A moment of self-indulgence. But then this is a blog...what else is it for.
It's amazing how reading the right thing at the right time will bring you back from the brink, lower your heart rate and make you look around and realize you're doing ok.
I've been reading "Carry Tiger to Mountain: the Tao of Activism and Leadership" and it's just tops. It helps the reader to negotiate these two seemingly contradictory ideas of activism, which is telling you to...ya know...act and taoism, which is so much about listening and not doing. It's really terrific and I love the writer's voice, he has a great combination of earnestness and straightforward storytelling mixed with a sense of humor.
In the chapter Retreat to Ride Tiger he quotes Thomas Merton saying,
So from the sage's emptiness, stillness arises. From stillness, action. From action, attainment.
Then I revisited my notebook from HPI, the program I did last fall, and found a document given to us at the end that sort of summarized the big ideas of the program as well as giving us lists of books, films, blogs and such of things that we should check out to inspire us. Love those Headlong folks.
It also had a page addressing presence with a list of things to think about. Among them:
Be interested, not interesting.
breathe and be simple
have No Idea, do not anticipate
I sometimes worry that I'm rationalizing, justifying a life that could easily look like laziness, but it doesn't feel like that's what my life is, so I try to let that go. I read things like that quote and these ideas and realize that what I'm doing with myself isn't actually as big a problem as my television would have me believe. (seriously, the more I watch TV the angrier I get. and I am all about TV. conundrum!) These things that I read feel like my life, so it's nice to see someone else give it a name.
blessings, all.
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