[Image: “Angular Momentum,” from xkcd.com. The tooltip/”hover title” at the original page says: “With reasonable assumptions about latitude and body shape, how much time might she gain them? Note: whatever the answer, sunrise always comes too soon. (Also, is it worth it if she throws up?)”]
From whiskey river:
Remembering
And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is—
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.
(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])
…and:
You’re really just an ongoing set of events: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, one after the other. The awareness is keeping up with those events, seeing your life unfolding as it is, not your ideas of it, not your pictures of it. See what I mean?
(Charlotte Joko Beck [source])
Not from whiskey river:
See the Flowers
See the flowers, so faithful to Earth.
We know their fate because we share it.
Were they to grieve for their wilting,
that grief would be ours to feel.There’s a lightness in things. Only we move forward
forever burdened,
pressing ourselves into everything, obsessed by weight.
How strange and devouring our ways must seem
to those for whom life is enough.If you could enter their dreaming and dream with them deeply,
you would come back different to a different day,
moving so easily from that common depth.Or maybe just stay there: they would bloom and welcome you,
all those brothers and sisters tossing in the meadows,
and you would be one of them.
(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])
…and:
My instruction for meditation practice is much the same as my instruction for psychotherapy: “Don’t duck.” Maybe it’s a little cavalier to say, because sometimes you have to duck or you get blown away. But if I say to myself, “This is painful, but it’s O.K.,” and I stay there, then it’s just what it is and then it changes. But when I run away from it or I push it away or pretend that it’s something else, that is the suffering. All those maneuvers that we do to avoid saying, “This is true. This is what’s happening” — the maneuvers themselves are the suffering.
(Sylvia Boorstein [source])
…and:
The Fair
Before the gates opened, before popcorn
and cotton candy drifted down throatslike sweet and salty summer evenings
of childhood, before the townspeopleconfessed to the music and lights,
the Ferris wheel baskets swung emptyin a slow arc, one by one, offering color
to the sky — red, yellow, orange, blue.Just roving boys, what else could we do
but follow the sandaled feet of girlsout to the fair to buy them rides
until our pockets turned up penniless,until we lost them in the dark
the way sparrows will fly from you,until our last walk past the fun house
mirrors stretched our bodies like gum,when we caught ourselves looking
back at ourselves for the first time.
(Hank Hudepohl, from The Journey of Hands [source])
I never know what I’m going to find when I start free-associating for these Friday posts; there’s always a surprise of some kind. When I plugged the phrase shape of life into Google, I wasn’t all that surprised to find a 2002 PBS series about evolution by that title. (Sample topics: “What animals were the first to hunt? Do you need a head to get ahead?… How do humans fit into the shape of life? Why have animals with backbones enjoyed such success?”) I wasn’t all that surprised to find references to a song by a trio called Kink Ador. What surprised me was finding that song to be an infectious blend of funk, jazz, and rock… from a Nashville-based group said variously to resemble the Talking Heads, the Police, Lady Gaga, the Muppet Show, the Kings of Leon, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. (Kink Ador is fronted by vocalist/bass-player/trumpeter (!) Sharon Koltick, described at their site as “like Sting except more likeable.”)
Here’s Kink Ador’s video for “The Shape of Life to Come”:
One non-surprise: all three of them, including the drummer, sometimes seem ready to dance right away while playing — especially in that long minute-and-a-half instrumental which closes the song. I’m no dancer myself, but I can’t say I blame them: that’s some serious move-music going on there.
Lyrics:
The Shape of life to Come
(lyrics by Sharon Koltick; music by Kink Ador)I hear the mournful music, I hear clapping hands.
We play along on guitar and drums.
Our footsteps tap tap, add to the requiem,
feed the remembering with each tap tap.Our reflection in the window makes us move fast
but we can’t outrun what’s already passed.
Summer birds sing, I hope it never rains again
oh there’s nothing to fear.
***it’s the shape of life to come.We take a short respite in a street cafe
get away from time, get away from light.
You say a few kind words, and I say amen.
oh there’s nothing to fear.
***it’s the shape of life to come.(claps, snaps, and laughs, drum section)
I was born a no one with an ordinary name
but I’ve advanced myself, I’ve had huge gains.
I’ve got titles on my crown, and I’ll never hit the ground.
oh there’s nothing to fear.
***it’s the shape of life to come.
jules says
Boy, did I need a lot of that today.
Never heard of that band, and their Nashville-based. Who knew.
jules says
Make that “they’re”. Need. more. coffee.
John says
Jules: As you know, I’ve never (yet!) been to Nashville. But my impression is that saying, “I’ve never heard of Band X there!” is like walking into a library, plucking a random volume from the stacks, and exclaiming, “I didn’t know they had this book!” :)
Jayne says
Breathe deeply, enter positive energy.
Listening to the music of Kink Ador (which I listened to 3x over, because I cannot draw the resemblance to any of those aforementioned bands–except, maybe, the yeah, yeah, yeahs, who are a bit more alternative, and who also happen to be on my FNF list–granted “The Shape of Life to Come” being the first and only song of theirs I’ve heard) and reading your selections forces a certain living-in-the-moment that often evades.
I’ve tried to meditate but it hasn’t ever worked for me. I can’t turn the valve off. Maybe I don’t trust what would happen absent the constant inner flow. Maybe I try too hard to find another flow, or whisper, or something that tells me I’m meditating properly and it’s all worthwhile. But it doesn’t happen–I think the plumbing is rusty, and the drain isn’t functioning properly.
Being present. It’s trickier than we think. Or is it?
I can tell you only: presently, I’m feeling better than I did prior to reading this. ;)
marta says
Okay, let’s see.
1. I love the comic at the top. (I’ve got a link to the strip over at my place, you know!)
2. Love Rilke. I didn’t really study him until grad school, but the class was taught by one of my favorite professors ever.
3. I feel lucky that I’ve never felt like I’ve been waiting for what my life was to become. Waiting for Agent, yes. But not the rest of it.
4. My mother took me to meditation groups and a meditation training weekend seminar, and my grandmother mediated almost every day. It has never stuck with me.
5. Just this week I watched a series about the circus. http://www.pbs.org/opb/circus/ I really liked it.
6. Like that song.
7. When you say you “don’t dance” is that you can’t dance or that you really never dance?
8. I’ve met many, many, MANY people who say they don’t dance. I still find this one of the most mystifying things a person can say. Hardly anyone would dance at my wedding. To this day I wished we had eloped. Ah, to each his own…
9. Thanks for your usual lovely Friday post!
cynth says
Trust me Marta, he can’t dance…it’s just not pretty! But he makes up for it with moves on this blog site, believe me!
Nance says
You’ve taken on something I once cared a lot for, two major pillars of awareness: 1) Don’t judge or label the unfolding events and 2) Stay. Those were also the major tenets of guiding successful psychotherapy, so I grew very practiced at them.
I moved deeper and deeper into that over the years and then it just stopped. I’m curious about that, but not enough to dig down and try to find out what happened. To that extent, at least, the awareness is still working.
Nashville is amazing, isn’t it? My jazz/blues based baby boy lives and works there, rubbing elbows and earning his daily bread with its “churched” musicians, its Americana and country types, its Victor Wootens and Bela Flecks, its big names and all. It was he who invented the phrase, when he was 2.5 years old, “I can’t want to.”
I would like to like Kink Ador just because it closes out another wonderful Friday, but I’ve tried twice and I find I can’t want to. The trumpet rocks, though.
John says
Jayne: It’s very difficult — for me! — to believe that you’ve never successfully meditated, in that stopping-the-internal-flow way. Maybe it wasn’t meditation as such, maybe you weren’t trying to achieve it (or much of anything else) at the time. It’s like a lot of other things… like, oh, say, like writing with the non-dominant hand. People say “I could never write with the wrong hand!” But if they lose the right one, they eventually learn.
Alan Watts talks about a meditation state of wu-wei, which he translates as “sitting quietly, doing nothing.” I don’t think (but whadda I know?!?) he meant that it required a particular physical posture, like sitting. Anyone who listens to and loves music as much as you seem to has probably slipped into and out of this state a hundred times without even knowing it!
John says
marta: xkcd is great, isn’t it?
I’m almost 100% sure that I had to leave college and wait a decade or so before I ever read Rilke. One of my sisters once cut out and framed for me a portion of one of his “letters to a young poet.” It’s the first few sentences from the third paragraph here — the one starting “You ask whether your verses are any good…”
(If you yourself haven’t read that paragraph, I think you might appreciate it.)
That sort of blew my mind, and I wondered who this Rilke person was. (The “Maria” fooled me — I was convinced it was a woman.) Since then, well, it’s struck me as very difficult to read anything he wrote without thinking: Wow.
I take a great deal of pleasure in watching other people dance, especially people who are really comfortable with it. (I’m not really sure what makes dancing “good,” but comfort with that form of expression seems like it might be a big part of good dancing.) I might could dance sometime — beyond the simple slow-dancing, I mean — but I’d have to almost completely remake my personality to pull that off. I’m just too self-aware.
Despite what cynth claims in her comment, I wouldn’t say that I really can’t dance, though. Not in the same way that (say) Seinfeld‘s Elaine couldn’t dance. (“Like a full-body dry heave”: ha!)
John says
Nance: That went right by me — the line about “something I once cared a lot for, two major pillars of awareness.” Those do sound like two things worth caring a lot for… which is what surprises me, in your claim about yourself. You seem awfully level-headed to me. If you’re still following this thread, could you bring yourself to clarify?
As for Kink Ador, I think one of the things first attracting me to it is the name of the group, which sounds like a play on the name of that cute animal. I’m always disappointed when someone I like doesn’t like the same things that I do but hey, De gustibus… applies to music as well as to anything else, eh? But you’re right: subtract the trumpet, and this would be a much paler song!