Posts Tagged daily minimum
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Going to Mars
After all these years, I think I finally understand what Natalie Goldberg meant in Writing Down the Bones and her subsequent books when she wrote about writing practice, and how it is about trusting your own mind, your own experience. I think I’m finally learning to do that through this daily minimum–learning to look round at my life and see that it is worth sharing, worth transforming into fiction.
Ken Wilber says that there are three main disciplines in the Integral Approach: art, which is discovering and expression the self; morals, the discipline of right relationship with other beings; and science, the exploration and explanation of the world around us. Or, as it may also be expressed, the Beautiful, the Good, and the True. I think each of these things may partake of the other; art is primarily about the Beautiful, but it may also teach about the Good and the True. That which is True, I find, is also Beautiful and leads us to the Good. And what is Good must partake of what is Beautiful and what is True in order for it to be virtue.
I finished the second book of John Varley’s Martian trilogy, Red Lightning, and started in at once on the third book, newly published, Rolling Thunder. It took me two whole books and part of another to realize the problem I had with this fictional universe, despite Varley’s engaging characters and good, fast-paced writing. It’s the Martian Superiority Complex. In the first book, Red Thunder, a group of private citizens are the first people on Mars, thanks to a quantum leap in power systems discovered by a genius; the narrator is a young half-WASP, half-Cuban guy. In the second book, Red Lightning, Mars is a settled place that relies mostly on its tourist industry, and the protagonist/narrator is the son of the first book’s protagonist, born on Earth but raised on Mars. Rolling Thunder, the third book, has for its protagonist the Martian-born third-generation of the family, a daughter with musical talent.
The Martian Superiority Complex starts in book two and just gets bigger and more obvious. Mars is better. Mars is cleaner, saner, free of crazies. Martians are well-educated, enterprising, and definitely *not* religious fanatics. Earthies are stupid, fanatical, poorly educated, good only for putting money into the pockets of Martians. They’ve screwed up their planet, they can’t be trusted with power, and it’s a darned good thing there are Martians to control the awesome power source that makes space travel and clean energy possible.
Behind this understandable superiority (understandable in a 19-year-old born and raised on Mars) there seems to be a not so understandable or forgivable attitude on the part of the author to our current situation on Earth. We’ve screwed ourselves up with fossil fuels, religious fanaticism, greed and power-mongering. Those of us who are sane need to cut and run: We should just dump Earth, let the crazies go down the drain, and find someplace else to live until Earth’s climatic turmoil resettles.
The problem is… we can’t actually do that. Varley’s fictional set-up depends on a source of power based on string theory that nobody but a single, singularly gifted genius can manufacture, let alone create. It’s all we can do right now to send those spiffy little rovers to Mars and other unmanned probes farther out. I’m delighted that we’re doing that, just to see other worlds in our system and learn more about the cosmos, but I don’t see us sending people to Mars, or even back to the Moon, any time soon. Like it or not, we’re stuck here, stuck with climate change, with dwindling oil resources, with religious fanatics willing to kill or die to prove to their own satisfaction that their way is the only way.
We’re not going to destroy the planet. Earth’s lifespan is far longer than ours; she will recover even if we bomb ourselves into oblivion. We can destroy ourselves and much of the biosphere, but eventually Mother Earth would birth new forms of life. I think Kim Stanley Robinson is closer to the mark in saying, as I think he says in his great Mars Trilogy, that what we need is not a new planet, but new forms of culture, and that the building blocks for those forms are right here on Earth.
But I’m still going to finish Varley’s book, and then probably look up his Gaean trilogy, which my father read when I was a teen. He’s a damned good writer.
Walking is my time for thinking
I had an ironic realization on the way to work this morning. I could have remained involved with AODA indefinitely had I just remained a Christian.
If you look at the First Degree Curriculum, which is also a guide to the basics of Druid living, you’ll see four main requirements: the Sun Path of ritual, the Moon Path of meditation, the Earth Path of living more lightly, and the Spirals. The Sun Path would have been satisfied by regular attendance at the Eucharist; the eight Neopagan holy days celebrated by the Order have close correspondences in the Christian calendar. The Moon Path would have been covered by the Daily Office, private prayer, and journal keeping. The Earth Path requirement of making small changes to reduce what one takes from the Earth is good for anybody, and the Spirals are specific to Revival Druidry but not specifically Pagan; the New Hermetics system, which satisfied the Magic Spiral for my First Degree, can easily be adapted to Christian Qabalistic symbolism a la the Golden Dawn.
Trying to be pagan screwed me out of being a Druid, you might say. Or, to put it more gently and probably more accurately, I might still be a Druid if I had not felt impelled to be a Pagan one.
As much as I love AODA, I do not see room for it in my life alongside Buddhism. Buddhist meditation is rather different from what the Moon Path suggests; Buddhist holy days are quite different from the Western seasonal calendar (which I still observe, just not ritually). The Spirals are not particularly applicable to Buddhist practice, and I am not doing much with any of them right now; I’m not singing or doing New Hermetics work regularly, and I’m writing but not poetry.
What *am* I doing? Well, I’m meditating daily. I’m writing for Livejournal. I’m moving toward original fiction writing. I’m changing the way I eat. I’m adding small bits of exercise to my day. I’m looking for new people on Livejournal and new books of paper to read. I’m doing my job or at least showing up and waiting for something to do. I’m watching interesting things on video and trying to get to a few of the summer movies that I think are worth seeing on the Big Screen. I’m going to weekly practice with my sangha and socializing with them, too. In other words, I seem to be Having a Life. It’s rather a change to Have a Life instead of Worrying about My Spiritual Life. That worrying I attribute entirely to myself and not at all to AODA and its requirements. It took a major shift–Western religion to Buddhism–to begin wiping out the worry habit.
It was perhaps inevitable that if I could no longer make Christianity work for me, if it no longer satisfied heart and mind, I would wind up as a Buddhist. I should have known from my past experience with paganism that I don’t do well with do-it-yourself religions. I think a lot of pagans, neopagans, reconstructionists thrive on precisely that, on making it up as they go along, building new structures to serve their needs and other people’s. I don’t. I need to adapt myself to an existing structure, find a place in it, be able to lean on that support. Buddhism seems to be doing the trick in that respect, and further, it’s doing things for me that no other spiritual path has done–like getting me to stop worrying, eat better, and exercise.
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A tropical heat wave…
My brain is addled from the heat, but the scale showed a loss of ten pounds this morning, after a week without major carbs. If it weren’t for the sickening heat, I would probably feel great. I really don’t find myself missing grains; I get hungry a lot, but meats, fruit, veggies, good yogurt or cheese do the trick. Over the weekend I ate frequently but in small amounts and drank a lot of water. I even ate a Reese’s Cup yesterday without any apparent effect; it wasn’t horrible, it wasn’t ecstatically wonderful, it staved off the vague nausea I was feeling, and it left me without any particular desire for more of the same.
The heat wave has basically confined us to the bedroom in the evenings, as that’s where the air conditioning is, and somehow, we have misplaced the remotes for both the tv and the DVD player. We can operate the DVD player manually, but the only way to switch the tv to the right band for DVD viewing is through its remote. So instead of watching our Netflix, we wound up with Bones and House last night.
Bones is not a bad show, if you don’t mind seeing fake dead bodies a lot. The title character is the Uber-Scully, so rational and so clueless about pop culture and social interactions that I wondered if she’s supposed to be on the autism spectrum somewhere. I mean, she’s never heard of Mr. Ed the talking horse? This episode revolved around murder at a pony play camp. (For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, well, some folks get a sexual kick out of pretending to be horses. With lots of fancy accessories….) They played this display of sexual fetishism about as straight as one could on tv; Bones the forensic analyst is totally rational and chacun au son goust about the whole thing, and Booth the FBI agent is frank about his “That’s just wrong!” reactions. I find David Boreanaz much more likable as Booth than I ever found him compelling as Angel. I’ve seen a lot of Buffy and a little Angel: The Series, and I am pretty well convinced that Boreanaz is a competent actor who can play comedy pretty well, but he just can’t do Brooding Angst. He’ll never convince me as a tragic romantic hero, but I could like him a lot as Agent Booth (the Anti-Mulder, hee).
This was the first time I got through an episode of House. I know that many people I respect love and adore that show, but I have some very strong medical squicks, and every time I’ve tried to watch House, it hasn’t just ticked my squicks, it’s put a rose in its teeth and flamenco-danced over them. This episode managed not to do so, and so I actually watched the whole thing. Yes, likable cuddly Hugh Laurie is strangely compelling as the misanthropic but brilliant House, limping, unshaven, staring about with uncompromising bloodshot eyes, and dry-swallowing pills by the handful. The minor characters hooked my interest–potential new hires competing for a handful of positions studying and working with House. But I’m not sure I’ll go out of my way to watch it again. I may need some Jeeves & Wooster to cleanse my palate.
I’m slowly reading my way through One Taste: The Journals of Ken Wilber with the happy certainty that I want to buy my own copy and read it again and again. It’s not hugely personal stuff, but the guy did write a book with his wife about her slow decline and death from cancer; he’s kind of covered the personal revelation stuff permanently, as far as I’m concerned. His ideas are exciting me, confirming how I think about some things, challenging me to look more closely at other things I tend to ignore. I will have more to say as I read more of his work.
The abundant rain we got in May has caused a lot of flowers to bloom earlier than usual. The day lilies are coming out, and there are some really splendid hollyhocks around the neighborhood, including one stand that’s a dark purple, almost black. When payday comes on Friday, I’m going to buy a disposable camera and get some pictures to share.
Lunch today consists of pepperoni, raw baby carrots, sliced American cheese, and some fresh pineapple left over from yesterday. I wonder how long I can hold out before eating it. Well, I did get to work early….
First you say you do, and then you don’t….
I have been saying since I started writing fanfic that I want to write original fiction. I used to, before I tried my hand at fanfic after a long spell of writer’s block. As I was writing my first erotic fanfics about Tom Paris and Harry Kim on the good ship Voyager, I was making notes for a novel set in a church and revolving around a solitary religious who comes to live in a parish and inadvertently provokes controversy and conflict. That novel has never gotten written, in ten years, though I’ve written lots of notes for it and a few chunks here and there. But I’ve written over 300 pieces of fanfic since fall 1997.
This afternoon I went looking for the archive of a writer who no longer writes fanfic and discovered that after a long hiatus, she has converted her website to a WordPress blog and is reposting her old stories. Even if she never writes another new fanfic, this is a good thing. It actually made me start to play with the idea of setting up a blog to repost my old fanfic, away from Livejournal. I took down the website I used to have when I thought I was Giving Up Fanfic Forever and going to be publishing my original stuff Any Time Now, but my stories are still available at their respective fandoms’ major archives. My fannish identity–which unfortunately was My Legal Name–has by no means disappeared from the ‘net.
More important than the issue of whether to do as this other writer is doing and start archiving things in one place again, based on WordPress or whatever, is the issue of fanfic vs. original fiction. I keep saying I want to write more original fiction… but I keep not doing it.
You see, one of my guiding principles in life is that if something is difficult, it’s not the right thing to do. I don’t mean that I never do anything that challenges me; if that was what I meant, I’d never get up the steps from the front door to my apartment. (Ow.) What I mean is that anything which is a consistent struggle, which either doesn’t get easier and more habitual no matter how long I do it, or that I keep expressing an intention to do but don’t accomplish, is not the right thing, for me.
For example, there is no AODA group in my area, but there is an ADF group. I said for two or three years, “Oh, I really should go out and visit the ADF grove…. I wasn’t wild about the folks when I met them before, but that was ten years ago… they will have changed, I’ve changed….” I kept saying that, and kept checking the grove website to see when they were celebrating the Neopagan holy days, and knowing just what bus I’d have to take to get out there. I never did it. Never even got close.
Conversely, when I decided I wanted to meet with a Buddhist group, only not the one closest to my home (because of transportation logistics), I simply did a Google search, found a comprehensive list of Maryland groups and their locations and contact persons, and scanned for Tibetan sanghas. I paid a visit to the group that was an easy ride away on the light rail and that was that. An intention was quickly followed by a decision, which was followed by an action that led to other, significant decisions.
I want to write original fiction. Really I do. I say that. And what comes out of my keyboard is fanfic. Fanfic and bloggery, and sometimes, if I try for it, poetry. I am making more use of Livejournal than ever, writing daily posts, putting up links, videos, and pictures of interest, communicating with the world. I might even *feel* like a blogger if it weren’t all on Livejournal, that wretched hive of scum and villainy, the Cinderella of the blogging world. But I like the LJ interface and hate cross-posting. So here I am.
