Confluence Formation

I almost slept in, but when I got up to turn off my alarm and cancel my appointment, well, at that point I was up, and I might as well make some coffee, and scratch some pages, and do the thing that I said I was going to do.

I think a lot, and hear a lot, about softening the edges of the grasp that productivity culture holds over us. The admonition to soften those edges strikes me as wise, especially as a corrective to the too-muchness of all of the capitalism that’s run amok, that’s running the world and making a mess.

But when I read a book or an article or a poem about not needing to be quite as productive as all that, I think about how whoever wrote the piece did manage to get up yesterday morning and make some coffee and go to yoga and sit at their desk and write something.

I feel two things about the matter. I have two thoughts.

My first is that, yes, pretty much everybody is trying too hard. Hustling too much. Pretty much everybody deserves a nap. Naps are subversive and powerful. The earth welcomes us at the angle of repose. There is wisdom in letting a field lie fallow. In practicing unplug. In observing sabbath. In being enough. In being a human being not just a human doing. In letting the day suffice. In honoring the labor of nurture. In activating pleasure, following whims, the peace of wild things. In letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

The second thought is that I’m made of muscle and creative genius. So are you. So are we each. And I relish some struggle. I like to work, to produce, to create, to make. I stand tall in the presence of the pull of gravity. I have edges and I find life, feel life, taste life, give life when I press into them.

Of course, the best critiques of productivity culture are not a dismissal of the creative spirit, but rather, protective of it. The end goal of productivity culture is the accrual of passive income. The end goal of creativity is the active production of life. 

I like a world where we’re all free from unnecessary struggle, free to make the creative contributions that we’re here to make. 

How many of us are unnecessarily struggling through our days in order to produce things that aren’t quite aligned with our creative edges?

I drift toward utopian thinking when I start walking with such questions.

I suppose, though, at the end of the day, when well-applied, utopian thinking can be a very creative, even productive, use of our time and imagination.

PS—This post pairs well with Kirsten Powers creative contributions on Changing the Channel.

PPS—And also with this conversation between John Dickerson and Brad Stulberg…

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Most mornings recently I’ve been doing morning pages. Before anything else (by which I mean: wake, brew coffee, do Wordle, then…) I open a notebook and uncap a pen and scratch out three pages of whatever comes through my scrawling hand.

One morning last week I wrote: 

I have a list of eight things to write taped to my wall. And a list of twenty odd things to accomplish before lunch, before peace can wash over. I have a list of four things I’m meant to always be. I have a list of things that make for a perfect day, but not that make for a perfect life.

So later—I can’t remember if it was later that day or a day or two later—and I’m not saying that a perfect day or a perfect life are either of them achievable or, for that matter, desirable, but—I took out my bigger notebook and made a list of the things that, for me, would and do and will make for, colloquially speaking, a perfect life.

* Make meals and memories with loved ones.

* Help people experience life to the full.

* Walk paths near rivers and fields and in cities and forests.

* Paddle canoes. Tend fires. Sleep outdoors.

* Explore my lover’s body. Make love.

* Make children. Support their genius and joy.

* Plan, fund, and facilitate feasts and adventures for my family.

* Enjoy good stories in many forms.

* Grow old in wisdom and in good company.

* Pay attention. Write about it.

So, now I have that list too. Today I’ll tape it to the wall too. As a declaration, and a celebration. To help me remember, and stay the course. A cluster of actuality and aspiration.

What’s on your list?

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I once helped a farmer bury a goat who had died during a cold December night. Or, come to think of it, the ground would have been frozen solid. Maybe we just moved the goat to a resting place and covered him with as much earth as we could muster, biding time till the thaw.

I used to wake up at first light even though the blackout blinds kept the sun out of the room. Bombadil, the bantam rooster that we accidentally got with a batch of hatchlings that were all meant to be hens, ensured my wakefulness with his cock-a-doodle-do’s.

A few weeks ago I tended the chickens—who still live with Lauren—while Lauren was out of town for Christmas. Then, on the first day of this year, Lauren messaged to let us all know that Bombadil had died defending his flock from a hawk.

That’s quite a way to go. That’s quite a way to start a year.

I called Lauren to lament. In the text thread my niece named how apt and valiant and poetic Bombadil’s ending was. I thought of the other three backyard chickens that I buried over the years under the flowers in the front yard. I thought of the John O’Donohue prayer that I read from a book of blessings for the first hen that died, standing at her little grave, shovel laid to the side.

I sobbed on the first of January, over Bombadil’s death. Rest in peace, darling little frenemy, whose morning cries warned of the new day and forbade further rest.

My tears for Bombadil were laden with the weight and the spin of the earth. Endings and beginnings. The uncertainty of creation. Is this as true for you as it is for me, that: Every day, when I set out to make something new, I fear that the spark of creativity won’t be there if I reach for it, that it won’t meet me if I show up?

But I usually do anyway, show up. And it usually does, meet me.

In a dream, my first car, a ’91 Mazda Protogé, won’t start. Mazda is the Zoroastrian god of wisdom, the creator deity. 

Nevertheless, I show up.

Because the man with the meditation practice met me in the basement and recited a poem about princes and kings and fools being makers of eternity. 

Because Keisha E. McKenzie wrote about how irrelevant it is to credit one moment of turn as any more significant than another moment of turn.

Because Tillich said that god is the ground of being. 

Because Maria says that being is the thing worth tending. 

Because Tom gave me feedback, encouraging me to be authentic.

I’m planning to launch a business as a life coach and a retreat guide. The specter and possibility of failure wakes me up in the morning before first light. “Cock-a-doodle-don’t!” it croaks.

In the field of human potential everybody’s promising something, and those promises are washed up in so much noise that it’s a wonder when any value manages to crawl through and evolve into transformation.

In the efforts of beginning a business there is so much earth to move. 

In any effort to create anything there is so much former life to compost.

Nevertheless. 

Because it feels good to muscle my way through this world of feather and flesh.

I am the hawk and the cockerel. 

And the man with the shovel, smearing earth on the corner of the page with a prayer.

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Last week I was on an island in the Caribbean. Some of the trees in the Virgin Islands National Park wink at you when you walk past them. They flex and whisper their age. They tell stories, if you listen, about the ecology of the place and about a whole history of happenings.

Ferns grow on the trees’ trunks and contribute to their whispers. It is a rather elegant arrangement. These ferns are epiphytes—they don’t put roots in the soil like many plants do, but instead they attach themselves to other root-bound plants and gather nutrients direct from the light that filters through the canopy, and from the midday rain.

We were on the island because it’s beautiful, and also to spend a week at the outset of this new year catching some rest and preparing for what’s ahead.

Emma and I got engaged over the holidays. On a rainy day in Boston in late December we gathered all of the house plants in the house and placed them in the living room for company and witness. We lit candles and built an altar with objects and words that told of our promises to each other. I gave her a ring that sparkles with gems that are situated along the band asymmetrically, like stones crossing a shallow riverbed. She gave me a beavertail canoe paddle made from alder, basswood, and walnut, with an oiled grip. It feels like a scepter and an heirloom in my hands. 

In witness of fire and life, we flowed around the bend, crossing a threshold into the next chapter of this story that we are authoring together.

One of the witnesses was the staghorn fern—an epiphyte by nature—who lives in my office near the windowsill over my desk. 

Last week I spent an afternoon swimming in the waters, among the reefs and over swaths of sea grass. I floated for I-don’t-know-how-long-because-time-melts-in-salt-water gazing at a sea turtle who found me while I was out snorkeling. When she surfaced I surfaced with her, and held her gaze, our heads bobbing together above the water and then below again, above for a deep gulp of air, and then below. She dove down to the grass to feed, and I waited ten or twelve feet above until she was ready for another breath.

And there was a third with us, her remora—one of the suckerfish whose custom it is to accompany other creatures, attaching to their bellies or the backs of their shells, like finned epiphytes of the sea.

Share this with someone who’s got your back.

Which all has me wondering what remora fish I carry with me into my days and into my relations. What are the sometimes pesky, sometimes graceful, always present companions that move with me? What skills, wounds, stories, needs, uncertainties, gifts follow and attach themselves to me wherever I swim? 

And what epiphytic instances of life have endured long on the trunk of my soul, drinking from the emotional weather around me?

With all of these hangers-on, it is brave of us to interact with one another. All of us. Any of us. It takes courage to explore the places where one ends and the other begins, to color new worlds with bold ecotones.

An excerpt from an encyclopedia article about community ecology:

No interaction between species fits neatly into the categories of antagonism, commensalism, or mutualism. The interaction depends on the genetic makeup of both species and the age, size, and physical condition of the individuals. Interactions may even depend on the composition of the community in which the interaction takes place.

Healthy ecosystems depend on variety and diversity; on the mixing and weaving of many. That’s why, after our engagement ceremony, Emma and I drove across town where our families had gathered to root for and bless us—and join us—in new formation.

Our worlds meet and we give shape to new ecologies. New patterns of atmosphere emerge with new formations of community. We lock eyes and take big gulps of air together. We tend to each other’s soft bellies. We have each other’s backs. Sometimes we stand tall on our own like trees, and tell the stories of everything happening around us. Sometimes we hold to those stories like thirsty ferns.

Always, in defiance of the categories that we create to make sense of such things, we interact. 

How very wild of us. We are brave and beautiful little ecosystems, and continual creation requires us to risk and celebrate proximity.

How very wild, that it implores us to explore our evolutionary instincts to share space; to nurture our particularities in the weather of community. 

How very wonderful, that the world depends on us being wild, and on the generative wildness of our many mingling loves.

PS – This post pairs well with Soul Mate by Flora Cash.

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The boy followed his father through the palms to the sand. When his feet touched sand the boy ran toward the waves, then a sharp left. He darted along parallel to the surf. Down the beach a ways he found a broad swath of wet sand and dug the toes of his right foot into the sand, hobble stepping around until he’d drawn a big circle in the sand, twice as wide as he was tall. 

If you’ve done this yourself you know it takes concentration not to lift the foot that is serving as your stylus. It’s an awkward and muscular art form, with unruly media. No wonder, then, that upon completing the circle—the very moment that his right toes plowed the final push of fresh sand into the valley where he’d began his mark—the boy’s brown face shifted from pure earnestness to unfettered victory.

“I did it!” he announced.

His father was already in the waves out of earshot, and the boy wasn’t announcing it to me, and I feel confident that he hadn’t been given instruction to do the thing that he was announcing that he’d done. So I’m left with complete admiration for this boy’s initiative; for this boy's self-determination; for this boy’s audacity—independent of any audience—to ensure proclamation of his incomparable accomplishment.

Once the circle was made and his victory sufficiently proclaimed he sprinted after his father into the waves, and left me sitting in the sand gobsmacked with inspiration.

Some people spend their days drawing lines in the sand, building walls, making barriers. These have their function, I suppose. But straight lines are a flirtation with abstraction. Walls are built to crumble. Barriers invite trespass. The lived world is alive with shifting curves. Curves circle the world. 

Let’s practice curves. Let’s be like the boy who makes circles bigger than himself. Let’s make circles bigger than ourselves, then bigger than those, then bigger than those. Let’s circle the world with circles that shift, then dive into the waves with victory in our throats.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit arammitchell.substack.com

Last month I got curious about Transcendental Meditation so I signed up for an information session with a local instructor. Curiosity takes us places. There is so much world, and so many souls exploring it from so many angles.

I met the meditation instructor and one other interested soul, a chef, on a rainy mid-December day in the basement of the historic Cambridge Masonic Temple in Porter Square. The instructor gave me and the chef each a clipboard so that we could fill out a form with our email addresses and reasons for being there. 

My reason was something like: More levity, doing good work with a greater sense of ease. 

I might have just as honestly said: To drop down, for a time, beneath the chatter, and to bring back a boon of clarity.

Also, I was curious what sorts of things Transcendental Meditation instructors talk about in the basements of Masonic Temples. The space smelled of patchouli from the other room where the group of ecstatic dancers were just finishing their mid-day romp. My meeting place was a smaller room with six folding chairs, a dry erase board, a stack of books, and the clipboards on a low table against the wall—plus me, the chef, and the instructor. 

The instructor held court and did his song and dance. I was as intrigued by the caliber of his performance as I was by the content of the pitch. Who says a sales pitch can’t be woven together like a one-man show? I love getting to witness people giving their gifts to this world.

I walked away soggy from the rain, and curiosity sated for now.

The Midwinter Revels show, that I wrote about before the holidays, was set in a medieval court at solstice, and it centered on the tandem trope of the king and his jesters. They are mirrors of each other, kings and fools. The king and the fool are an inhale and exhale of the same breath. 

At winter solstice the king is traditionally charged with the curious duty of descending to the nether world to retrieve the light to bring back for the realm, ushering in a new cycle of creation and growth. In the Revels things went topsy-turvy, as they often do in a good story, and it ended up that the three fools were the ones who were called on to fulfill the king’s task. And so—faithful to the realm in their own ways—they descended.

In the basement of the temple the meditation instructor recited a poem that I had never heard, penned by R. L. Sharpe around a century and a half ago:

Isn’t it strange

That princes and kings,

And clowns that caper

In sawdust rings,

And common people

Like you and me

Are builders for eternity?

We’re all making something, or meant to be, at every given moment. 

Making love. Making amends. Making art. Making room. Making friends (or the reverse). Making home. Making memories. Crafting our contributions and building a legacy. We are—moment by moment—makers of eternity.

The poem continues:

Each is given a bag of tools,

A shapeless mass,

A book of rules;

And each must make—

Ere life is flown—

A stumbling block

Or a steppingstone.

I like it. Though, certainly, by God’s grace, it’s not that binary. After all, I might stumble over something that causes you to leap. The builders, along with those who are making their way, share responsibility for the outcome of the walk. 

But the fools do return with light for the realm, making it possible for us all to identify, and then avoid or utilize, whatever the obstacles in our way. 

And, in case you missed it, we are, each of us, a court unto ourselves. We are, each of us, common people and princes and kings and clowns that caper—descending, transcending, dancing, stumbling, strolling, transgressing, and jesting—our way from moment to moment, day to day, season to season. That’s what it is to be alive. That’s what it is to be human.

So, whatever you are feeling today, and as you lean into this new year, may your heart be open to the full expression and experience of your humanity. You are royal, you are tricky, and you’re not alone in this world that is drenched with curiosities. 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit arammitchell.substack.com

During intermission at Midwinter Revels last week I sparked connection with the man next to me at the sink while we washed our hands. When he bent toward the faucet, his glasses slipped from where they were perched on the top of his head, and he caught them midair.

“Nice snag,” I said to him. 

He chuckled. And I chuckled.

While we dried our hands at the paper towel dispenser I pointed at his lapel.

“What’s that on your pin?” I asked.

“It’s a dragon,” he said.

“Oh, that’s awesome,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said. “My one true love gave it to me.” 

And he smiled and I smiled, and we parted ways.

God I love humans.

Back in October I got to see Yo-Yo Ma play with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I sat by a woman named Carrie who loved the orchestra. She had season tickets.

Carrie pointed things out to me in-between movements. She told me the name that she had made up for her favorite bassist, the one with the red sash who never used a stool. She told me about all of the percussionists, and that that guy who was seated in the row behind us was one of the percussionist’s dads. She told me the best place in New Orleans to get praline, and the best bars in Cambridge to get beers. She pointed out the prowess of the woman with the piccolo, which I had already noticed. (That woman could play the piccolo! How excellent of humans, that we invented the piccolo. And that someone came along—her, in particular—who has it in them to fill a hall with that pitch and passion.)

Carrie shared a full slate of her observations with me that evening. Then, at the very end, after the orchestra finished a concerto by Shostakovich, Carrie glanced over at me aglow, with a countenance of content and soulful longing, and said while clutching at her heart, with a deep sigh, “In a past life I really think I must have been a Russian peasant.”

I just love us. So sincere. So silly. So tender. So mighty. So creative and full of life.

Share this with a human you love!

Saint Iraenaus made this bold theological assertion: “The glory of God is man fully alive.”

I think that the glory of God—such as it is—is more vast and varied than man’s fullness alone. I think humans of all genders, and creatures of all sorts, and vegetables and minerals for that matter, all sing in their fullness to the glory of whatever continuous and creative genius vibrates behind the dynamic and evolving stuff of life. 

But I take Ira’s point, and these passing singular encounters back it up: God is glorified when you and I—and Carrie, and the man with the dragon pin, and the man who gave it to him, and Yo-Yo Ma, and the piccolo player, and every last peculiar and particular one of us—are fully alive.

And that full life goes by different names, wears different clothes, strums different tunes here and there and now and then. Maybe it peeks at you when you hear a time piece ticking, strumming the bass note of every second that backs up every moment of your full life. Maybe it’s the bit of eternity you hold when you touch the hands of someone you’re in love with. Maybe it’s composing or playing or reveling in ensemble music. Maybe it’s the light making the sky a color that feels, somehow, somewhy, important to notice. It's the beauty of simple things—or of complicated things given actual shape—these moments of aliveness.

It is a taste, a hint, a glimpse, a memory of something divine made immediate. For those who believe in God it is all the power and wonder of grace. And for those who don’t, I'm not sure that it's anything less than that anyway. 

That’s my favorite thing about the theology of Christmas (tucked in, cozy, over there in a corner of truth behind the hubbub, behind the carols, behind the tinsel, behind the Christmas morning breakfast casserole—which I am definitely behind—and all of the other traditions that tumble us along toward the end of a year):

Abstraction, when it comes to the divine, doesn’t quite cut it. 

Divinity, instead, is found in particularity. God dancing with us in the dusty constraints of the time-bound, material world. And us, dancing God back to God.

I’m going to go do some of that dancing now. Going to bask, for the rest of December, in music and family and true love and good light.

Merry Christmas, to those who observe. And happy solstice on the way.

I’ll see you again, back here, in the new year, eager to share some of the other creative contributions that I’ve been brewing for this world, so ripe with the divine.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit arammitchell.substack.com

I’m not sure what the most affirming and compelling thing would be that a friend or a reader might say to me. But my friend David got close when we sent me this on Monday: “I’ve been encouraged to see the wilderness more through your writings.”

And then he told me about one of his other wilderness guides, his two-year-old, Lina: 

One of the games she plays is called ‘bird’. We essentially just pretend there are birds on a walk, or in our basement, or wherever we are, and just say, 'Oh, look a bird!’ (There are no birds and we just point wherever.)

He continued:

I sometimes feel like there is no wilderness in the suburban jungle that is southeast Michigan but sometimes just pretending (and being excited about it) gives me a hint of the joy and playfulness that comes from running through the woods and being in wide open spaces.

John Muir begins chapter one of Our National Parks with this:

The tendency nowadays to wander in wildernesses is delightful to see. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.

That was 122 years ago.

Muir describes the forays of those who delve deep into the wilderness “jumping from rock to rock, feeling the life of them, learning the songs of them, panting in whole-souled exercise, and rejoicing in deep, long-drawn breaths of pure wildness.”

About those rock-jumping, soul-panting, long-drawn wilderness rejoicers, Muir says, “This is fine and natural and full of promise.” Then he says, “So also is the growing interest… in the half wild parks and gardens of towns.”

The half wild parks and gardens of town. I love that phrase. I love that sentiment. I love the way it makes room for wildness to crawl into even our most cultivated green spaces.

It gives me permission to do what Lina knows through pure instinct how to do. To make believe. More than permission. Inspiration. I’m inspired by Lina’s spirit of imagination, by her and Muir’s audacity of proclamation.

“Oh, look a bird!”

“Oh, look a park!”

“Oh, look…!”

More than permission—the weave of the wisdom from this two-year old in Detroit and this 122 year old turn of phrase—it’s a commission, to go out, seeking and naming every instance of half wild wonder that manages to stumble past whatever doldrums insulate us from being always completely taken with this wonderfully wild world.

I write that mouthful of a sentence, and then I check myself. “But Aram, everything in this world isn’t gorgeous and playful and light. What about the the gnarly, the severe, the shadows? Don’t bypass those.”

I listen to myself when I check myself. Good note. Good caution. Of course. But that’s not what we’re doing here, is it? 

It’s wildness that we’re talking about embracing, not a vapid outlook on life. The commission is not to bypass any of the world that we encounter, but to imagine it infused everywhere with the magic that we have already tasted elsewhere. 

The commission is to make believe, in a way that makes it so.

PS - Want to join me next spring in the practice of wildness and make believe?!

For eight weeks in April and May, I’m teaching an online course with the School of Global Citizenry. You’re invited. Read about it here: Spiritual Formation in the Wild.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit arammitchell.substack.com

When its spiritual growth that I’m after, a balance between consistency and flexibility serves best. If it’s too rigid, for instance, my morning routine breaks every few weeks. I need to keep it simple and supple and strong. Right now I have one commitment in the morning: That I engage in a morning practice. And I have a menu of morning practices that I pick from depending on what I feel that I need, and on the actual time at hand.

One of the things on my menu is a meditation in six movements. I made it up for when I need help at the threshold between days. It helps me move from the residue of what proceeded into the potential of what’s ahead.

My RTDB meditation goes like this:

Light a candle or put on some soft music, or don’t do either of those things. Close your eyes or stare at the corner or at your toes or at the branches of nearby trees. You can sit down, or lie down, or stand up, or stretch, or go for a walk. (If you go for a walk, make sure you’ve extinguished the candle.) Any of these postures, it doesn’t matter, just quiet yourself, and then, review the day before, by recalling these things…

Place notes

Make note in your mind of the places you occupied and moved through. Where were you throughout the day before? What were the place names? Were you in Massachusetts or Maine, or both? Were you near a mountain? Which mountain? Were you near a beach? Which ocean? Were you inside of the sanctuary of a big church in Cambridge? Were you, at some point during the day before, in a low-seated comfy chair in the living room of a house on Avon Hill? Was the weather in New England unseasonably warm? How did the light fall, just so, through the stained-glass windows? What did the room smell like? 

Bass notes

Make note in your heart of the ways that the day and its happenings occupied and moved through you. 

How did you feel throughout the day before? What were the undercurrents of your emotional experience? Did they shift after breakfast, or after that interaction with the barista, or after that phone call with your friend in Asheville? Or did they keep pretty steady through the day? Your feelings are a color. What colors colored your day? Your feelings are a genre. How did the day’s drama flow?

Moment of courage

When were you a hero? You did something brave yesterday, probably several somethings. I don’t have examples, because courage is incredibly personal. Be honest and generous. What was one brave thing? It’s not arrogant, it’s just you that’s cheering you on here. One simple brave thing. Hold it up like a trophy in your heart.

Moment of revision

Anne Lamott tells of three basic prayers: Help, thanks, and wow. Oops might be a fourth. When did you oops? Or get oops-ed upon? The idea here isn’t to wallow, or seethe. The idea is to notice that life is tinged with shadow and light; to notice that you can be brave (which you’ve just previously noticed) and imperfect; that life can be glorious and gnarly.

Recall something from the day before that you would change if you could. You can not, of course, return to the day before and actually edit what you did or what happened. You can, however, gather up, like water from the spigot of your own lived experience, the happenings of a day—no matter the extent to which they approached and approximated your idea of your best day or your best version of you—and pour that water into the potted plant that is today’s experiment at life. Recall one small moment of revision, and then, move on.

Moment of making

What did you make? Just one thing. Sure, no doubt, you made lots of things. But right now just punctuate your heart with pride over one of your day’s creations. Maybe you made a friend. Maybe you made a painting or an actual sculpture or a delicious sandwich. Maybe you made love. One moment of creative expression and collaboration with the spirit of genius. One moment of offering, of contribution to the world.

Moment of more

Which moment, among all the rest of the day’s moments, would you have loved to stretch out, to have paused time, to have lingered in?

All of that happened. Now, let the day suffice. Take six deep breaths, one for each of the movements in this meditation. And on the sixth exhale step—or leap or tiptoe or front flip or belly flop—into the day ahead.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit arammitchell.substack.com

I was born on this day in 1982. Here are 41 things that I have learned since then.

* There is so much world.

* When kindling a fire: Start small and build slow.

* Do the same when kindling any new practice, aim, or intention.

* In politics and personality assessments it’s seldom beneficial to paint with a wide brush.

* Blank pages are invitations, not enemies.

* Imperfect action is necessary, and most of the time enough.

* Carry a notebook and a pencil pretty much everywhere all the time.

* Blackwing pencils are the best pencils.

* Any religious idea can be a dangerous religious idea. Most of them can be redemptive. Whether the ideas manifest in the world as one or the other is totally up to us.

* Trees make good friends and good teachers. 

* Oak, pine, cedar, and birch each have a personality and intelligence all their own.

* The call of the wild; the calm of the hearth. The thrill of the dark; the bliss of illumination. The quest; the retreat. We need it all.

* Solvitur ambulando.

* The quality of a meal is directly proportional to how far into the backcountry you’ve gone to eat it.

* A good bit of stand up comedy has more prophetic thrust than a well reasoned argument.

* Blessed are those who are in on the joke.

* If you are paddling upstream in a yellow canoe and you get to a bit of swift water, it is best to get out and walk around.

* Hope is useful when it’s also honest.

* The wisest among us are seldom in a hurry.

* Along with Audre Lorde, I think it’s true, “In order to win the aggressors must conquer, but resisters need only survive.”

* With Jay Griffiths, I think it’s true, “We are animal in our blood and in our skin. We were not born for pavements and escalators, but for thunder and mud.”

* With Aristotle (or whoever misattributed it to Aristotle), I think it’s true: “The most intelligent minds are those that can entertain an idea without necessarily believing it.”

* With Ita speaking to Finn in Frederick Buechner’s Brendan, I think it’s true, “Smirchy and holy is all one.”

* Per the letter I wrote to Grampy the year he turned 100 years, I think it’s true that a man needs little more in life than companionship, nourishment, some sturdy shelter, and a good bottle of mustard.

* Speaking of the palantir in The Two Towers, Gandalf says, “Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.” That’s true also of hammers, of smartphones, and of biblical hermeneutics.

* With a little improvisation and an eye for opportune moments, the three card tricks that you learned when you were 12 years old will “wow” pretty well any crowd.

* There’s always someone who’s got better tricks than you.

* Earth weighs what earth weighs. 

* And spirituality is a muscle.

* The best way to speak truth to power is to confront ignorance with inquiry.

* And it’s seldom useful to speak in absolutes.

* What stuck people need perhaps more than anything, is permission. Permission to slow down. Permission to step back. Permission to lean in. Permission to experiment and to fail. Permission to play. Permission to take up the them-sized space in the world.

* The best thing about being a grownup: You get to write your own permission slips.

* If you’re willing, there’s as much truth in Lancelot’s sword fighting lesson, from the opening scene of First Knight, as there is in any other great excerpt of sacred text.

* It matters what metaphors you filter your life through.

* Selfishness is rooted in a lack of imagination.

* It’s not a competition, but love wins.

* It’s possible to simultaneously be open to feedback and careful with your heart.

* At 14, at the summit of Ben Nevis in a bluster of snow, dad told me: “Interest comes and goes, but commitment gets to the top.” I still think that’s true.

* Also true: The top isn’t always the best place to be.

* It can be both.

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