being
weekly reflection, updates & good stuff 5.25.2021
What it means to be human — to me, finding another dark sky and looking up at the cosmos, at all of those stars, it is just so awesome. And to think about the fact that humans have somehow managed to figure out what makes all of those beautiful stars and what’s going on, and somehow, somehow, our brain has pieced together a 13.8 billion-year history of our universe, and how intimately we’re connected to those distant times and places — the calcium in our bones, and the iron in the hemoglobin in our blood, they were all cooked up in a massive star that blew itself up billions of years ago. I mean, we are literally — it’s Carl Sagan’s “we are made of stardust.” And that’s quite literal.
And so, to me, being human is about appreciating the fact that we are so closely connected to this much bigger idea of an evolving universe. I mean, I often say, “It takes a cosmos to make a human.
Jill Tarter, “It Takes a Cosmos to Make a Human,” On Being with Krista Tippett
Friends,
May 25 has been an important date on my calendar for a long time. It’s my mother’s birthday (would’ve been her 86th). I associate the smell of lilies of the valley with the month - sure, this is the time they bloom, but as my mom’s favorite flower, our house was fragrant with the pointed sweetness of the flowers. When we moved into our new home, my husband and I tried to plant a patch of lilies of the valley, but, almost evoking a biblical parable, some of the ground was too exposed, too rocky for the flowers to thrive, and some of the ground was too dark, too dank for them to sprout. We focused on the other plants - an abundant hedge of rosemary, succulents gradually covering the ground, a baby Japanese maple, blueberry bushes, a young Magnolia. Over the course of last summer, with my husband’s expert gardening skills and my obsessive watering, the garden flourished. I take particular pride when, from the window, I catch walkers-by stopping to admire and even snap pics of our increasingly lush little patch along the sidewalk.
May 25 is also the Feast of Madeleine Sophie Barat. In Catholic tradition, the feast of a saint marks the anniversary of the day s/he died. Sophie (as she is lovingly referred to) founded the Religious of the Sacred Heart (RSCJ), a society of women religious whose work in education and other fields is animated by Sophie’s insight that when a child knows she is loved, she becomes powerful. I started teaching in Sacred Heart schools, and her vision and the mission of the order formed (really, continues to form) my own approach to teaching and understanding of the purpose of education.
Like most religious orders, RSCJs hold the words of their founder close and follow her example in their work and their lives. Sophie’s daily prayer is a popular text for devotion, and it reveals the characteristics and the traits she desired.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
give me a heart that is one with your own:
a humble heart that knows and loves its nothingness;
a gentle heart that holds and calms its own anxiety;
a loving heart that has compassion for the suffering of others;
a pure heart that recoils even at the appearance of evil;
a detached heart that longs for nothing other than the goodness of heaven;
a heart detached from self-love and embraced by the love of God,
its attention focused on God, God’s goodness its only treasure in time and in eternity.
In last week’s episode of On Being, Krista Tippett interviewed Jill Tarter, the astronomer who inspired Ellie Arroway in Carl Sagan’s Contact (Jodie Foster played “her” in the film). Much of their conversation revolved around the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), but it was as much an extended meditation on what it means to be human. Tarter reminded me that, from stardust to our current morass, as much as we’ve imagined to be separate from or superior to the rest of the natural world, we are existentially, interdependently immersed in an evolving universe. Our dissatisfaction with sloth, our demand for immediacy is the real delusion of our lives - detachment from our addiction to “now” is a necessary step in our appreciation of, our understanding of, our cooperation with the evolving universe.
Detachment is a skill developed in many spiritual disciplines - it serves different purposes for different people, but it’s recognized almost ubiquitously as a technique for personal and collective growth. In her prayer, Sophie doesn’t deny the complexity of the universe, of relationships, of being, but they do clarify what being human is about for her. It’s about humility, gentleness, love, compassion, innocence, and detachment. Without denying or defining its opposite, Sophie points to goodness as a reflection of the love of God, as the animating force in the universe that enables us to build bridges between our imperfections and our idealized (humble, gentle, loving…) selves.
“It takes a cosmos to make a human,” Tarter said. In an immediate sense and an ultimate sense, we’re not alone on the journey. Sophie outlines the traits that can bind us together, that can bring out our best selves and that can establish justice and instill a true and lasting peace, and they’re all relational - none of these suggests isolation or independence. Tarter points to our origins’ origins, the beginning of all of our beginnings, but, for all the biological and social diversity, all the conflict and irreconcilable differences we navigate in our day-to-day, from a distance (to quote the Divine Miss M) “there is harmony and it echoes through the land. It’s the voice of hope, it’s the voice of peace, it’s the voice of every” being (she sings man, but I’m skewing for inclusivity here). Maybe it’s not the voice of hope or peace at all - maybe it’s our common stardust, scattered billions of years ago and striving toward, if not reunification, constant renewal.
I was so consumed with the springtime budding of the irises and the exponential bursting of the rosemary that I nearly forgot the lilies of the valley that we’d planted a year earlier. And they sprouted and bloomed. They weren’t the color of pearl, like the flowers in my mom’s garden; a shade of purplish-pink, almost a dusty-rose wrapped around the blossoms. They weren’t prominent - the lilies were reclusive, practically hiding under the leaves of adjacent irises and hydrangeas. But their fragrance was familiar, that pointed sweetness that filled my mom’s kitchen in May. Funny, isn’t it - it just took a little time and detachment for the flowers to grow, and even when they did, they surprised me. That’s the magic of stardust.
UPCOMING
Guided Meditations | Mondays, 4:00pm PST & Thursdays, 9am PST (starting April 8!) via Zoom
Good Stuff V | 4-week symposium on Wednesdays at 5:00pm PST begins on June 2. Sign up here!
UPDATES
Looking for meaningful conversation without having to prove, disprove, or accomplish anything? Join a Symposium! Symposia bring people together to explore a topic from different angles. Check out my website for more information and to sign up. Symposia are limited to 10 participants and need 4 to run. Upcoming Symposia:
Good Stuff: talking about listening, seeing, feeling, and other ings. Good Stuff V (Wednesdays June 2, 9, 16 & 23); Good Stuff VI (Wednesdays: July 14, 21, 28 & August 4); Good Stuff VII (Wednesdays, August 11, 18, 25 & September 1; Good Stuff VIII (Wednesdays: August 8, 15, 22 & 29)
Rituals, ceremonies, traditions: starting points for understanding, engaging, and constructing ritual life (Thursdays: July 15, July 22, July 29, August 5)
Madonna: a case study in religion & pop culture (Thursdays: August 12, 19, 26 & September 2)
Miss Jean Brodie is past her prime: teachers in film (Thursdays: September 9, 16, 23 & 30)
Guided meditations via Zoom continue on Mondays at 4:00pm PST and on Thursdays at 9:00am PST! These morning (on the West Coast)/mid-day (on the East Coast)/evening (wherever else you might be) sessions will be just like the Monday session - our aim is to practice being present and finding a little peace and quiet. If you or someone you know could use a 20-30 minute dose of peace and quiet on Mondays or Thursdays, visit the meditation page on my site to sign up!
GOOD STUFF
Remember
May 25 now marks a sacred day on the American calendar, the anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. If Mr. Floyd was Catholic, I’d say it’s his feast day, too. I’ve posted much of my own reflection on his death and what it revealed, especially to those of us who have been protected by the privilege that comes with being White. Today isn’t a day for another cis, White man to comment; instead, I defer to poet Toi Derricotte and choose to take today to listen, to continue to learn, and to strive to see what I haven’t seen before.
“Why I don’t write about George Floyd”
Toi Derricotte
Because there is too much to say
Because I have nothing to say
Because I don’t know what to say
Because everything has been said
Because it hurts too much to say
What can I say what can I say
Something is stuck in my throat
Something is stuck like an apple
Something is stuck like a knife
Something is stuffed like a foot
Something is stuffed like a body
Delight
There are hundreds of creation stories, maybe thousands. Over time and around the world, people have used the tools and vocabulary available to them to string together a story about the origins of life. I grew up with the narrative in Genesis, but in a course about Jewish methods for interpreting scripture in college we dove into the two creation stories at the beginning of Genesis. The first, with the famous lines “In the beginning” and “And it was good,” is more ethereal, more cosmic in scope. The second, telling the ever-popular tale of the creation of Adam from mud (which shouldn’t be a surprise, since in Hebrew the name Adam means ‘mud’) and Eve from one of Adam’s ribs (which makes less sense, since her name means ‘living’), focuses on the creation of humanity (and, rather heavy-handedly, the creation of gender roles) and sets us up for the expulsion from Eden after the rib-person took a bite of the fruit (not an apple - the text never specifies which fruit). I never really enjoyed the second story (mostly because I couldn’t see past the overt reinforcement of inequitable gender roles), but the first story continues to resonate with me. The layers of creation in Genesis echo in a stylized way the narrative that we’ve developed about the creation of the universe through modern science as well as other evolutionary creation stories.
The most mind-blowing insight that I learned from that course is one I sit with regularly and emerged from a peculiar textual choice. Traditionally, Jews interpret the Torah to be written by God. When interpreters come across contradictions and ambiguities in the text, the assumption is not that the author was mistaken but that our understanding is limited. There are hints embedded in the text and insights from our own experiences that help us to fill in those gaps, to resolve or make meaning of apparent contradictions. The first and best example of this is the very first line, typically translated, “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth...” In Hebrew, the first word transliterates to b’reshit (‘in the beginning’ or ‘at the start’), but if this refers to the origin of all creation, why start with the bet, the second letter in the Hebrew alefbet, not alef? Traditional interpretation precludes any suggestion that God made a mistake or didn’t mean anything by it - it’s literally (and literarily #badhumshee) the first line in the text. Some took this to suggest that this story might point to the beginning of creation as we know it, but as alef precedes bet, something must’ve preceded the creation we know.
That insight opened my mind to other creation stories - not just because they help me to fill in the gaps in my existential pondering but also because they reflect something about another culture, another part of the world from which another group of humans looked at the earth below them and the stars in the sky and started to wonder about what ties them together, what keeps them apart. A few years ago, I stumbled across Bhajju Shyam and Gita Wolf’s Creation a few years ago and kept it in my office, hoping that someone - a colleague, a student, a parent, anyone - would notice it, ask about it, and embark with me into a philosophical wormhole. Never happened. The book itself is beautiful - handmade, silkscreened, and vibrant - and it conveys the creation story woven in the Gond culture of south-central India. It’s not a book I can sufficiently describe - it’s really one to be experienced. This is less of a narrative creation story and more of a meditation on the core categories of existence and the meaning that Gonds have gleaned from their form and function.
Since we can’t walk through it side-by-side and take turns flipping the pages, I made a short recording, pausing on the images and texts. If you’ve got 5 minutes, make yourself a cup of tea and dive in with me.
Reflect
Around this time last year, just two months into quarantime, I published a short reflection prompted by Joy Harjo’s poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here.” Sitting with the poem in the weeks before (what would’ve been) my mother’s 85th birthday, my mind went to her kitchen table and an illuminated text that hung nearby. Now (what would’ve been) her 86th is today. An excerpt from a book by Gerard Vann, OP, the text questions the notion that we will only be judged for our piety and self-deprivation and suggests that love - love of music, love of words, love of color, love of children - will be more important in our ultimate assessment. As we move out of quarantime Vann’s words resonate even more loudly - whatever comes next, I hope we’re able to stop judging ourselves and others by the marks we meet or miss and start committing to build a beautiful world. Gifts, responsibilities, Vann & Harjo and other short essays are on Medium.
Listen
Moby wrote the song “We Are All Made of Stars” after the attacks of September 11 (which happens to be Moby’s birthday), a hopeful and uplifting song released into a nation grappling with existential questions of vulnerability, viability, and identity. It was inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the refrain that gives the song its title grows from Carl Sagan’s seminal insight that “we are made of stardust.” In the video, though, a deadpan Moby wearing an astronaut’s EMU accompanies a series of celebrities (some with better reputations than others) through the glamorous and seedy corners of Hollywood. The juxtaposition of Moby’s inspired and inspiring track with a range of Hollywood glitter(ish)ati - from Verne Troyer and Thora Birch to Ron Jeremy and Sean Bean - is jarring and makes me wonder what Moby and director Joseph Kahn intended, but I interpret the video to be a commentary on the illusion (and sometimes delusion) of celebrity. Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges tumbled from prime-time sit-com success as children to troubled and complicated adulthoods. Does anyone remember anything about Tommy Lee other than his sex video with Pamela Anderson? About JC Chasez post-’N Sync? About Kato Kaelin after the OJ trial? None of the celebs featured seem to be particularly comforted by Moby’s message, but how could they be, surrounded by, assaulted by the lights and commotion that come with commercial success? There’s no space to grieve, no room to expand, no horizon to suggest a next chapter. At one level, Moby’s spacesuit is a clever but costumey twist, letting him float unnoticed among the “stars” (#badumshee), but it also sends a message to these earthlings to look beyond the lights and the distractions, to see themselves in perspective, beautiful little specks floating in the galaxy, like every other person moving through the planet each a little portion of stardust
If you stream music on Spotify, I’ve started a playlist called “Bill’s Good Stuff,” including music I’ve loved for a long time as well as things I’ve come across more recently. Feel free to add the playlist to your favorites! Bill’s Good Stuff Spotify Playlist
Read
For this week’s meditation, I used a poem by Wendell Berry.
“How to Be a Poet”
Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly.
Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places and desecrated places.
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come out of the silence,
like prayers prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.
