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Key Thoughts:

Introducing “The Recognitions” – a biweekly podcast series from Patti Digh on living mindfully

• Exploring ideas, interviewing authors and intellectual mentors, and opening space for discovery
• Asking provocative questions
• 5-20 minutes in length, twice a month
• The root of “recognition” is “to think over again”

Ideas in this episode:

• Our lives are stories.
• We are storying ourselves at every moment.
• Story is a yearning meeting an obstacle.
• Stories are patterns of those meetings with obstacles.
• We must learn to recognize our way out of patterns rather than repeat our way out of them.

Books mentioned in this episode:

• The Recognitions by William Gaddis
• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
• Letters to the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
• The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac
• From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

What is the second book Patti would take to a desert island, beside “The Recognitions”?

You can find out here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/big-question-little-question/id492116403

Questions to Leave By:

1. What patterns have you recognized in your life?

2. What do you recognize about those patterns? What do you know, but deny?

3. What keeps you in those patterns? They must be serving you in some way–how?

(Podcast theme song: “Relearning How to Be” by Tamara Bailie, with music by Ryan Tilby)

Heaven for Helen

-Mark Doty

Helen says heaven, for her,
would be complete immersion
in physical process,
without self-consciousness—

to be the respiration of the grass,
or ionized agitation
just above the break of a wave,
traffic in a sunflower’s thousand golden rooms.

Images of exchange,
and of untrammeled nature.
But if we’re to become part of it all,
won’t our paradise also involve

participation in being, say,
diesel fuel, the impatience of trucks
on August pavement,
weird glow of service areas

along the interstate at night?
We’ll be shiny pink egg cartons,
and the thick treads of burst tires
along the highways in Pennsylvania:

a hell we’ve made to accompany
the given: we will join
our tiresome productions,
things that want to be useless forever.

But that’s me talking. Helen
would take the greatest pleasure
in being a scrap of paper,
if that’s what there were to experience.

Perhaps that’s why she’s a painter,
finally: to practice disappearing
into her  scrupulous attention,
an exacting rehearsal for the larger

world of things it won’t be easy to love.
Helen I think will master it, though I may not.
She has practiced a long time learning to see
I have devoted myself to affirmation,

when I should have kept my eyes on the ground.

Heaven for Stanley

-Mark Doty

For his birthday, I gave Stanley a hyacinth bean,
an annual, so he wouldn’t have to wait for the flowers.

He said, Mark, I have just the place for it!
as if he’d spent ninety-eight years

anticipating the arrival of this particular vine.

I thought poetry a brace against time,
the hours held up for study in a voice’s cool saline,

but his allegiance is not to permanent forms.
His garden’s all furious change,

budding and rot and then the coming up again;

why prefer any single part of the round?
I don’t know that he’d change a word of it;

I think he could be forever pleased
to participate in motion. Something opens.

He writes it down. Heaven steadies
and concentrates near the lavender. He’s already there.

[image from here]

I’m continuing my quest to become bendy in 2012.

Sometimes I fall off the wagon. Do you?

I have made a conscious decision from the moment I started writing 37days that I would not allow ads on this site, though many have asked. That I wouldn’t accept product reviews. That I wouldn’t create affiliate programs or participate in them.

This means that if I write about something I love–lavender cake or a Tom Bihn bag or a series of wellness seminars with coaches I admire, I’m writing about it because I love it and want to share my excitement about it, not because I’m going to profit from it at all.

I wanted to create a better reading experience–for me AND for you. I hope you enjoy the simplicity and grace that brings to this site.

I’d rather make strong offers into the world and if you respond, that’s magical. If you don’t, it’s magical in a different way.

I refuse to make you feel you’re broken in order to sell you a course or a book. You’re not broken, and you don’t need to be fixed. If you’d like to explore with me in a subject-focused way (rather than an expert-focused way), I welcome you with open arms and much love.

Here are my current offers. I’m very excited about each of them. I hope one might resonate with you or someone you love.

February 1, 2012 – January 31, 2013 / 37days book club: read and think more / Online

February 1, 2012 – March 8, 2012 / VerbTribe & VerbTribe Intensive: creating a sustainable writing practice in 2012 / Online (spaces are very limited at this point, but feel free to join the waiting list)

March 17, 2012 / The Geography of Loss: Creating an Art Quilt of Grief/ With artist Jane LaFazio, San Diego, CA (limited to 25)

April 7, 2012 / Story Blocks: Your Story. Your Art. Your Life. / With artist Kimberly Joris, Milledgeville, GA (limited to 22)

April 19-22, 2012 / Groove, Drum, Create: A Women’s Retreat on Letting Go / With Leanna Joyner and Michelle Currie, Asheville, NC (limited to 17)

Love,

[photo by Jeremy Madea, rocks by The Rock Fairy]

Reply to the Question: “How can You Become a Poet?”

-Eve Merriam

take the leaf of a tree

trace its exact shape

the outside edges

and inner lines

memorize the way it is fastened to the twig
(and how the twig arches from the branch)
how it springs forth in April
how it is panoplied in July

by late August
crumple it in your hand
so that you smell its end-of-summer sadness

chew its woody stem

listen to its autumn rattle

watch it as it atomizes in the November air

then in winter
when there is no leaf left

      invent one

[image from here]

So. I spent the day trying to figure out how to use my microphone and Macbook Pro to create a podcast and a video. All stinkin’ day. Plugging and unplugging, trying it out, hearing nothing, flipping another switch, changing one system preference and then another. Endlessly. I felt like I was chipping little marks in a stone tablet.

Finally! I figured it out!

And created a short video to announce my newest online course, VerbTribe. It was gorgeous! Flawless! Every word trippingly fell from my mouth like a beautiful waterfall.

I hit “save,” and then “play.”

There I was, so cute! And there was my mouth, moving. But no sound was to be found anywhere.

And so, this video is what happens when you are voiceless. Lemons, lemonade. I hope you enjoy it half as much as I did salvaging it from the trash pile and making an old-fashioned silent movie out of it.

What I am trying to say in the video is this: You’ve wanted to write for a long time. Perhaps that time is now. I’m here to help, if you’d like. A limited number of spaces remain in my first 37-day class of 2012. It’s called VerbTribe. And it’s for people like you who have had “write more” on your New Year’s Resolutions list for far too long.

Life is short. Write accordingly. Go here for more information on how you can create a sustainable writing practice in 2012.

I have found as I’ve made my way into adulthood in this life of mine, that I share his dream. And I have dreams of my own.

I have a dream that we won’t fool ourselves into thinking Dr. King’s dream has been realized.

I have a dream that one day we will stand in lines all night long to find solutions to child abuse and child hunger, just like we stand in lines all night to buy iPads, and Harry Potter books, and tickets to the next Star Wars movie.

I have a dream that one day we will show up by the thousands in small towns across this nation and this world to show support for dismantling racism, just as we’ve shown up with incredible energy to win the right for a Google Fiber network to be put in our town.

I have a dream that we won’t abdicate our personal responsibility to the power of the internet and technology.

I have a dream that what happened to James Byrd and Matthew Shepard and Lawrence King will never happen to anyone else.

I have a dream that we will never see human beings as abstractions or “whats” but always as “whos,” people who are as fully textured as we are, whether they are the CEO or the homeless person in Pack Square.

I have a dream that we will wake up and realize the discrimination we impose on our lesbian, gay, transgender, queer, and intersex friends and neighbors is immoral, that we will be as ashamed of it in twenty years as we are of the behavior of our grandparents in the 1950s as they propagated discrimination against blacks.

I have a dream that no child will go hungry tonight, no child will be gang-raped in their lifetime, no child will be bullied into killing him or herself.

I have a dream that when we ask “how are you?” we will stop to hear the answer.

I have a dream that two monologues will never be confused for a dialogue.

I have a dream that every person who is contemplating suicide will find someone to reach out to instead.

I have a dream that we will protest disparities in our criminal justice system and health care system like our hair is on fire.

I have a dream that we find a way to walk toward and embrace the darkness in our lives as a rich soil for growth instead of protecting ourselves and others from it.

I have a dream that children who are spirited, who have autism or asperger’s, or who are now seen as outcasts or “problems” for any reason will be recognized for the gifts they bring the world.

I have a dream that peace is as prosperous as war.

I have a dream that everyone who was hurt or traumatized in their childhood will get the help they need not to perpetuate that pain into another generation.

I have a dream that either/or thinking will be abandoned in favor of both/and.

I have a dream that we will abandon the Oppression Olympics that keeps us from making real progress in the fights against “isms” of all kinds in our effort to be seen as most worthy of attention.

I have a dream that we will choose to be optimistic in the face of despair.

I have a dream that we will all spend a year getting to know someone who scares us.

I have a dream that we will all recognize we are the storyteller and not just the listener.

I have a dream that we will find prejudice and hatred and ridicule in others not as an occasion for prejudice and hatred and ridicule on our part, but as an occasion for learning and teaching.

I have a dream that we can all learn to give up our need to be right in order to hear one another’s perspective.

I have a dream that we will recognize we are always in choice.

I have a dream that women will one day be able to walk to their car late at night without holding their keys in their hands like a defensive weapon.

I have a dream that we will find a cure for MS, CF, ALS, spinal cord injuries, and cancer. And soon.

I have a dream that white males will be allowed to cry freely without being teased about it.

I have a dream that my children and your children will take the best of what we offer them and leave the rest behind.

I have a dream that teachers, nurses, and artists will finally be recognized for the national treasures they truly are.

I have a dream that teachers will make as much money as basketball players and will use the excess funds to transform our educational system into the one they long for, one that focuses on learning, and not teaching or containing or testing.

I have a dream that we will all sit quietly and very still for just 10 minutes every day.

I have a dream that we will learn how to listen half as well as we judge.

I have a dream that every week we will provide at least one meal to someone who is hungry.

I have a dream that giving is our national pastime, not getting.

I have a dream that every lonely child will find a friend who loves her.

I have a dream that we all find commonality amidst a glorious celebration of difference.

I have a dream that we stop confusing noticing difference with making a judgment.

I have a dream that we will consider volunteering to help others less fortunate to be our birthright, not our punishment.

I have a dream that, as Henri Nouwen said, we recognize community not as a place to dazzle each other with our talents, but as the place where our poverty is acknowledged and accepted…as a true source of new life.

I have a dream that you, too, have a dream.

(reposted from 2010)

mind 

“…grieving is an unavoidable part of life — the necessary price we all pay for having the ability to love other people. Our lives consist of a series of attachments and inevitable losses, and evolution has given us the emotional tools to handle both.” This commentary is about proposed new guidelines that, if adopted, would mislabel many people who experience completely normal grief as having a psychiatric problem: “Turning bereavement into major depression would substitute a shallow, Johnny-come-lately medical ritual for the sacred mourning rites that have survived for millenniums.” Are we so uncomfortable with grief and loss that we must whisk our way through them as quickly as possible, and pathologize them, and drug ourselves out of them?

body

I am going to ride my 1965 Schwinn 3-speed bike with the grocery baskets on the back more often. In anticipation of my Iron Girl Triathlon, of course. And for general riding-80-miles-around-the-neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon as I am wont to do, I am loving this orange bike helmet. Serious crush. Orange crush.

As some of you know, after 35+ years as a vegetarian, I transitioned to a vegan diet on October 31, 2011. So I have been gathering vegan resources since then, like this vegan snack guide. If you’re interested in including more vegan foods in your diet, it might be handy for you as well!

I’m going to bet you’ve never really thought about the discovery of salad before. Mr Brilliant has.

And speaking of salad, here’s how to make salad in a jar.

spirit

This blog post by Ken Robert is one I read over and over again. There is so much in it that I resonate with. In a world in which people identify themselves as gurus and life-changers and experts, it is grounding to realize that I’d rather be an example, a friend, an advocate, an explorer, a collaborator, an artist, a human being. Thank you, Ken, for giving words to my desire.

word

“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.” -Rainer Maria Rilke

[image from here]

Snow

Once with my scarf knotted over my mouth
I lumbered into a storm of snow up the long hill
and did not know where I was going except to the top of it.
In those days we went out like that.
Even children went out like that.
Someone was crying hard at home again,
raging blizzard of sobs.

I dragged the sled by its rope,
which we normally did not do
when snow was coming down so hard,
pulling my brother whom I called by our secret name
as if we could be other people under the skin.
The snow bit into my face, prickling the rim
of the head where the hair starts coming out.
And it was a big one. It would come down and down
for days. People would dig their cars out like potatoes.

How are you doing back there? I shouted,
and he said Fine, I’m doing fine,
in the sunniest voice he could muster
and I think I should love him more today
for having used it.

At the top we turned and he slid down,
steering himself with the rope gripped in
his mittened hands. I stumbled behind
sinking deeply, shouting Ho! Look at him go!
as if we were having a good time.
Alone on the hill. That was the deepest
I ever went into the snow. Now I think of it
when I stare at paper or into silences
between human beings. The drifting
accumulation. A father goes months
without speaking to his son.

How there can be a place
so cold any movement saves you.

Ho! You bang your hands together,
stomp your feet.  The father could die!
The son! Before the weather changes.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye was brought into my life by my friend, Catherine Faherty. My thanks, Catherine. Once, a few years ago, Catherine called Naomi Shihab Nye to tell her that a friend was dying, a friend who often sang songs by Naomi to her children when they were young. Would Naomi sing some of those songs to her friend on her deathbed? And yes, she did.

Naomi Shihab Nye is one of the 12 people I’ve identified as “I would love to talk with them” in 2012 for my new podcast series, “The Recognitions.” I hope she might be able to say yes again. I would love to thank her for her voice in the world, and for her generosity of spirit.

This poem has struck me deeply today. I hope it opens up a space in your heart as well.

[image from here]

A woman with a beautiful voice and a big mind asked me to be on her radio show this past week. And I said yes. We hadn’t talked before, but it seemed as if we had.

Koren Motekaitis and I talked for an hour, and I just listened to the podcast she created from the radio interview. An insightful interviewer, she made me think–and laugh, two prerequisites for a great day. I hope you’ll enjoy our conversation about:

• finding the extraordinary in everyday life
• 20 seconds of insane courage
• what the royal road is
• how a bowl of cheerios changed my perspective
• how boundaries free us
• creating a new balance sheet to account for the intangibles in our lives, like love
• You’ll hear Koren’s beautiful analogy about “the weather” and what she taught me about swim class and bathing suit anxiety

While you’re listening, sign up for Koren’s free podcasts. You will love them.

Thanks, Koren. Here’s to many more conversations with you. And my thanks for the work you are doing in the world.

[image from here]