Even though I have this belief
that I'm unable to heal / I'm undeserving of healing, **
I acknowledge it's no longer working for me.
Forming Thoughts on a Keyboard
"Expectations based on the work itself are the most useful tool the artist possesses. What you need to know about the next piece is contained in the last piece. The place to learn about your materials is in the last use of your materials. The place to learn about your execution is in your execution. The best information about what you love is in your last contact with what you love. Put simply, your work is your guide: a complete, comprehensive, limitless reference book on your work. There is no other such book, and it is yours alone. It functions this way for no one else. Your fingerprints are all over your work, and you alone know how they got there. Your work tells you about your working methods, your discipline, your strengths and weaknesses, your habitual gestures, your willingness to embrace.
The lessons you are meant to learn are in your work. To see them, you need only look at the work clearly - without judgement, without need or fear, without wishes or hopes. Without emotional expectations. Ask your work what it needs, not what you need. Then set aside your fears and listen, the way a good parent listens to a child."
Is it really so hard to believe that "finding our purpose" is a big deal in today's culture? Doesn't it make sense that we search for meaning in what we do with our time - in how we slave our days - because we biologically long to be connected to the cycle of feeding our bodies? Perhaps the reason we are so intrinsically tied to our work, and are so quick to place our worth as humans in the hands of the job we've chosen, is because it replaces what used to be the physical daily rhythm of staying alive, of feeding our bodies. Our basic needs are now met, and the only connection we have to staying and feeling alive is making sure we have enough money to buy food.
When we were connected to nature, when our senses were so attuned to the patterns of the day to show us the next place to eat and sleep, did we doubt our place in the world?
This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth the beloved left
And, leaving,
Left to us.
No other world
But this one:
Willows and the river
And the factory
With its black smokestacks.
No other shore, only this bank
On which the living gather.
No meaning but what we find here.
No purpose but what we make.
That, and the beloved’s clear instructions:
Turn me into song; sing me awake.
- Gregory Orr, "This is what was bequeathed us"
So much of the community that we aspire to and yearn for comes out of certain kinds of practises. We're all here for a certain amount of time doing something. So the question is, what are you doing with your time? How do you spend it, how do you fill up a day? What is the quality of that experience? When you take those units of experience and concentrate them over time in many people, what does it foster? A community is not an abstract set of principles; a community arises out of what people have to do - day in and day out - to take care of themselves and each other. The way they are together.
Why would you, in a time of supermarkets, go out there collecting individual clams, harvesting with your bare hands, drying out berries, walking around harvesting little bits of food - so much work for so few calories - why? What is the point? Because that's what you did with the day. Because theres a quality of experience that comes from looking so closely at the earth. You learn something. The way it absorbs your attention, the way you can spend hours in the berry bushes; it's not for the berries... they're just the effect. They're the berry on top. The meat of the matter is, “that's what I did today, that’s how I saw the world today, thats how quiet my mind was today, how many times I felt a spark of joy at "Oh, look, here's one. Oh, another one, and here's another one!" That's how precise my observation got today.
A revised quote by Eli Marienthal from "Back to Earth", speaking with Chris Ryan on Tangentially Speaking, episode 411.
So, how are we spending our time?