. they are young parents. 25 and 26. to say that they are doing an amazing job is an understatement. these are the kind of people that really should raise children.
these two pictures they sent out reminded me of how we all start out. fresh. innocent. vulnerable. a white canvas of endless possibilities.
then things happen. some of the things that happen as we grow up are painful and devastating and take their pound of flesh and leave their mark. it’s easier to
shut down over time than it is to open up.
it’s not easy to remember our own innocence never mind someone else’s. but how about at the start of this new fresh year, if we just drop all our big projects and push to achieve and get it all done for a minute, and remember how we all started.
even the jerks we encounter were once small children. jerks are jerks because of unattended and unhealed wounds inflicted upon them from childhood that they haven’t worked through.
a new year without compassion towards ourselves and others is a new year absent of our most beautiful aspect; our humanity. our power to be kind.
as the saying goes; it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.
these pictures of Lena Elizabeth are all of us.
maybe it’s time to find an adorable picture of yourself as a wee one and prop it up on your desk and gaze lovingly at that sweetie-pie who survived it all and is still here.
