“After the Ecstasy, the Laundry”

[Video: “Behind the scenes” look at the making of a pop-up “art book,” Everyday Wonders, which was created to advertise the features of a new Samsung smartphone. (The advertisement itself is here.)]

From whiskey river:

Pastoral

There are so many messages I can’t interpret.
The hundred maples at the edge of my street shout orange, orange,
orange, in silent voices. And may say more if I could decipher.

How I want to understand the many calls of the birds migrating through
on their long journey. And what is the message of the shaggy
wave-curled sea quarreling around the black rocks out at the far point?

Perhaps words themselves wander off into other fields, like sheep lost
in the depths of the hills beyond the local hills so the shepherd has to
go climbing up and down, his legs aching, his breath heavy
in his chest until he spies them off there under

that far evergreen, and wrestles them down and brings them home.

(Patricia Fargnoli [source])

…and:

Anyone can see that if grasping and aversion were with us all day and night without ceasing, who could ever stand them? Under that condition, living things would either die or become insane. Instead, we survive because there are natural periods of coolness, of wholeness, and ease. In fact, they last longer than the fires of our grasping and fear. It is this that sustains us. We have periods of rest making us refreshed, alive, well. Why don’t we feel thankful for this everyday Nirvana?

We already know how to let go — we do it every night when we go to sleep, and that letting go, like a good night’s sleep, is delicious. Opening in this way, we can live in the reality of our wholeness. A little letting go brings us a little peace, a greater letting go brings us a greater peace. Entering the gateless gate, we begin to treasure the moments of wholeness. We begin to trust the natural rhythm of the world, just as we trust our own sleep and how our own breath breathes itself.

(Jack Kornfield [source])

…and:

Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter’s deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself. The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world’s oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter.

(Shauna Niequist [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Everyday Escapees

My poor students, all I ask of them
is to grow antennae, lie down with lava
and rise with snow, grow tongues from
their math assignments and no, Melissa,

your mother won’t approve of the bioluminescent
smear on your communion dress. The world fidgets
in uneasy relationship to our statements
about it nevertheless producing silver

buds from ragged limbs like the luster
in late Frank Sinatra songs. Finally,
when I got off the sixth floor, I felt
like I was walking out into the sky

and aren’t we all pedestrians of air?
Doesn’t it feel all wrong to turn our backs
on the ocean? On an ant? On those Chagall
windows you have to go through a gauntlet

of ancient armor to get to? What was her name,
that night nurse so deft her blood draws
didn’t wake me up? Don’t get me wrong, I want
to wake up. I want my old dog to show me

all that wolf-light she hides inside
even though she thinks I won’t understand,
even though her vet and I conspire
to keep her alive forever.

(Dean Young [source])

…and:

From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly, it was dark night, on the land and the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the earth rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything. Only an extraordinary act of will could recall us to our former, living selves and our contexts in matter and time. We had, it seems, loved the planet and loved our lives, but could no longer remember the way of them. We got the light wrong. In the sky was something that should not be there. In the black sky was a ring of light. It was a thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring. It was an old wedding band in the sky, or a morsel of bone. There were stars. It was all over.

(Annie Dillard [source])

Whew. After that last excerpt, I’m feeling the need for something lighter. Something like… like this:

[Below, click Play button to begin Everyday. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:10 long.]

[Lyrics]

The sound of that song is (I think) one of the most unusual in all of what can be classified as “rock.” It’s not so much Buddy Holly’s voice which sets it apart; mostly, it’s the instrumental accompaniment throughout. That thing which sounds like a music box? Neither a xylophone nor a glockenspiel, but a celeste (played by the wife of Norman Petty, the song’s co-writer). As for the relentless pit-a-pat rhythm effect, that came from the drummer’s hands on his knees — Wikipedia says his lap — over and over and over. How very… prosaic, yet wonderful.

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About this post’s title: The Jack Kornfield quotation above comes from his book After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. This may be my favorite among all the titles I’ve ever seen for books about philosophy, self-help, meditation, and Zen.