thoughts after the weekend's 16-mile bike ride

On This Earth

To love my own, my body,
to know without saying, legs, you are good legs,
and feet and stomach and arms, good, and the spaces
under my arms, and the brown pigments
splashed across my back like tea leaves.
To love my body the way
I sometimes love a stranger's: a woman
on the subway, tired, holding her two bags,
a child slumped against her like another sack
as the train stops and starts and the child says something
so quietly no one else can hear it,
but she leans down, and whispers back,
and the child curls closer. I would love my body
the way a mother can love her child, or the way
a child will love anyone
who gives it a home on this earth, a place
without which it would be nothing, a dry branch
at the window of a lit room.

-Juanita Brunk

what I do while I wait for the lentils to cook

an early birthday present

let's talk about dating

I've been on this organization kick recently; take my bookmarks folders as an example of the extremes my focus can take me to. 

In the throes of this organizational passion, I was clicking through my facebook profile, preparing to edit any and all old information that should be discarded, when -

I found this little category under my name that said "Interested in."

Huh, I thought, I don't remember that. And I got all excited, thinking about what I could list:

Interested in good books. In good music; Jars of Clay, Anais Mitchell, Eddie Vedder. Light, and how even concrete grain elevators look beautiful in late afternoon. Cacti, owls, coffee in the morning. Writing. Words. Science! Reading about particle physics, although I'd rather not do the math. Women's rights. History. The Appalachian Trail. Mennonites. Poetry. Prayer. The way poetry can be prayer.  

Interested in all the things I don't know. All the things I want to learn. Python. How Coffee cup stirling engines work. The 76 Best Board Games of all time. Fingerpicking. How to be a better listener. Calligraphy. Trees - I mean their names; douglas fir, pin oak, trifoliate orange. Literary Theory. The Illiterate, well enough to say by memory. How to make crème brûlée. 

Interested in the world. 

I clicked on the little box and it opened a tiny window.

I looked at the little box and was filled with an aching sense of disappointment.

--

I'm going to turn 23 in 40 days and I've never dated anyone. My culture expects me to be ashamed of that. My culture expects me to be waiting, to be whiling my time away.

Guess what? That's not happening. I have too much to do.

Tomorrow I'm taking the metro into D.C., all on my own. I'm going back to the Hirshhorn, and the Postal Museum, and I'm going to find a cafe to sit and write in. 

I am a lot more than a click of the little men-box, and I refuse to be reduced to that. The world is too big and interesting and fragile to wait around.

A New Year

“Most people don't know there are angels whose only job is to make sure you don't get too comfortable & fall asleep & miss your life.” 

― Brian Andreas

Here's to a year of being just a little uncomfortable and a lot awake.

(New Year's Day in Bethesda)

why I write (an exercise in attention)

IV ii

in the middle of traffic at Church and Gerrard I notice someone, 

two women, for a moment unfamiliar, not crouched with me

in a hallway, for this moment unfamiliar, not cringing at the

grit of bombers, the whine of our breath in collapsing chests, in

the middle of traffic right there for a moment unfamiliar and

familiar, the light changing and as usual in the middle of almost

dying, yelling phone numbers and parting, feeling now, as the

light beckons, all the delicateness of pedestrians. I wish that I

was forgetful. All that day the streets felt painful and the

subways tender as eggshells.

-Dionne Brand

---

in the middle of traffic at Greentree and Old Georgetown I notice the 

two black women waiting for the crosswalk to start counting down,

20, 19, 18... I step confidently past them, I walk across the six lanes, 

the light is green; I have the right of way, the light is green and I step into 

traffic; I step out on to the dark macadam and the car turning right

honks, the driver leaning into the sound, and I keep walking. The solid thunk

of my books keeps thunking across the six lanes and the light is green.

I'm not who I was. I hold my head up. I stare into middle distance. My boots

thunk on the solid road.

all the delicateness of pedestrians. the last time a driver honked at me while

I had the right of way was while crossing a four-lane (five lane?) (six lane?)

road in Damascus. I do not wish that I was forgetful. 

And yet: all that day the streets felt painful and the subways tender as eggshells.

---

"And my personality is such that I'm more likely to just sit and try to figure it out. But I'm getting better at using M___ as a resource, I think."

He looks at me closely. Nods. "Constitutionally, I'm like that. Maybe it's a Mennonite thing. Take care of yourself, be self-sufficient. You know."

I can feel the corner of my mouth tipping up. Yes. I know.

"But you're still having fun," he asks, before sending me on my way to catch the bus. "You're still feeling like you're growing? Because that's high on my priority list."

I pace in the elevator, too alive to keep still.

---

I close Dionne's book, holding my place with my index finger, think of what else I've read on this bus route. Fahrenheit 451 is the first thing that comes to mind.

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. 

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

The man next to me gets off at Rolston Road. I think of Jacqueline Berger's poem The Failure of Language, think "there are no right words," ask myself "...or does it only deepen what we know of loss?" 

I get off the bus at my stop. Marywood Road. I start trudging up the hill. It is dark; I think of the little red cabin in Pennsylvania that my grandparents took us to when I was small. I think of the streetlights on South Fulton Street. I think of walking late at night on the roads west of EMU.

I think, as I walk, of Jacqueline Berger writing about her friend's kitchen; I don't have the whole poem memorized but I know the line about the glass, the etched walls, "and add it to a box marked Kitchen."

That line is the whole poem, I told Thia once. The weight of it, the amber against the glass, all of it wrapped in words (newspaper) and reduced to a brown, nondescript box... the poem was trying to rescue rescue her friend from her radiant perishing, was trying to see and love what was vanishing, and the language was important. The language was so important, was the thing that could keep a life from disappearing into a small brown box.

---

I estimate that since January 1 of this year, I have written very nearly 100,000 words. They have taken the form of academic essay, poetry, blogging, journal entries, and attempts at fiction.

Oh, and letters. Maybe - maybe add a few thousand more words to that tally.

---

I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough it'll make sense.

-Ray Bradbury

---

Last week I was looking through an old journal in search of something and stumbled across this instead: 

...and also him telling me that he had heard i can 'read a book and know it.' 

They make good companions, books do. They are worth carrying around in your head, worth the mental space.

---

It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No,no it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

-Ray Bradbury

---

There are no right words, if by right we mean perfect. But there are good words, and words worth remembering. 

As I walked up the dark sidewalk to the door of my apartment, I had a line of a poem knocking around in my head - "I am not done with my changes." 

I couldn't remember where it was from, and so I looked it up. Oh, yes. the layers by Stanley Kunitz. how shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? 

yet I turn, I turn...

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go...

I think again of my conversation with K___. "You're happy?" he asked me. "You're growing?" 

I think of Lancaster, of Harrisonburg.

Some losses. Some gains. 

Maybe I am finally learning how to love the place I am in.

---

In this language I have sought, during those years and the years since then, to write poems: so as to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was and where I was meant to go, to sketch out reality for myself.

…A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the—not always greatly hopeful—belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are underway: they are making toward something.

Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.

Such realities, I think, are at stake in a poem.

-Paul Celan

there was an owl on my porch this morning,

perching on the handrail to the deck. Its face was turned away, and after a moment it turned to look at me with wide dark eyes, then lifted its wings and flew away.

It's going to be a good day.

bus stop with a view

'and say my glory was I had such friends.'

if you aren't into poetry, you can just move along now

because this blog post is dedicated to my new favorite poet.


[It's such a beautiful night I feel like I can't sleep. The rain is falling on the skylights, soft and unpredictable, a funny sort of conversation. The quiet-seeming yellow lights strung across my window, Anais Mitchell's "Child Ballads" playing... ah, life just burns at me sometimes, how wonderful it is.]


okay, so, you know how i just wrote "meet Christian Wiman. This will never happen, but a girl can dream" as part of my '20 things to do' list?

Yeah, yesterday I listened to this On Being podcast, an hour-long interview with this lovely human being. I felt like I had met him. I was listening to it at work and I had to keep pausing because my eyes kept burning like I was going to cry. It was kind of weird, actually, but I'm chalking it down to one of those odd 'kindred spirits' moments and leaving it at that.

So now I'm just going to quote a bunch of stuff he said on the show/in essays archived on the poetry foundation website because I think he's awesome & I want all these thoughts in one place.

__

Krista Tippett to Christian Wiman: You know, you've written "Faith is not a state of mind, but an action in the world, a movement towards the world."
Me: Yesss.
__

Ms. Tippett: So one thing I really like in your poetry and I think it connects also to your faith is this real tie to reality, which also gets intellectualized, the notion of reality. Do you know what I mean [laugh]? I don't know. When I was reading through you, I also found a lot of reference to reality from Simone Weil, "It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy in order to find reality through suffering" or even in this essay you wrote, "Hive of Nerves." You talked about Christ using metaphors, speaking the language of reality in terms of the physical world. So tell me about how you think poetry works with reality uniquely.

Mr. Wiman: Well, you know, I've been sick lately and I actually had a bone marrow transplant and was in the hospital for quite a long time. And one of the things, poetry died for me for a while. I found that it just wasn't speaking to me. I think I had certain expectations that took me a while to realize were false expectations. I think we often talk about poetry getting us beyond the world and taking us to the very edge of experience and then getting us into the ineffable. I have to say, when I was, you know, faced with the actual ineffable, I didn't want poetry that gave me more of the ineffable. What I wanted was some way of apprehending the world that was right in front of me that was slipping away.

I wanted the world, you know, in front of my eyes, and the poems that I found useful were absolutely concrete, sometimes not at all about religious things and not at all about spiritual things, but simply reality, and reality rendered in such a way that you could see it again. There's a great quote from the mid-20th-century literary critic R.P. Blackmur. He's talking about John Berryman. He said that his work "adds to the stock of available reality." It added to the stock of available reality, and that's a good way to think about what a real poem can do. It suddenly makes the amount of reality that you have in your life greater. You're able to apprehend more of it.


...Mr. Wiman: Right. And that has helped me to at least understand those terms somewhat and to explain to myself why I do need some sort of structures in my life. I do need to go to church. I need specifically religious elements in my life. I find that if I just turn all of my spiritual impulses — if I let them be solitary, as I am comfortable in being, I'm comfortable sitting reading books and trying to pray and meditating. Inevitably, if that energy is not focused outward, it becomes despairing. It turns in on itself and I will look up in a couple of months and I find that I'm in despair. So I think that one of the ways that we know that our spiritual inclinations are valid is that they lead us out of ourselves.

__

From The Poetry Foundation...


All sorts of useful things may be written in perfectly adequate prose: editorials, history, philosophy, theology, even lasting novels. But there is no such thing as a perfectly adequate poem, because a poem into which some strange and surprising excellence has not entered, a poem that is not in some inexplicable way beyond the will of the poet, is not a poem.

***

Seamus Heaney has noted that if a person has a single poem in his head, one that he returns to and through which, even in small ways, he understands his life better, this constitutes a devotion to the art. It is enough. And in fact I find that this is almost always how non-specialists read poetry—rarely, sparingly, but intensely, with a handful of high moments that they cling to. The emphasis is on the memorable individual poem, and poetry in bulk is rarely memorable.

***

You don’t need to know a thing about quantum entanglement, wherein one atom can affect another even though they are separated by tremendous distance, to have some sense that our lives are always larger than the physical limitations within which they occur. We exist apart from our existences, you might say, are connected to the world and to other people in ways we will never be able to fully articulate or understand—and we assert our iron wills and ravenous hungers at our own peril. There is such a thing as a collective unconscious. There is such a thing as a spirit of place, and it reaches beyond geography. And poetry, which is a kind of quantum entanglement in language, is not simply a way of helping us to recognize the relations we have with people and places, but a means of preserving and protecting those relations.

***

Most poets I know read almost unconsciously at first, feeling the poem’s formal and linguistic dynamics as much as its “meaning” (in the end, there is no way to separate meaning from a poem’s form and sound). Meaning matters, of course, and most poems do have some bedrock denotative sense upon which the mind can rest. But still, some mystery usually remains. Poetry, like life, has its patches of pure black, its furthest interiors where meaning gleams darkly, and must remain in that darkness if it is to mean at all. You know a good poem by whether or not those irreducible dark spots are integral to your experience of the whole. “Our only obscurities...should be those we are driven into,” Ruth Pitter once wrote, “then a sort of blessing may descend, making such obscurity magical.”

***

One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise.

***

For all the canons and anthologies, for every rock-solid reputation and critical consensus, poetry is personal or it is nothing. That is, until a poem has been tested on your own pulse, to paraphrase John Keats, until you have made up your own mind and heart about where you stand in relation to it, and it to you—until this happens, all poetry is merely literature, all reading rote. It’s true that some people are better readers of poetry than others; that some people’s judgment matters (for the culture as a whole) more than others; that, just as with music or art, there are elements of craft and historical perspective essential to being able to formulate a meaningful response. But still: poetry is made up of poems, and poems repulse and entice in unpredictable ways, and anyone who reads independently and spiritedly is going to carry an eccentric canon around in his head. This is half the fun of it all.

Special bonus feature: this recitation of Robert Bringhurst's "These Poems, She Said."

So, believe me yet? He's the best. The best.

200th post

I thought about doing some kind of epic "200" list for my 200th post, but that seemed like a lot of work for a small payoff. But then I thought, 20 is kind of like 200, except... pleasingly small.

So, I bring to you:

20 things I want to do (in no particular order) before I write 100 more blog posts

1. read Infinite Jest again, this time in chronological order.
2. submit a poem to a literary journal, just for fun.
3. gain greater guitar skills. this is actually going to happen, unless I somehow manage to write 100 blog posts in the next 3 weeks.
4. go to an NHL game, try not to feel guilty about the violence of the game, etc.
5. read The Brothers Karamazov; attempt to build a friendlier relationship with russian literature.
6. go on a date. ...one recent trip from harrisonburg to bethesda included a conversation between 4 women on the merits of online dating. which was hilarious, I tell you what, but a less creepy option might be to find a guy from hyattesville to go with me to a poetry reading at busboys and poets.
7. make pumpkin soup in a pumpkin. this also will happen, thanks to The Housemate.
8. memorize another Eliot poem. 
9. meet Christian Wiman. this will never happen, but a girl can dream.
10. go to a political protest. surely something interesting will happen near me before I reach 300 posts.
11. sleep a lot. this will definitely happen.
12. make something edible with The Housemate using the foraged acorns. hopefully be pleasantly surprised.
13. get a pet. a turtle? give said creature a name relating to particle physics (charm? lepton? yes.)
14. send more mail. this is not altruistic. I would like to get more mail.
15. go to an art museum. maybe after the government un-shuts itself.
16. visit baltimore & hopefully run into the crazy americorps people again. oh, and hopefully NOT get lost.
17. gain public transit skills. DC Metro, I'm looking at you.
18. start a fiction-writing group? this probably will not happen, given my neuroses about my writing + how busy all my writing friends/acquaintances are. 
19. re-henna my hair. or something.
20. grow an avocado tree. seedling. whatever. it's in the works.

a handful of change

"I've been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But...who gets excited by a mere penny?

It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.

It is that simple. What you see is what you get."

-Annie Dillard


Some pennies from the last 24 hours:

*my brother texting me about hockey
*seeing the praying mantis perched on the truck at the end of my street
*signing up for a CSA with The Housemate and picking out a week's worth of fruit & fall veggies
*listening to anais mitchell in the car; the setting sun lighting the beltway all orange and gold while the shenandoah song was playing
*facebook conversations with friends in florida and mississippi and pittsburgh
*listening to This American Life as I'm working (yes, I am still working...)
*listening to all the international scientists discussing my country's government. (ha. hahahaha. ...ugh)
*acorn squash for supper


well! I feel much more cheerful about my life after making that list. feel free to add pennies to the comments below...

#grateful

for Harrisonburg.
that I have so many homes.
that I know so many lovely human beings.
that there are so many churches in the world that feel like home.
that the elephant ear plant is still growing.
that the bag of potatoes made it from lancaster to harrisonburg to here.
that R said, i like to think you are my friend. 
for the way morning light falls slanted and bright through the windows.
that I have gained a little confidence since I first set foot in Hburg.
that I can see this in myself.
for friends that ask how I feel about Syria.
for weekends.
for brothers.
for drinking tea in the dark.
for The Housemate.
for the car full of strong women.
for the conversations we had during the drive.
for tomatillo seeds.
for letters.
for hiking.
for the tiny salamander I held in my hand.
for children, and the stories they tell.
that I am here.
that I am alive.

endings & beginnings

by my rough calculation, I've spent 12% of my life in Harrisonburg. today's my last full day in the shenandoah valley for the forseeable future, and I'm finding it fitting that it's sort of grey and dreary outside. it's hard to leave things behind, places and people; my internal landscape is tending towards grey, today. and yet some of my favorite people in the world have already begun to scatter from this small town. and some are remaining here, staying in Harrisonburg, to see what else can be gleaned from this place outside of the university doors. and I am heading home to lancaster, and then on to the NIH.

my facebook news feed has been full, recently, with friends and acquaintances three years younger than me. they're coming to the end of their first year of college, and are talking online about all of the things they'll do over the summer, the people they're excited to see back home, the friends they're leaving for the long summer break. see you soon, they say, and they can say it to either group of people and it will be true.

I feel ages older then my first-year college self. it all feels much harder, now. much more real. much scarier.

* * *

beginnings: also appropriate for a damp and clouded day.

"But faith is not necessarily, or not soon, a resting place. Faith puts you out on a wide river in a little boat, in the fog, in the dark."

I don't know where I'm going, I wrote in a book earlier in the semester. It would be nice to have a map. I still think that, some days. but I am also starting to feel eager - to do, to try, to see if I can make it in the real world that is out there, outside the safe bounds of my childhood, out past the walls of EMU. Jayber was right: it isn't a resting place, exactly. I am not calm or still when I think about the next year of my life. I feel a bit like I've been thrown onto a river in a little boat, in the fog, in the dark. but I also feel the truth of this other thing he said, which is that I have been led. I feel the truth of that down in my bones, which I guess is the faith that is causing me to stay on the raft (in the fog, in the dark), paddling with the certain thought that it will be alright.

“If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line...But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circling or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led - make of that what you will.” 

* * *

12% of my life in this place, though. Harrisonburg, a second home; the site of so many mistakes, so much growth.  Ah - I will miss you. The ugly grain elevator, even. 

May the Lord bless you & keep you, dear small city; dear, lovely EMU community. Until we meet again - because, Insh'allah, we will. 

birthday

i'm 22 today. (strange. when did that happen?) some things i've done in the last year:

moved into a rental house
learned about paying bills
worked with adults with developmental disabilities
kept going to early church
taught some super cool kids to play Settlers of Catan
read a bunch of theology texts
learned more math
visited friends at camp hebron
heard Julia Kasdorf speak, twice
went to a Josh Garrels concert in D.C.
wrote a bunch of poetry
started writing fiction
learned how to ice skate
cooked red lentil coconut curry
learned how to bake really awesome sourdough bread
celebrated a 5th birthday in a trailer
kept in touch with friends in china, guatemala, lancaster, and oregon
wrote some letters
made a bunch of mistakes
laughed at myself
failed to laugh at myself
watched many sunrises over massanutten
biked through many cold mornings to school
biked through rain
biked through snow
bought some cacti


today i walked through the world wearing my black boots, my owl shirt, with twin french braids. i felt strong & beautiful & happy to be alive. i went to the little grill for breakfast with thia, and had chocolate pancakes and orange juice, and i was telling stories about my life, and the world felt almost unbearably lovely.

it is, isn't it? we live in a world where there are 22nd birthdays that have chocolate pancakes and friends to eat with. where there are days and days of sunrises, made more beautiful by the days of snow and rain.

yes. it's a lovely world. & i'm happy to be here.

'the really important kind of freedom'

...it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. -G.K. Chesterton


I read this recently and it reminded me of the people who live at the house I work at and my last entry on this blog, the one about the life of a perpetual child.


I can't really imagine being able to exult in monotony. To never grow tired of the banal, the trite, the routine, the infinite small moments that make up a life. But I keep coming back to this thought - what other way would I want to live? A lot of life is banal, trite, routine, and small. If I can't rejoice in these things, than there is a lot of life that I am squandering.


And THIS makes me think of (who else) David Foster Wallace & his beautiful and terrifying commencement speech [Kenyon College, 2005]. In this speech, given to graduating college students (which I will be so, so soon!), DFW reminds us that how we see our lives is a choice. He reminds me every time I reread this that it is hard to stay aware and awake and alive, but it is always a choice. (I lifted quotes from this lovely website):



There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?" ...if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

...And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration.

...But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

...the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

...the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.