Sacred (At Least, To Me) Scriptures

Happy Friday (Ack, Saturday again) --

I've been thinking a lot about identity lately. It's back-to-school time, and although I don't have kids to help prepare for this annual ritual, perhaps my mind (or the algorithms that serve me "personalized" content) is caught up in the residual "allow me to re-introduce myself" feeling of this time of year.

I started going through old selfies, in search of some elusive "event" to put my finger on, where my identity was definitively formed. But instead, I noticed that even photos as recent as five years ago seem almost unrecognizable in this moment now. In Fall 2017, I was living in Beijing (the hometown of my maternal grandmother), and preparing to move to Shanghai (the hometown of my maternal grandfather). I struggled to feel deeply connected with either place, however, because culturally my life felt more than two generations apart from them.

I honed in on a particular photo taken in September 2017 at Jing'An Sculpture Park in Shanghai, and noted down the reasons why I felt worlds apart from the "me" that was pictured: I wasn't married, I was bloated and hadn't yet felt urgency to take my health and diet seriously, I had big hair - enough for 3 or 4 people, and my sense of self was so wrapped up in the identity of my employer, I wore branded underwear and had (still have) its logo tattooed on my leg. I found myself asking, if so much can change in five years, then why do we speak about identity -- and in my case, seek to find it -- as if it's a static "thing" to be "found?"

Kwame Anthony Appiah's book "The Lies That Bind" has provided many sparks for some of my re-thinking. "Every religion can be said to have three dimensions. Sure, there is a body of belief. But there's also what you do -- call that practice. And then there's who you do it with -- call that community, or fellowship. The trouble is that we've tended to emphasize [obsess, IMHO] the details of belief over the shared practices and moral communities that buttress religious life." I'm not proposing to start a new religion (Why Are There No New Major Religions?) but I have been thinking a lot about the dimension of daily practice.

Similar to my recent awakening of paying attention to what I put in and what comes out of my body, I've been thinking that next I should tackle what I put in and what comes out of my mind. Religions have sacred texts; I have Twitter, opinion pieces that are sent to me that I feel the need to "catch up" on first thing in the morning, and the news. I recently had the thought that one place to start refining what I take in, who I am and how I move in the world, would be to identify my own set of modern scriptures or sutras and read them, ritually.

These are the ones that are most returned to in my phone - putting them in one place so I might start the experiment of reading my own set of sacred texts each morning.

We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For -- Hopi Nation; Oraibi, Arizona (via Alice Walker)

You have been telling the people / That this is the eleventh hour / Now, you must go and tell the people, / That this is the hour, / And there are things to be considered. / Where are you living? What are you doing? / What are your relationships? / Are you in the right relationship? / Where is your water? / Know your garden...

It is time to speak your truth. / Create your community, / Be good to each other. / Do not look outside yourself for a leader. / There is a river flowing now very fast / It is so great and swift / That there are those who will be afraid, / They will try to hold onto the shore. / They will feel they are being pulled apart, / And will suffer greatly. / Understand that the river knows its destination, / The elders say we must let go of the shore / Push off into the middle of the river, / Keep your eyes open and your head above water.

And I say; see who is in there with you, / Hold fast to them and celebrate! / At this time in history / We are to take nothing personally. / Least of all, ourselves! / For the moment we do, / Our spiritual growth and journey comes to an end. / The time of the lone wolf is over! / Gather yourselves! / Banish the word 'struggle' from your attitude and vocabulary. / All that we do now must be done, / In a sacred manner and in celebration.

We are all about to go on a journey, / We are the ones we have been waiting for!

To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. -- Heidi Priebe

To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be.

The people they're too exhausted to be any longer.

The people they don't recognise inside themselves anymore.

The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into.

We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out, to become speedily found when they are lost.

But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be.

It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way.

Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame.

Sometimes it will be a flicker that temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.

Self-knowledge is not fully possible. -- David Whyte

Self-knowledge is not fully possible. We do not reside in a body, a mind or a world where it is achievable or, from the point of being interesting, even desirable. Half of what lies in the heart and mind is potentiality, resides in the darkness of the unspoken and the unarticulated and has not yet come into being; this hidden, unspoken half of a person will supplant and subvert any present understandings we have about ourselves.

Human beings are always, and always will be, a frontier between what is known and what is not known. The act of turning any part of the unknown into the known is simply an invitation for an equal measure of the unknown to flow in and re-establish that frontier: to reassert the far inward, as yet unknown horizon of an individual life; to make us what we are - that is, a moving edge between what we know about ourselves and what we are about to become. What we are actually about to become, or are afraid of becoming, always trumps and rules over what we think we are already.

The hope that a human being can achieve complete honesty and self-knowledge with regard to themselves is a fiction and a chimera, the jargon and goals of a corporate educational system brought to bear on the depths of an identity where the writ of organising language does not run.

Self-knowledge includes the understanding that the self we want to know is about to disappear. What we can understand is the way we occupy this frontier between the known and the unknown, the way we hold the conversation of life, the figure we cut at that edge, but a detailed audit of the self is not possible and diminishes us in the attempt to establish it. We are made on a grander scale, half afraid of ourselves, half in love with immensities beyond any name we can give.

Self-knowledge is often confused with transparency, but knowledge of the self always becomes the understanding of the self as a confluence between what is known and not known; a flowing meeting of elements, including all other innumerable selves in the world, not a set commodity to be unearthed, measured, and knocked into shape. Self-knowledge is not clarity or transparency or knowing how everything works; self-knowledge is a fiercely attentive kind of frontier conversation with the unknown, a form of humility and thankfulness, a sense of the privilege of a particular form of participation, coming to know the way we hold the conversation of life and perhaps, above all, the miracle that there is a particular something rather than an abstracted nothing, and we are a very particular part of that particular something.

What is success? -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is Success?

To laugh often and much;

To win the respect of intelligent people

and the affection of children;

To earn the appreciation of honest critics

and endure the betrayal of false friends;

To appreciate beauty;

To find the best in others;

To leave the world a bit better, whether by

a healthy child, a garden patch

or a redeemed social condition;

To know even one life has breathed

easier because you have lived;

This is to have succeeded.

The Zen of Python -- Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.

Explicit is better than implicit.

Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated.

Flat is better than nested.

Sparse is better than dense.

Readability counts.

Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity.

Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced.

In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.

There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.

Now is better than never. Although never is often better than *right* now.

If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.

Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!