OPM 155, July 19th Meditation (commemoration)

Circumstances (time and place) dictate the revisiting of these meditations, the original writing that happened ten years ago.  For example, today I inverted the itinerary I had been following (more or less) for the past few weeks, and instead of revisiting the material in the evening, I started first thing in the morning.  Time.   As for place, I am alone at the home of my good friend and colleague, Stacy Smith, where I am taking up my annual post of caring for Bodhi (the dog), watering plants, but mostly relaxing.    It was this annual care taking that ultimately lead to my relocating to Portland, to a house just 15 minutes down the road from Stacy’s.   And because of my son’s tendency to have allergic reactions when he is too long with Bodhi, Kelly took him home last night and left me to my thoughts for the evening and morning.  The space of solitude (but not loneliness, as Arendt would say).

I share these details for reasons that have to do with the ‘place’ I find myself this morning as I revisit the original meditations.  First, in contrast to the way I felt a few weeks ago when the material seemed repetitive and it all seemed quite far from where I am working these days, I am connecting again with the material.  Indeed, the questions I wrestling with ten years ago are reverberating today, especially as I attempt to understand what is entailed in the turn from the mind to the heart, and what it means to think and write from the heart.  (Something tells me I was already getting into that work that in the past year when I was writing on ‘music-making philosophy’.  Perhaps the philosophy of the heart is the music-making kind?  And perhaps ‘feeling the funk’ is one way we thinking from the heart?  nb: the paper I am referring to [ LINK] concludes with: “In sum, the blues in the form of an educational music-making philosophy is both a working out and working with the heat generated from the blood, sweat and tears of the funk of living together with others.”]  Second, the connection I am experiencing with the material was facilitated by Aby Warburg’s epigraph, the fragment that I discussed in OPM {nos}, and its identification of an ‘old book’ that teaches us of a kindred spirit between ancient philosophies (North, South, East and West).   After my encounter Warburg’s fragment I read my musings from ten years ago from the month of July, which were mostly inspired by the writings of Buddhists,  and the original ecumenical/horizontal attitude returns powerfully. 

But all this brings me to what I wanted to write about this morning, and that is the troubling irony I am experiencing this morning as I write from this place of solitude.  Or is it solitude?  Listening at this moment to the rhythmic syncopated songs of birds bouncing off the tall maples and elm trees I am immediately reminded that ‘solitude’ is erroneously mistaken when we understand it only as a human experience.   By definition, solitude is defined vis-à-vis other people.  It is a relational experience: ‘the state of being alone, cut off from all human contact.’ The old keepers of the iconic Maine lighthouses are romantic examples of those who endure solitude.   In this strict sense I am experiencing solitude.  But it is precisely this anthropocentric worldview that my work (then and now) is attempting to question, deconstruct and, ultimately, replace.   Indeed, if ‘learning’ is the general category for all things human, then ‘Being’ is the general category for all things that includes humans but is not reduced to them.  Of course, Being is so much more than ‘all things,’ and not even totality, or existence, or any singular term however general, can capture Being.  Even ‘Being’ can not do justice to Being!  [I’ll let that one stand…]

The direction of my writing was guided by probing the troubling irony of being here in this house by myself, and revisiting a meditation that includes the begins by identifying meditative thinking as a “practice that takes the learner ‘beyond ideas,’ through the renunciation of the cognizing isolated ego, to…the root of the matter…where one arrives at the suchness of things…the ‘path of non-conception,’ called ‘No idea.’”  The troubling irony is that the writing, then and now, can not possibly qualify as that practice ‘beyond ideas’.  And this is precisely why I am more or less hitting the wall with my attempt to understand what is entailed in thinking and writing from  the heart.  For a moment this morning, the bird songs reminded me that the original insight about this turn from mind to heart came when I was imagining the way to connecting what I called the ‘exegetical writings’ of the Wabanaki and Thoreau.    In both cases the ‘old book’ presenting itself for exegesis was the proverbial book of Nature.   Both cases produced a documentation (petroglyphs, essays) that was descriptive, and not meta-analytical.  And this suggests that the thinking happening when we turn from the mind to the heart is not so much from the heart as through the heart.  In this sense, the heart is a threshold, a portal, an opening that enables us to enter into a congregation with all living beings, and thereby to ‘read’ the book of Nature.  In turn, the writing that happens from the heart, happens from the gathering of that congregation, like the Wabanaki petroglyphs and Thoreau’s essays.   In sum, the question that I’m faced with as I conclude this commemorative commentary is the one that asks about this meta-analytic writing that happens when we turn from the heart to the mind?

And this leads me to the fragment distilled from the writing made this day ten years ago:

What do we make of the thinking pointing beyond itself to another thinking that it recognizes with humility as capable of mediating a  experience it can only describe?   Does the difference indicated remind us of the ground where all experiences co-exist?  Or does the humility of the first disclose an economy of Being where the second has a higher value?