smile
weekly reflection, updates & good stuff 4.27.2021
“The body never lies.”
from Martha Graham, Blood Memory.
Friends,
When I was a kid, a song was playing (my mom played WGN constantly in the kitchen). I don’t remember which song, but she’d entered into an extended scat sequence, something I’d never heard before. I asked, with a hint of disdain, “What’s this?” My mom replied, undistracted from whatever she was doing, “Ella Fitzgerald.” “I don’t like it.” Without looking toward me or missing a beat, “Then why are you tapping your foot?”
For me, smiling is a similar reflex. If something delights me, amuses me, or surprises me, I have no choice in the matter. It’s as instinctive as a cough in smoke or tears while chopping onions. I’m susceptible to others’ smiles, too. Even watching the dullest movies, I find myself smiling with smiling characters. I’ve been to more painful theater productions than I care to count (I mean, I was a middle school principal for a short time), but when I see kids or just terrible amateurs exuding joy and pride in their performance, I’m right there with them.
Perhaps it’s an instinct, perhaps a learned behavior or a cultivated skill. I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. #katyazamolodchikova But it’s a reflex that I’m grateful for. In the darkest of hours, I’ve been lucky to tap into some emergency reserve of joy stored in my muscles’ memory that can at least start to recharge me. My memory of my mother’s wake, standing with my siblings to form a long receiving line (#youngestof10) for extended family and extended friends, wasn’t the grief that enveloped me or the sadness that we absorbed from the extended. It was how much my cheeks and jaw hurt from smiling and laughing - delight at seeing people I hadn’t for a while, meeting people I’d only heard about, and hearing stories, some I’d heard 100 times and others I hadn’t heard at all.
UPCOMING
Guided Meditations | Mondays, 4:00pm PST & Thursdays, 9am PST (starting April 8!) via Zoom
Good Stuff IV | 4-week symposium on Mondays at 5:00pm PST begins on May 3. Sign up here!
Religion in film: a case study in religion & pop culture | 4-week symposium on Tuesdays at 5:00pm PST begins on May 4. Sign up here!
UPDATES
Cat Dillon’s Routines & Rituals Symposium began yesterday! Over the weekend, Cat hosted a virtual happy hour with some of the people she interviewed for the symposium, and it is quite a group. The breadth of experiences, the depth of thought, and the variety of expertise in the group is really striking, and our hour together made all the more eager to hear their stories and their insights on meaningful routines and rituals that bolster self-care and wellness. Register here for the symposium!
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!
Registration for the Good Stuff IV and Religion in film: a case study in religion and pop culture symposia is open! What, exactly, is a symposium? It’s a chance for a group of people to connect, experience something, and engage in meaningful conversation. Check out my website for more information and to sign up. Interested? More info and registration are here. Symposia are limited to 10 participants and need 4 to run - if you’ve thought about participating, now is the time to sign up!
GOOD STUFF
Learn
I lived in Washington, DC, for five years, and one of the many joys of the city is the variety of murals and public art (you have to go beyond the National Mall and Ford’s Theater to enjoy them). A local favorite is a pop-art style depiction of Marilyn Monroe in Woodley Park, but when moving through the neighborhood with folx, instead of thinking, “What’s the story there?,” my response was always and unfortunately, “Oh, a Marilyn mural. Cool.” Recently a friend shared an article that was as delightful as it was astonishing. In “Restoring Marilyn Monroe in Woodley Park,” high school student and journalist Seth Riker recounts the story (really the people and the lives) behind the mural and excavates an often forgotten truth that DC is so much more than seats of power and (sometimes overly) patriotic (and often overwhelmingly gauche) monuments. The article revived happy memories of my time in DC (I initially lived in Adams-Morgan, not far from the mural), but it particularly made me smile when I imagined a teenager connecting with an 82 year old gay man. Perhaps he just wanted to hear the basics about the painting, but Riker’s interview of Roi Barnard elicited a beautiful oral history of queer life in the 20th century.
Smile
From Thich Nhat Hanh, Be Free Where You Are: A Talk Given at the Maryland Correctional Institute:
Why should I smile when there is no joy me? The answer to that is: Smiling is a practice. There are over three hundred muscles in your face. When you are angry or fearful, these muscles tense up. The tension in these muscles creates a feeling of hardness. If you know how to breathe in and produce a smile, however, the tension will disappear - it is what I call “mouth yoga.” Make smiling an exercise. Just breathe in and smile - the tension will disappear and you will feel much better.
There are times when your joy produces a smile. There are also times when a smile causes relaxation, calm, and joy. I do not wait until there is joy in me to smile; joy will come later. Sometimes when I am alone in my room in the dark, I practice smiling to myself. I do this to be kind to myself, to take good care of myself, to love myself. I know that if I cannot take care of myself, I cannot take care of anyone else. Being compassionate to yourself is a very important practice. When you are tired, angry, or in despair, you should know how to go back to yourself and take care of your tiredness, your anger, and your despair.
Reflect
I stumbled into this in Divinity school while taking a course about modern American dance. Throughout the course, we focused on Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Graham, each of whom frequently reflected on the intersection of spirituality and art and integrated religious themes into their choreography. The most unusual aspect of the course wasn’t the topic - instead of the standard weekly discussion section, our chance to dive deep into things and get to know (read: impress) the professor, we met for a weekly dance movement workshop. Our professor was an accomplished dancer herself, and it was quickly clear that the course was rooted in her personal passions. When we focused on St. Denis, we learned her warmup. When we focused on Duncan, we mimicked her exercise of connecting various images from classic-inspired vases into fluid movement. And when we focused on Graham...contract, release, contract, release, contract, release.
To say that my classmates and I got to know each other in a different way is, perhaps, the understatement of the decade, but the bigger surprise was what the weekly workshop revealed to each of us about ourselves. On one hand, I expected to apply the vocabulary of religious studies and ritual theory to dance, but the result was the inverse - I’ve applied their insights toward understanding ritual action and religious identity. In “An Athlete of God,” an essay she read on the radio as part of the Edward R. Murrow’s “This I Believe” series, Graham expanded on the idea.
Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather to all who can read it. This might be called the law of the dancer’s life - the law which governs its outer aspects.
”Then there is the cultivation of the being. It is through this that the legends of the soul’s journey are re-told with all their gaiety and their tragedy and the bitterness and sweetness of living. It is at this point that the sweet of life catches up the mere personality of the performer and while the individual (the undivided one), becomes greater, the personal becomes less personal. And there is grace. I mean the grace resulting from faith: faith in life, in love, in people and in the act of dancing. All this is necessary to any performance in life which is magnetic, powerful, rich in meaning.
The essay is brief, but, like her choreography, it’s dense and rich, deceptively simple. It’s a quick read, but being able to hear Graham read the essay (thanks to the revival of “This I Believe” by NPR in the 2000s) is a gift.
Listen
Have you ever heard a song that compelled you to smile? On first listen, it’s caught your attention with its melodies or harmonies or its lyrics? Or you find yourself unconsciously tapping your foot or swaying with the rhythm? A recent episode of Livewire featured The Lone Bellow and “Count on Me,” a song they recorded last spring (remotely from each other because of the pandemic, a first for the band). I’d never heard the song - I’d never heard the band - but by the end of the group’s live performance on the show, I found myself rocking back and forth with the rhythm, smiling widely, and my eyes welling with very happy tears. The music grabbed me - it’s rich and textured, and their voices are raspy and soulful and strong - but the lyrics struck me as unusual and strikingly relevant. Denying the pattern of popular and poor advice (the singer is the solution to all your problems, and you just need to be open to friendship for everything to get better) that finds its way into too many songs (“Bridge over Troubled Water,” “You’ve Got a Friend,” “I’ll Be There for You”), The Lone Bellow advises:
Let it break you
Let it help you lay down what you held onto
You can count on me, I can count on you
To help you lay down what you held onto
These are probably the most soothing words I’ve heard in the last year. In the bigger picture, they resonate with Arundhati Roy’s (to me) prophetic essay from last April and her insight that we have an opportunity to imagine our world anew and to leave behind the things that perpetuate injustice and degradation, but more delightfully they offer a definition of authentic friendship, a promise to bring out each other’s best selves.
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 Mary Oliver (no, not that one).
“Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me”
Mary Oliver
Last night
the rain
spoke to me
slowly, saying,
what joy
to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again
in a new way
on the earth!
That’s what it said
as it dropped,
smelling of iron,
and vanished
like a dream of the ocean
into the branches
and the grass below.
Then it was over.
The sky cleared.
I was standing
under a tree.
The tree was a tree
with happy leaves,
and I was myself,
and there were stars in the sky
that were also themselves
at the moment,
at which moment
my right hand
was holding my left hand
which was holding the tree
which was filled with stars
and the soft rain -
imagine! imagine!
the long and wondrous journeys
still to be ours.
If you’re interested in my own reflections and updates on bill hulseman consulting, subscribe at billhulseman.com/contact or visit my blog and Medium pages.
Thanks for reading!
