Silence isn’t my strong suit. Or I should say, keeping quiet isn’t what I’m known for. One of the main reasons l live the life I do is because I am very sensitive to noise, but my problems start when I seem to forget that other people, and my own peace of mind, are affected by excessive noise created by me too.
And noise includes talking too much. Of course there are any number of reasons a person talks too much. Some people even believe they talk so much because it quietens the mind. No, afraid not. Been there. Not for me anyway.
Insecurity, nervousness, fear, low confidence, compulsive behaviours. The list could go on and on. When you think about it, the why isn’t always so important as the how to fix it question.
I spend a lot of time alone, in solitude, that gives other people and on rare occasions my mind, a break. I spend a lot of time listening to music to which I always listen intently. Of course that works on a number of levels, and is uplifting most of the time.
Speaking of listening to music, I usually use headphones like a lot of people. And I am blessed, absolutely and truly blessed, to have really good noise cancelling on my headphones. Anyone who uses ANC knows that it’s almost a miracle and makes the experiencing of music even better than it already is.
But I have discovered another use for the noise cancelling. I don’t always want to listen to anything: sometimes even I want some quiet, some silence. So, probably not the first person to do this, but I use ANC just by itself, just to shut out external noise. But I’ve found it does more than this. Turning it on somehow creates another space. I actually feel like I’m enclosed in a space, or place. I hope that makes sense.
We tend to think of quiet and silence as meaning the same thing, and obviously they are similar and we use them interchangeably a lot of the time. But, sometimes they seem to be two distinct concepts. Quiet is an absence of noise. Whereas silence often seems to me to be a kind of solid state, an entity that comes into being for a short while (or longer hopefully) and encloses one in something like a cocoon or protected space.
Of course this state can be attained in different ways. For me lately I find with ANC on for itself alone, I can relax more quickly; I feel sort of ‘protected’ and safer somehow. Anyway, enough for this little tip from me. Perhaps headphone makers should change the label from Active Noise Cancelling, to Active Silence Creation
In my last post I shared with you a poem. Just another note as I said then. Today I find myself thinking about sharing a drawing with you. Or it’s a design, a ‘symbolic’ illustration. I’m not sure what to call it. Actually illustration is a good word in this case: I’m not exactly sharing it for its own sake, but to illustrate the topic for today’s post. Anyway, moving right along.
For a lot of years I have every so often had an urge to create patterns and designs, and just to colour in things. Just to see colour on the page I think. Just to be making them. They are of many and varied shapes and some are paint, some markers, and some pencil. I picked this one more or less at random so you can see the kind of thing I’m spending way too many words telling you about.
I really enjoy making these things. It can be quite a meditative process; of course mind can wander as always, but I find that if I just focus on the exact mark I’m making or a particular detail, then it pulls me in. Into the zone as you might say. In that sense it can be an intense experience.
And therein lies the problem: Sometimes, particularly with pencils I can be be so focused and intent, that I end up hurting my hand. Holding the pencil too tight, pressing too hard trying to squeeze more colour onto the page (that’s what it feels like anyway), or just old fashioned and typical impatience pulling me to push harder.
Whatever the cause, nowadays if I even begin to use a pencil (writing with a pen is okay for some reason) my hand begins to ache. It’s not terrible pain, just a nagging thing. But certainly it is what you might call a disincentive.
While I was looking through a pile of old drawings a couple of days ago, I thought, I wander if I can use my other hand instead? Now I’m not one of those people who can switch between hands with ease; if there is an opposite to ambidextrous, then that’s me. But I thought, I’m going to try anyway.
So I took a coloured pencil and paper and with my non-dominent hand (that’s an understatement if I’ve ever made one) and tried to just pretend I was colouring in some shape. No lines as such, just colouring in strokes.
Alien alert! That’s what it felt like. Completely and utterly alien. Although my hand wasn’t totally out of control, it felt like it was. Still I persisted, and you know I won’t say I got to the point of it feeling natural or fluid or comfortable, but I could tell there was potential for that to happen.
In a funny way it wasn’t even my hand that was the problem; it was more a mind or brain thing where I just felt out of joint, not connected or something. Quite disorienting actually. But I think I’m going to try again. At least I thought I can use my other hand for the big areas, leaving my usual one for the finer work when necessary.
I suppose it’s like anything new isn’t it? Or rather in this instance it was about realising I’m not able to do a thing, an activity that is meaningful to me because the way I was doing it was making it too hard, or even impossible. And actually causing damage.
Who can say why it’s only just occured to me after so many years of struggling with the issue (on and off). I guess, there’s a right time for everything, or as I often think, there is never a wrong time. Life just is.
Never too late as they say, to do it differently. I guess we’ll have to see what happens. I might end up ambidextrous, who knows? Mind you, don’t be expecting fine art or lifelike portraits with my other hand anytime soon.
A few weeks ago I finished one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. Yes, I know: we live in the days of hype and the redundant superlative. Everything is the best, biggest, greatest. Or, conversely, the worst, most tragic, saddest; it goes on and on.
In this case however I am not exaggerating. This book was amazing. It’s Learning from Henry Nouwen and Vincent Van Gogh: A portrait of a compassionate Life, by Carol A. Berry. From this book I’ve learned as much and more about Van Gogh’s motivations, his vision, his art, and yes, his very nature and soul, than in everything I’ve read, seen or heard about Vincent until now put together. And that includes from several visits to the magnificent Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam.
The book had its genesis in a course the author sat in on in the 1970s put on by Henry Nouwen for Theology students. The course aimed at helping future ministers and pastors learn to connect with their future parishioners. Basically it was about accessing the compassionate sides of their own natures so they might better help others. Nouwen used Van Gogh as a the model of a person who had lived a life built on compassion for others.
The author has mined Vincent’s letters (mostly to his brother Theo) and studied deeply his paintings and drawings, in order to understand and demonstrate what it means to live a life of compassion, and to highlight the artist’s mission in life. For me that mission is summed up very nicely in a quote from one of Van Gogh’s letters:
Art is to console those who are broken by life.
Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo
I had a vague sense of Vincent’s spiritual leanings (I knew he’d been a missionary living among poor miners and their families to better understand and help them), and he’d tried to become a preacher. But, before finding this book my thinking hadn’t gone much deeper than that.
But, through reading this book I discovered Vincent was really what many of us might call a mystic. The author goes further and after what i’ve learned, I tend to agree with her: she thinks Van Gogh is a saint.
A mystic in the sense that he tried to live a holy and compassionate life. He viewed all nature (of which he concluded humans are simply one equal part) as being expressions of the divine. And a saint in that he dedicated his life to making art that would inject light and colour into the darkness of people’s lives.
As I mentioned, Vincent had been a missionary for a time. But his radical way of living among the poor and sharing their lives in order to know and love them better was shocking and way too extreme for his bosses, and he had to move on.
So, he finally settled on full-on immersion in his art. His mission was to make paintings that offered comfort and consolation to those who are suffering. And that’s all of us to one degree or another isn’t it?
You can see by now that this supremely accessible (and pleasurable to read) work has had a profound impact on me. This book isn’t only for artists, nor is it a religious book; it is as I have said an inspiration and guide to living a compassionate and loving life.
I don’t want to just say ‘I can’t recommend highly enough that you read this book’; I want to say instead Please, please read this book. Then obviously act on what you have read!
I’ve always admired – loved – Vincent, now I think I know why. Or as Don McLean says in one of the most profound love songs (Vincent) in history (remember, I never exaggerate):
Now, I understand, what you tried to say to me How you suffered for your sanity How you tried to set them free They would not listen, they did not know how Perhaps they’ll listen now
I don’t remember when I began to collect quotes; my early teens I think. I just started making notes of quotes from books (even comics in those far off younger days), from conversations overheard. Then, later, little excerpts from my own journals and other writings. Even slogans I’d see on t-shirts, billboards, or wherever else.
This doesn’t mean much in these times when you can type in a search for quotes on any subject, for any occasion, by anyone from anytime in history. But, in those long ago days before computers were in our hands, and certainly way before the Internet, it wasn’t so quick and easy.
Anyway, fast forward to the not so distant past;One day I sat at the computer (it was time for computers, thank goodness) and typed up all those collected quotes stored in several boxes full of little notebooks and scraps of paper.
The result is literally hundreds of pages of tightly typed quotes. That typing (which in fact took me quite a bit longer than one day) was in fact the genesis of a book that has remains half written.
You see, as I typed I saw so many great words of wisdom that I just felt compelled to put some of them together somehow. Ive now been at that task for many years: its a very intense process and takes so much energy and, as any writer will tell you, the muse has to strike before we can begin to strike those keyboard keys! Anyway, it will be done when its done; the very notion of presence, of there only being now, is actually one of the major themes of the book.
As I got to the end of that original typing marathon, I noticed that, strangely, the very last quote in that long long list reads simply, If you. Clearly a sentence begun but left hanging. Who will ever know what would or should or could have come next but never did?
Some time ago I remembered that interesting little fact and began to think about its meaning. I decided to do a quick search of the whole collection for that little conditional phrase. The search revealed that there are 139 instances of quotes beginning with If you.
So, dear readers, dear friends and fellow travellers on life’s journey, here are eight (why pick ten like everyone else would?) of those quotes, chosen at random (is there such a thing really?).
No commentary or comment from me; you, the reader, can do very nicely without my two cents worth thrown in. Well, okay, just 2c worth: I have often learned a lot from quotes such as these (not necessarily these ones specifically); sometimes a simple quote has led to a healing or an important insight.
So, I thought it would be a great idea to share some of my collection with you and perhaps there will be one or more that strikes a chord:
If You …
If you allow things to surprise you, you will get easily confused.
If you always do your best, you will be free from regrets.
If you follow the eternal law, you can understand how to love.
When you forget who you are, and dont know what to do, act the way you would if you did.
If you really dont care, you arent going to know if something is wrong. The thought would never occur to you. The act of pronouncing something wrong is a form of caring.
If you have to ask questions all the time, you never get time to just know.
If you are not interested in this, then why are you here?
If you deny even one person entrance to your life, youll never get their uniqueness from anyone else.
So, there you are. Theres much to reflect on here. Lots to focus on, to meditate on, and contemplate.
I wrote this little remembrance about the birth of my journaling life some time ago. I thought it might be nice to share it here on my new Notes from the Hermit’s Cave blog as keeping a journal has been such an important aid to my own ongoing healing, and has been key to my spiritual journey.
For many of us keeping a journal is a key element in our efforts to live a good life, or even to have a life: it can be a tool for healing, a means to bring some order to the chaos in our hearts and heads, and a venue for reflections on life, the Universe, and everything. For me, it’s been all of these things and more.
I guess for most people Henry David Thoreau is best known for the book he wrote about his time living alone in a small cabin on Walden Pond in Massachusetts, titled funnily enough Walden. And I suppose most people would have no idea that all, or pretty much all, his writings, lectures and so on, came from his Journal. Note the capital: he himself called it The Journal.
A few years ago I read a very cool book called The Book of Concord: Thoreau’s Life as a Writer, which is an examination of, yes you guessed it, his life as a writer. What made it extra interesting was the way the author (William Howarth) used The Journal as his way into Thoreau’s writing and life.
Let me tell you one of the many things that jumped out at me from this fascinating book: the reason Thoreau started keeping The Journal in the first place. It seems that one of his neighbours in Concord was Ralph Waldo Emerson (imagine that if you can). Anyway, one day Emerson says to Thoreau,
‘What are you doing? Do you keep a journal?’
Now, it seems that Thoreau had been running around telling everyone he was a writer and that he was examining nature and studying the life of the town. All that writerly kind of stuff. But he hadn’t been keeping a journal.
So, he answered Emerson’s challenge by beginning The Journal. And, as I said, all his writing from then on came right out of that journal. Sometimes, believe it or not, he literally ‘cut and pasted’ from The Journal; he actually tore out pages or cut up passages and stuck them together to form the final manuscripts. Now, that is called having supreme confidence in your own work.
Anyway, after I read that, it got me thinking about my own journal and how I came to begin it. As I sit typing this, my journal is safely stored away in a trunk in my sister’s garage. (See the update at the end. Strange syncronicity indeed)
There are close to one hundred separate volumes, mostly school type notebooks (called exercise books in Australia), some exotic volumes from travel in India and a few odd looking specimens of varying shapes and sizes. Hard to believe really: so many words.
This is my personal journal; my art journals are another matter. Just wanted to make that distinction, though oftentimes it’s hard to tell the difference.
In late 1980, I returned to Australia after a few months in New Zealand. I wasn’t in great shape and was hanging around at my parents’ house and feeling like a ‘wet week in a thunderstorm’ (if you get my meaning). One day, my mother out of the blue said,
‘Why don’t you start keeping a diary?’
Of course you don’t know my mother, but believe me when I say that this is most definitely not the kind of thing I’d have ever expected her to suggest to her son as a way for him to deal with his very poorly mental condition.
But, just like Thoreau after his chat with Emerson, I headed to the shops without delay, bought a school exercise book, and began my diary (I often interchange the terms diary and journal). And I’m still at it, as I’ve said.
And you know what? Thinking about my journal now, I feel a sense of pride. I don’t mean arrogant, ego driven ‘pride’: my heart is glad. I have consistently for over forty years kept a record of my life which goes deep into my psyche and beyond. Well that’s what it often feels like.
Sometimes it’s been an extremely detailed account and written every day; other times there have been gaps with just scant little notes to record my doings, thoughts, feelings, and so on. But, at least it is there. I have a profound sense of achievement when I think of my journal. Maybe I need to adopt the capital like Thoreau: My Journal.
My final words must be then, thanks Mum. I know I thanked you when you were still in this world with us, but it can’t hurt to announce my thanks to the world (as much of it as reads this blog anyway) can it?
Update
The trunk containing The Journal has left my sister’s garage (thank you little sister) and is as I type this update, on a truck heading this way and will arrive late tonight or early tomorrow.
The timing is completely serendipitous: By ‘chance’ I came across the above piece of writing today as I was looking for other things, then a little while later got a call from the shipping company with the news! Pickup wasn’t scheduled for a few more days.
Of course I still regularly spend time with The Journal, perhaps more than ever, and it will be very nice indeed to have the whole thing with me once again.
Yet Another Update
Yes indeed, it certainly is, nice I mean. Here is The Journal in its full glory (one volume missing but will be here soon)
Over the last couple of months or so I’ve been listening on and off to Jimmy Buffett. I like Jimmy’s music, and I have liked it since the late 70s. I have at least ten of his albums in my Music folder.
Anyway, Buffett is an American singer/songwriter who writes and performs songs about beach life, sailing, exotic island paradises, and generally having a good time down at the beach and in and on the water. And preferably in sunny climes.
Yes. Hedonistic is a word that’s been used to describe his music and the lifestyle he celebrates. Still, I’ve liked him for a very long while now, and every so often I get into his ‘escapism’ and his relaxing in paradise kind of vibe.
Something a little rebellious about many of his lyrics too. But let’s not go there just now. What I want to talk about is a song I’ve listened to dozens of times, but when I played it again the other night, it got my attention in a way it never had before.
What I mean to say, is that for the first time I actually heard the song (Love the Now. Have a listen, you won’t regret it). I got what the writer was saying with his lyrics.
All the pain and the pleasure I love the now All the blood and the treasure
Then another verse:
The whole damn world’s gone crazy The moon is jumping over the cow How can you help But not love the now?
It’s like he’s saying, ‘yeah, it’s all good.’ Not just hedonistic but nihilistic as well. Like he doesn’t care, doesn’t want to know. But, then, in another verse he writes:
It’s the only place I’ve ever been It’s the only way that I know how
It is. That’s what he’s saying. ‘All the ranting and Ravin’ and ‘All the cussin’ and cravin’‘ are there for sure. Or, rather, they are all here. And now. But, dig a little deeper, read between the lines (so to speak).
Listen to this:
Don’t talk about your superstitions Don’t talk about your cats meow But don’t talk about tomorrow tonight I Love The Now
You see? He doesn’t want to hear about your belief systems imposed on you by others. He doesn’t want to hear about your fears that have been manufactured by someone else to keep you in line. And he is not the slightest bit interested in your fancy material toys and other stuff (cat’s meow: a great expression coined in the 1920s meaning fancy, flashy, cool, awesome and other similar epiphets).
And don’t talk about some far off distant future (okay tomorrow night may sometimes seem awfully close to now, but you get the meaning).
The bottom line (literally and figuratively): he loves the now. And that’s because that’s all there is: the now.
So, on the face of it hedonistic, nihilistic even, as if he’s shrugging his shoulders in a ‘so what?’ kind of way. But he’s not doing that at all; he’s actually offering a solution to the overwhelming tidal wave of ‘things that are wrong with the world’, and about which many of us feel helpless and sometimes even hopeless. The Now. It really is the only thing you’ve ever known, the only time and place you can ever hope to be. So why not love it? Why not just live it?
This is not resignation; it is not fatalism or a giving up (or in). In fact it is a courageous engagement with the total reality of life as it is right now. Jimmy writes that:
Tomorrow’s right around the corner I’ll get there somehow But I’m stuck in [the] meantime
A couple of days ago when this powerful and important statement in the form of this illustration showed up on my social media, I was struck by something I don’t think I’d noticed before. Suddenly I saw: ‘might not change the world”. Might not? Which gave me the idea: it could as easily say ‘Helping one person might change the world …’.
But, you know, my thinking went even further: I realized that might and might not have nothing to do with it. The reality is that every action we take, and that includes the action of helping other living beings, actually does change the world.
Well, firstly, which of our actions help other beings, and thus change the world, we can’t always know. And obviously we can’t always (actually it’s more like very rarely) see the impacts of our actions. And even if we do, it’s likely that we’ll only directly get to see what happens in a limited and local sense. Nevertheless, all actions have a tendency to result in a domino, or cascade effect that literally never stops.
But, wait, there’s more. I kept thinking about it, and came up with a couple of ideas about why it could be a good idea to change the might not in this marvelous saying, which speaks of a negative possibility, to always will, which points to something definite.
All is one on the physical and the non-physical levels
We’ve all had those moments when we sense a connection with the rest of the world; we feel that we are part of nature, part of something bigger than just the one of us.
But, have you ever felt you were even more than just a ‘part of’ the world or nature? Have you ever had a sense that you are nature? Maybe this sounds a bit esoteric: we are one Self; we are all manifestations of the divine; we are all sparks of the one light, and so on.
And of course we can’t know for sure what goes on beyond the physical world. But, even at the most basic level of the material world, especially as we get down to the microscopic and even atomic levels, it’s hard to see any ‘separation’ between any individual and another. Atoms merge and cross over, interact, and change, energy fields collide and mingle, between all living and non-living things.
So, who’s to say that one small action on my part, one small change, won’t have a cascading effect as the ripples (that’s a good way to put it isn’t it?) from that action spread through the world and beyond?
The ‘What can One Person Do?’ Dilemma
Our Sydney Smith quote partially answers this agonising question for us as we’ve seen. Still, you might think that one person can’t do a lot when the needs are so many and so vast, and when most problems in our world seem to be so intractable. Mr Smith says that there is always something you as one person, as an individual can do, even if it’s a small thing you do.
Just think how many people everywhere are asking this same question: ‘What can one person do?’ If even a tiny percentage of those individuals answered that they could do something, then you would start to see changes taking place for sure. How could all those actions not add up to a changed world?
The Multiplyer Effect
Just now I used the words ‘add up’. Well actually it’s more like a multiplication effect isn’t it? If we say we change the world by helping just one person, then there has to be a Multiplyer at work I think.
We have all heard that aphorism that if you give food to a hungry person then you feed them for a day, but if you teach that person to produce their own food, then you feed them for a lifetime. Another truism definitely.
Still, once again, I think we can go further. Is it possible that by teaching one person to produce their own food you can help the whole world eat properly? Let me tell you a story I heard on an online video just a few days ago.
A man was traveling in a poor part of a country he loved. He’d spent the previous few years in another part of the same country building a house and growing his own vegetables and fruits.
He met a local person who was renting a small block of land, and that person asked him if he could help them build a house and teach them to grow their own food. It was a poor area, and the land was pretty much a little slice of jungle.
Anyway, this man agreed to help, and has been there for a few years now. He showed that local person how to grow various fruits and what looked to me to be a huge variety of vegetables. And they didn’t forget the flowers either. As the seasons passed, seeds were gathered and more land turned over to growing food.
Apparently from the very start they had a surplus of the fruits and vegetables they were growing, so they began offering them to neighbours, most of whom were also very poor.
Our traveling friend then showed them how to collect seeds from the food they ate (and the flowers too) and began to show these neighbours how to plant, fertilise, care for, and harvest what those seeds produced. In this way they too were able expand the amount of food they could grow.
So, already there is a growing area of this one slice of one country, that’s becoming self sufficient in fruit and vegetables. Now, that’s not the whole world obviously, but you’d have to agree, it’s a good start.
Anyway, just think: those people now have skills and surplus food and seeds to share further afield. Who can say how far such action might spread? It all sounds quite simplistic put like this, but it is the way that many grassroots movements for change have worked. And remember, nobody can reliably predict the ongoing impacts of any actions.
So, yes it is true, helping one person does indeed change the world for that one person. But whatever we do for one person, it also does definitely change the world beyond. As we’ve said, we may not see how or that it changes everything in the world and certainly not all at once.
We may think of ourselves as just one separate little individual, but we are united with all life. We may think that it’s all too much; too many problems; what can I do? The road to changing the world seems to be blocked, seems to be impassable.
Well, one teacher I admire is Swami Ramdas who founded Anandashram in India. Among the many great things he said, this one stands out for me above them all. I may have the wording a bit wrong, but basically the message is:
Once you have set your feet upon the path, then you are already at your goal
Which is another way of saying that if you help one person, then you have already changed the world.
It is an old belief, and it is a good belief, that our life is a pilgrims progress.
Vincent Van Gogh
The usual definition of a pilgrim is a person who goes on a journey to a special place, a place that has significance for them, often as a spiritual exercise or quest. Sometimes the journey can be over long distances and a difficult road.
The key characteristic of a pilgrimage is that it is to be undertaken on foot, or put another way, a pilgrimage is a journey we (as the pilgrim) travel on by our own efforts, under our own steam as they say.
In this quote Vincent is talking about that other pilgrimage: the one that goes on on the inside. It’s referring to the idea that our lives can be an inner spiritual journey (or pilgrimage) from our present imperfect condition to a place or state of beatitude. Or as some might say Heaven or Nirvana. Others call it Self or God Realisation. And some other people call it Enlightenment.
You could say that Vincent is suggesting that a pilgrim is one who goes on a special quest to find the answers to life’s big questions; a pilgrim is a person who travels (either out there in the world, or inside on a journey of the heart, mind, and soul) to see, to learn, to do and to grow as a human being.
And, if all goes well, we end up in Nirvana, or a state of spiritual advancement as a kind of nice bonus at the end of the road
Spiritual for me in this context refers to the things that affect or relate to the human spirit or soul and might not be concerned simply with the physical or material aspects of life.
But here is the funny paradox about this kind of inner spiritual pilgrimage: as we learn, as we discover new ways of being and relating to people; as we find answers for ourselves and as we grow as people, we find that changes start to take place in our physical world.
From simply directing the wheres and whens of our activities in the material world, to pushing us in a direction of study, to influencing what people we meet, to the type of work we end up doing and to the actual state of our mental and physical health. It’s that inner pilgrimage that really is running the show of our lives.
So, as we travel the long road of our lives, let’s continue to learn. Let’s keep alert for those insights that come with a desire to grow and to work out what our lives and the world are all about. Above all, let’s keep on pilgriming down that road, and allowing ourselves to be open to new experience, new people, new ways of being.
Another quote from Vincent that I particularly resonate with. This time from a letter to his brother Theo and talking about the lot of the pilgrim:
Notes from the Hermit's Cave 