I think this is perhaps a good time for my comments and thoughts on "The Tree of Contemplative Practice" ( link). I feel like I do need to recenter myself after this morning and remind myself that the only person's behavior I can control is my own.

(I also need to remind myself of Patricia Walden's, "Draw your attention to the center of your heart, where it's quiet." That may not be anatomically true but it does resonate with me - I like the idea of walking around, having this quiet, calm core, that I can draw on when I need to).

I think perhaps one of the antidotes to the craziness of the modern world - and dealing with crazy-making people - is to do things that are quiet and contemplative.

(Disclaimer: this might not work for everyone, I suppose. I am a classic - and extreme - introvert, one who is taxed by too many dealings with people and one who recharges by being alone).

I like the tree because it emphasizes that there are a lot of things one can do. For example: I cannot do sitting meditation for long. I never have been able to. My mind runs away with me, I start thinking about the laundry or some book I'm reading or what I need to remember to buy at the store. But I can do other things. I can do something akin to meditation while I knit, or while I pull weeds in the garden.

And I actually do a fairly large number of the "branches" - maybe not everything on a branch (I don't even know what all those things are). But - working my way around the tree from the lower left - I sing, at least in church. Perhaps my knitting and quilting could be considered "contemplative art."

I do yoga and I have done walking-as-contemplative-practice (not so much here, this is not a very walker-friendly city). I've tried sitting meditation without much success. Centering prayer works better, or other "centering" practices like some of the ones on my yoga tapes.

As for "activist practices" - if you count cooking at a soup kitchen or cleaning up trash or all those little things a person does to try to make the world a better place, I'm there. I'm not so much down with activism in the sense of marching and chanting; I tend to be more of a behind-the-scenes, I'm-going-to-find-something-that-needs-to-be-done-and-do-it kind of person. And I'm better with local stuff, stuff I can "grab hold to," than I am with global type of stuff.

And I've prayed, and I did lectio divina in the past (and it's one of the things that I'd like to keep up with, but there just aren't enough hours in the day and I guess I don't make it a priority). (Lectio divina, for those unfamiliar - it literally translates to "divine reading." What it is, is reading a passage - be it of scripture or another spiritual passage - and reading it over, slowly, many times, and thinking about what it means to your own spiritual practice; what it is teaching you.)

I don't really have cyclical practices other than taking note of the liturgical year. I try to "keep the Sabbath" in the sense of not doing "WORK-work" on that day, and also not shopping (being materialistic), but I don't always succeed. I also have tried in the past to keep media-sources off (other than listening to music) but again, I'm not as disciplined about that as I could be.

For relational practices - well, except for here, I'm a pretty bad journal keeper. I am fairly good at deep listening but I don't always have the opportunity for that.

(Funny - I started out to do this as a "gee, there are a lot of things I do on that tree" and it wound up being a "But I don't do any of them as well as I could." I guess that's another component of my personality right there - very strongly self-critical.)

Anyway. The whole site is worth a visit. It refers to God, but in a very non-denominational and general sort of way - definitely not a Christian-specific site. There are some other comments on there I like:

"We are compelled to read for profit,to have parties for contacts, go to lunch for contracts, play for therapy, drive to get there, gamble for charity, go out to rebuild the community, stay home to rebuild the house. Our leisure hours are as frantic and busy as our work hours and therefore as meaningless - meaningless enough to drive some of us to drink, some of us to the hospital, and all of us to the beck and call of the marketplace." -- William McNamara.

And I think that's a lot of the problem - that modern society views "doing nothing" as a vacuum, and abhors it in the way that some of the Dark Ages priests abhorred the concept of zero and nothingness.* Or like the old saying about nature abhorring a vacuum (which actually goes back to the human fear of zero*). I see it in people being overscheduled and in people pressing ME to overschedule, to do more and more. And I kind of cry out to do LESS, to pull back a little and have more open time to think and BE.

(*I am currently reading William Seife's "Zero" where he talks about the development of the concept of zero and also the concept of infinity. Apparently zero was very threatening to Middle-ages Westerners - it was actually banned in some places. Which is also why our calendar has no zero, and there is no "year 0.")

Instead: there's something WRONG with you if you are doing "nothing." You are not being productive, or, conversely, you are not consuming and contributing to the economy.

But we need to pull back. I think perhaps this ties in with the rudeness issue I talked about last week - we are, many of us, on our "last nerves," and we're so frayed and tired and trying so hard to hang on to what's left of our essential selves, that we tend to forget the other people in the equation. But we need to all take time to sort of pull in and pull back and THINK about life and who we are and what we are doing.

And I don't know how we can do that, as a society. I think we need to. We all need to pull back. One thing I'm frankly amazed by is the level of (what I would consider to be) unnecessary debt some people take on - buying fancier cars than they can really afford, buying new wardrobes when their old clothes still fit them, taking lavish vacations that they take loans out against their homes for....and a lot of the people like that that I know, they don't seem to have a real security; they seem to be like hamsters running on wheels.

And I wonder: when is the "snap" going to happen? Or maybe, it already has: the point where we as a society get stretched past the breaking point and can't take it any more?

Like I said: I don't have any really good answers. I know I buy into the problems myself: watching too much crap on tv, doing stuff that really doesn't enrich me, soul-wise, because it's rote or it's expected of me or I don't want to look "too weird" to the rest of the world. And I have to admit on some level I DO like shopping, I do like roaming the boutiques and such...even though I realize it's a bit of the hamster-wheel problem.

I read an article in this past month's "Yankee" magazine (or maybe it wasn't - I can't find a link to the story on their site - but anyway, the story was about Tumbleweed Tiny Homes) - about a builder who makes "tiny houses" - houses with like a 700 square foot footprint - houses that are like a modern version of Thoreau's cabin. And on the one hand, that's deeply appealing to me - there'd be so little to clean! Everything would be so cozy and close-at-hand! Think of how tiny your carbon footprint could be!

But then I find myself coming back to: but where do they keep their books? How to they manage the question of having summer and winter clothes? Is there enough room for that? What about people with hobbies that need supplies?

And I don't know. I suppose there's a happy medium between having a 4,000 square foot house that's impossible to air-condition in the summer and that you have to fill up with "stuff" and living in a tiny cabin where you basically live as an ascetic because there's not any room. (And honestly, I'm probably not too far off that happy medium, in reality: my house is just about 1300 square feet, my heating and a/c bills are almost never as much as $100 a month, but I still have room for my books and my yarn and the stuff I feel like I "need.")

I had a friend in college who said her goal was to be able to live out of a backpack - so she could travel the world easily. I remember looking at her a bit aghast: what about BOOKS, I asked. Well, yes, she said, thinking a bit. Books do present a problem. (We were both of us book-lovers and book-owners; I know, I know, libraries exist but I've become very conscious of the fact that some communities have, to say it in a nice way, rather incomplete libraries. For me, owning my own books is still important).

So I don't know. One of the little back-burner conflicts I have in my life is very much the need to balance a desire to tread lightly on the Earth (and I think I do okay. Not great, but okay) with a need for comfort and things that make me happy. And it's something I'm still learning, I guess. Maybe someday I will be able to purge and shed and move into one of those tiny cabin-houses; just not now.