The world I knew
as stable
Static
as a child
has always been ending
Breaking
Growing
Shifting
To go on
We must
remake the world
each day
Tag Archives: meaning
Matter
What do people need?
water
food
shelter
each other
meaning
In recent months, I’ve revisited Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, and some of the Zen ideas and teachings therein have wended their way into my consciousness. Reminds me of snippets of Buddhism I’ve absorbed over the years, such as the interconnectivity of all beings.
“A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again.”
A Tale for the Time Being, p.194
A wave is a person is alive is dead is the same thing. The narrator goes on to lament that one cannot hold on to water, to the people we love. “…still I gripped her fingers a little more tightly to keep her from leaking away.”
More recently, other ideas about how fleeting human life is in the scale of geologic or universe time have bubbled up. I wish I could cite the articles or podcasts that resurfaced this idea, but it’s not uncommon. Perhaps it was this:
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
Lao Tzu (as quoted in Frugaling’s Ownership Isn’t Real, We Rent This Life)
And I’ve picked up another of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels, and so have remembered Aurora, and the perils of a generation starship. What are we preserving, when we rocket a probe into the stars?
We are all star stuff.
Carl Sagan
Another idea that’s gained prominence in my mind recently is the emphasis, in some cultures, not on individuals or even the group, but on the culture itself. The peoples’ practices.
In high school, I hit upon the belief that the point of life is to defy extinction. I’ve come back around to this, with some additions.
The point of human life, broadly, is
To defy extinction
To perpetuate the species
To make meaning of existence
To reproduce culture
So…what is our culture? As families, as communities, as municipalities, as states, as a nation? (USA context, here.)
What is worth reproducing? Passing on? Changing? Leaving behind?
now
And what role do we play, as fleeting time beings? Given that most of us are unremarkable outside of those who know us, I’ve started to believe that what is important is family, chosen biological or otherwise. That is where our attention can make a difference. Where we transmit values and cultural practices. Where we make meaning.
now
Ozeki’s work reminds me of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower ~ the only lasting truth is change ~
“Everything in the universe is constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives.”
A Tale for the Time Being, p.408
[I mistyped “flows” as “flowers” just now. A freudian typo?]
So many people have lived
small lives
Brief
Time Beings
And what does it mean,
to truly “live our lives”?
What life is worthy of living?
How do we fully honor, appreciate
the privilege
The unlikely circumstance
of living?
now, this moment, mindfulness meditation, and its capitalist twisting, unrooted from its Buddhist origins*, how can we be present for one another, make meaning together, create something lasting knowing that lasting is relative and relatively hopeless beyond a few generations ~ we last, endure, relationally, with our relations ~
“human consciousness is neither more nor less than the clouds and water, or the hundreds of grasses”
A Tale for the Time Being, p.409
we are all star stuff
—
*Listen to the Upstream Podcast’s conversation with Ron Purser for more on “McMindfulness“
Filed under Contemporary
Wait! Before we eat…
Amateur food photography is nothing new. What else can be said about the now mundane practice of pausing before a meal to document it so the image can be shared and admired? Perhaps nothing, but I’m going to share the following experience, anyway.
About a month ago, I treated myself to a day at the Huntington Library. After wandering the gardens and visiting the Reformation exhibit, I decided to have some lunch in their upscale cafeteria. I took my tray outside to what I’ll call the veranda, because I like that word, and sat happily alone amidst people of various ages. That day there was a high school group visiting, probably a private school judging by their uniforms. The girls wore sweaters and skirts. (What’s with private school uniforms and skirts? Beyond the scope of this post…)
So there I sat, eating a passably tasty veggie wrap and enjoying the fresh air and the murmured conversation that filled it, when into my field of vision walked a trio of private school students with their own lunch trays. They selected a table at the edge of the veranda that overlooked the gardens, set down their trays, and sat. But as soon as they had done so they were standing again, each of them taking a step or two backward with their smartphones held aloft, attempting to properly frame their respective meals. After taking satisfactory pictures, they sat and proceeded to eat.
I took out my notebook and made a sketch of the scene, along with a few notes:
Daily documentation — visual — as cultural practice. The three girls photographed their curated collections of comestibles, making the quotidian significant, adding a layer of ritual (visual documentation) to another type of ritual (meal sharing), which will in turn be ritually disseminated on social media (sharing of the visual documentation of meal sharing — nay, meal plating).
Or does the ubiquity of such a practice mean that the quotidian is just that, and layering these rituals temporally is no longer in itself significant? When so many snap pictures of their food to share them in the pursuit of technologically mediated attention, is that not simply a mundane cultural practice?
No less meaningful, but meaningful in a proscribed, ritualized way.
I suppose I mean to say that it’s no longer art.
Filed under Art of all Kinds, Contemporary, Technology
The Problem with Identity
This is a series of questions that circle back on one another. I do not have answers.
Anthropology seems at odds with itself. As a discipline, it’s charged with understanding people from their own cultural perspectives, maintaining that meaning arises from use. Thinking through these tenets, it leads to a tension between intention and interpretation. I’ve been thinking about this in terms of identity and personhood–who someone is, how that “who” comes into being, and who has the power to determine who the “who” is.
Filed under Gender Trouble, Power
Poetic Interlude the Third
Voided
Community
Sustainability
Accountable
Words I am tired of hearing
Of using
Use made meaning
Made meaningless
Filed under Wordplay
Contemporary Contempt 