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The Short Pitch

I’ve launched a Patreon site through which I will share popular education research and documents. It’s a little rough around the edges and I will be improving and updating it regularly (especially regarding tier benefits). There are several free posts there that you can check out. Upcoming posts will be for paid subscribers and i’m offering five subscription tiers from modest to angel. That said, all documents will eventually be posted on my website and available for free download - there are already several documents there to check out.

To be blunt, I need, somewhat urgently, income to keep going. While this substack is free and will remain so, if you wish to support my work, you can choose a paid subscription here. Otherwise, have a look at the Patreon subscription tiers. If you cannot afford to subscribe (especially in this era of subscription-to-everything) you can still be a huge help by recommending to your friends, colleagues, and networks, this Substack and/or my Patreon.

The Longer Story

I began this substack at the same time as beginning a PhD. Both are means to continue what i’ve been doing for almost 50 years: practicing popular education to support communities and people who are resisting oppression, who are fighting for a more socially and economically just world, and who are, increasingly urgently, fighting for environmental justice.

In my work, as you can see in my substack posts, popular education refers both to those groups that practice popular education in name and those that do so in principle. Popular education is a living dialogue involving millions of people and social movements around the world. It is a practice and theory (or praxis) of learning and teaching that originates in social and political struggles against oppression and for a more just and equitable world. It is defiant and also playful, it is both humble and bold, critical, creative and artistic. It practices, as Paulo Freire writes, faith, hope, humility, love, and critical thinking.

As Argentinian organizer and educator Mariano Algava writes - about the playfulness of popular education - in Jugar y Jugarse: Las técnicas y la dimensión lúdica de la educación popular (Play and Playfulness):

…popular education is not a set of techniques and workshops for use by marginalized groups as remedial education for those who “dropped out”. Popular Education does not replace the "organization" needed to transform reality, nor is it a place for militancy without class consciousness. Popular Education aims to support diverse forms of resistance to capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, racism, imperialism; and for socialism and challenging the commodification of all aspects of life. The construction of popular power (for the individual and the social) subverts and problematizes; this action is joyful, embodied and intellectual at the same time, creating new ways and new forms, is playful.

Popular education also has deep roots in Canada and Quebec. In 1899, labourer-teachers with Frontier College travelled to lumber camps across Canada to teach literacy. Recently renamed United for Literacy/Littératie Ensemble, it continues its work today. In that same era, what would become known as the Antigonish Movement applied adult education methods to organise co-ops and credit unions. And starting in 1941, that National Farm Radio Forum broadcast a weekly half-hour show to people gathered in each others’ homes who then discussed the issues of the day. The number of groups and individuals using adult education, community organizing, and, later, popular education to educate and organize for positive change only proliferated from there. I joined these efforts in 1978 through the international development youth exchange Canada World Youth (but that’s a long story I will write about another day).

Finding myself a single parent of a 12-year-old, having just lost a job, and not foreseeing a pandemic that would change all our lives, it seemed like a PhD would be a good project to pull together the many threads of 40+ years of education and organizing work. In possession of thousands of items from the popular education movements of Canada and abroad, creating an archive of Canadian popular education seemed a logical and useful project. And thus i’ve used the PhD to begin that very thing. I have focussed much of my energy on further developing the popular education method “Naming the Moment;” pioneered by Deborah Barndt and the Moment Project of the Jesuit Centre for Social Faith and Justice in Toronto, Ontario.

Long-story-short: the pandemic slowed me down and i’ve reached the end of my funds to complete writing the dissertation. Focusing now on income to keep me and my son housed and healthy, i plan on completing the dissertation in the winter semestre at York University (between January and May 2027). This will position me to then apply that PhD for the organizing and creation of the archive.

Because the urgency to put our world on a better track accelerates every year, popular education has never been more important as a practice of social, economic, and political change. As we continue to overheat our planet the news is a grim daily litany of environmental disasters, continued habitat and species loss, accelerating mass migration, declining quality of life for millions and billions, rising authoritarianism and fascism. The deadlines of 2030, 2040, and 2050 are just down the road. And we’re still not slowing down our mining and burning of fossil fuels. I honestly don’t know if we’re going to make it much further without catastrophic loss of human life and the unpredictable economic and political changes that will result. But i do know, as Bill McKibben says and as Andrew Boyd writes that even though reversing the damage in the near future is beyond our means, everything we can do to slow the heating of our planet means millions of lives saved that will otherwise perish.

We are in a time of “terrible stories,” as the anthropologist Anna Tsing speaks of, that demands a moral courage and a capacity for caring for each other that most of us have never imagined. There are many efforts, both wonderful and humble, underway that seek to do just that. My contribution has been to practice popular education. I am creating an Archive that can support the countless efforts (those underway and those yet to be born) to apply our moral courage to facing and surviving the imminent catastrophes with as much loving-kindness, compassion, playfulness, and creativity as possible.

I began this substack to advance this goal. It is free to subscribe and I will never paywall it. You can look back in the archive to see my earlier posts in which I feature a variety of reviews of popular education works. For the past couple of years, in order to focus on writing a dissertation, I have mostly limited myself to sharing poems. But now that I have had to pause the dissertation writing, I will be posting more frequently about popular education including some of the pieces of my PhD research.

I have now also launched a Patreon (as i’ve mentioned in the past) which i will use to post downloadable (and printable) resources that can be used in the many contexts of social movement struggle (for environmental justice, equitable housing, resisting racism and colonialism, patriarchy, trade union organizing, and more). Some resources will be paywalled until i publish them on my website (where you can already see a selection of downloadable resources available for free).

You can contribute to these efforts by becoming a paid subscriber either to this substack or my Patreon (i.e. you needn’t subscribe to both). There should be a subscription option that matches what you are willing and able to contribute. Also, you can be an enormous help by promoting either or both my substack and my Patreon, to your friends, colleagues, networks.

Any feedback, suggestions, reactions to any or all of this is most welcome. As usual, for me, I am learning this by doing. Which means mistakes are unavoidable. But improvement is a permanent item on my to do list.

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My Next Project

I will be launching my Patreon site tomorrow - regardless of how ready I am. I’ve been planning this since I began my PhD just before the pandemic. But then, well, the pandemic happened. Doh! I’m sure I needn’t reiterate its effects on our lives. So, here I am, once again ready to start something new.

Briefly: my patreon site will work in tandem with this substack, my website, and, possibly, other site i use (like Tumblr and Academia.edu). My Patreon site will be my main means of sharing all the documents I have gathered over my almost 50 years of popular education work around the world. My hope is that I can connect with enough people interested in contributing (with paid subscriptions) to my popular education archive project to be able to build something enduring that can add to the many efforts underway to respond and resist to climate catastrophe, and all the many issues of injustice and oppression that are as bad as they ever were. Because I have a lot of stuff to share and it’s helping no one as it languishes in boxes all over my house. And me and my son (and our wee wheaten terrrier) need some way to stay housed, healthy, and nourished.

Anyone with a paid subscription to this substack will automatically be subscribed to the Patreon if you wish. I will not be asking people to pay for multiple subscriptions. I will explain more in my launch message tomorrow.

Meanwhile, as always, I hope you enjoy the poems I’ve shared today.

Until soon

chris

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The moment i heard Anna Tsing suggest that we need to “tell terrible stories beautifully,” many things connected for me. Inundated by a cacophony of doomers and brightsiders, anti-science fundamentalists, millenarians and rapture-ists, supremacists and fascists of all kinds, and Mars-bound Bexiters (billionaire ‘exiters’; plus one ‘texiter,’ so far), how do we “stay with the trouble,” as Donna Haraway counsels, while maintaining our individual and collective capacities for love, compassion, joy, and hope (or, possibly better than hope, equanimity?)?

There are a lot of “terrible stories” out there. The daily news is a litany of dour happenings best taken in small doses. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) founded 38 years ago, has never, as far as I know reported good news. As i write this morning, the sky is an unnatural beige haze over Toronto as the smoke from forest fires in northwestern Ontario blankets this region. You can smell the scent of burnt trees. My son said it smelled like “burnt toast.”

I’d heard some time ago from activists and from occasional speculations in mass media that many climate scientists were downplaying the seriousness of their findings for fear of paralyzing people into inaction. I read an astonishing account in Andrew Boyd’s I Want a Better Catastrophe in which he describes an encounter between environmental activist Tim DeChristopher and IPCC climate scientist Dr. Terry Root after listening to her 2008 presentation on the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. Boyd quotes DeChristopher’s account:

I went up to her afterwards and said, “That graph that you showed, with the possible emission scenarios in the twenty-first century? It looked like the best case was that carbon peaked around 2030 and started coming back down.” She said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said, “But didn’t the report that you guys just put out say that if we didn’t peak by 2015 and then start coming back down that we were pretty much all screwed, and we wouldn’t even recognize the planet?” And she said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said: “So, what am I missing? It seems like you guys are saying there’s no way we can make it.” And she said, “You’re not missing anything. There are things we could have done in the ’80s, there are some things we could have done in the ’90s — but it’s probably too late to avoid any of the worst-case scenarios that we’re talking about.” And she literally put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry my generation failed yours.” That was shattering to me.

My initial impulse was to sympathize with both DeChristopher and Dr. Root. I could appreciate the fear that many experts have in sharing the unvarnished truth of their findings. The idea of people being demoralized and paralyzed into inaction seems credible. This is one reason i think a popular education approach is so important since it attends not only to people’s need for crucial information but also to their morale needs for coping with this “terrible” information. Surely, these scientists have something to fear? But then i remembered parrhesia - the “fearless speech” (that Michele Foucault historicizes brilliantly) that was, in its earliest recorded use, the dangerous truth spoken to a tyrant who could (and often would) kill the speaker (thus the “don’t shoot the messenger” caution). Foucault shows how parrhesia evolved over a thousand years to become that speech act - between people - of uttering dangerous truth that could result in physical, if not fatal, harm but, more often, results in moral and social harm, e.g. the breaking of a friendship, excommunication, banishment from a family, and, important in the context of relaying scientific information about climate, reputational harm. These are all real phenomena to be feared or, at least, cautious about. But paralysis isn’t necessarily what happens to the scared. Rather, first they might well attack (and often do) the messenger and then they will double-down (way more active and complex than paralysis) on their clinging to the hegemonic status quo. That’s why i believe that context is everything and that popular education is about both learning how to read, craft, and use context and about developing the moral courage (which also requires clarity) to speak that dangerous truth when it will have the greatest positive effect. This means outmaneuvering the ingrained common-sense (hegemonic) responses of fear, suspicion, demoralization, etc. Yes, each year’s climate numbers have exceeded worst case scenarios. Which means, of course, that what we face will be worse than the worse case scenarios. You could even say “unimaginably worse” since, almost by definition, what will happen seems beyond the imaginative capacity of the best-informed people on the planet. That’s enough to make preppers of us all.

[Weather update: The colour of the sky has deepened to a super-saturated pale yellow which makes me want to run outside and tell the many joggers to look up and take it easy this morning. It is eerie and unnatural. The scent of forest fire smoke has now permeated the house.]

We need a politics that can face that worse-than-the-worst news and move us to care more widely and deeply (more radically) for each other than ever before. This is what Anna Tsing is calling us to do. I like that she uses the word “beautifully” to qualify the “terrible stories” we need to learn to tell. She is not recommending a mere aestheticizing of bad news but rather the kind of “telling” that addresses the complex needs any listener has: to be informed, to be challenged to think critically and creatively, to be encouraged and remoralized (or morale-boosted, if you will), to be reminded that they are not alone, to be challenged to remember that not everyone suffers climate crises equally, and so on. Also, to become good “tellers” as well.

There is a robust literature that’s worth looking at as both examples of how “terrible stories” can be told “beautifully” and as guides for our own telling. Anna Tsing’s remarkable book The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins looks at the foraging of matsutake mushrooms, which tend to grow in places disturbed by human activity, and the interconnections with immigrants and refugees (who are some of the foragers), with other species of plants and animals, and with the networks of capitalist production and consumption. Julie Cruikshank’s Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination, continues her exploration of indigenous knowledges (see Life Lived Like a Story - a life-changing read for me) with a look at how indigenous peoples have understood and lived with glaciers compared to the western/colonial understanding and exploitation of a nature understood merely as separate elements. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s very popular Braiding Sweetgrass looks at indigenous ways of knowing and science with a lot of discussion about human-non-human relationships and reciprocity. Finally, Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive: A Journey with Water is the most beautiful book i’ve read recently and a wonderful challenge to how we understand our relation with rivers and, of course, more broadly, water.

[Weather update: The sky is a richer yellow giving the city an eerie cast. Every time i look outside, i can feel my brain cycle through the set of sky states - dawn, dusk, imminent storm, post-storm, spring fog, Fall overcast - and nothing connects. It is eerie and disturbing and the scent of forest fire has gotten stronger.]

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Donna Haraway’s work has guided my art and writing and activism for over 35 years. Her scholarly writing may be something of a handful, but she has a bracing sense of humour in the way she uses words and crafts sentences. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that she has a refined (wicked?) sense of play. And she likes to play - with ideas, with language, with theorizing. You can see some of her playfulness exemplified in this 1987 video from Paper Tiger Television (a public access TV program founded in 1981 by activist and filmmaker Dee Dee Halleck): Donna Haraway Reads “The National Geographic” on Primates.

There is so much I love about how Donna Haraway thinks and writes and plays. Her notion of “staying with the trouble” is one in which i see a rational and poetic way to dispose ourselves in living into the futures that we have wrought and have yet to see. As our environment continues to degrade and our politics continues to spiral into various degrees of authoritarianism and, in some cases, outright fascism (can’t wait to read End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor due out in a few weeks), as more and more people find (futile) refuge in denial and various fundamentalisms, the scientific data is pointing to numerous catastrophes (some of them unfolding as we speak) and any of many possible collapses. I’m with Andrew Boyd in thinking that it’s sensible to aim for “a better catastrophe” rather than delude ourselves that some salvation is just around the corner.

Haraway suggests an alternative name for this geological/climactic age that is now commonly referred to as the Anthropocene. Rather, in typically playful fashion, Haraway suggests the term Chthulucene to invoke the myriad images of “earth-wide tentacular powers and forces” found in cultures around the world: Naga, Spider-woman, Pachamamma, Medusa. She suggests that what we are experiencing in this moment is more akin to a geological boundary event which, though such things are usually measured in millions of years, might last only thousands, or less, depending on how we act now. Oh, yes, it spells trouble, for sure. And you can read more about her idea of the Chthulucene in this remarkable (and kinda short) essay: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.

So, if we are facing an age of proliferating calamities, how do we best equip the generations that will be living into this future? Staying with the trouble suggests a courageous and open-hearted stance of being able to see our damaged planet and to be ready to confront the unexpected challenges that await while maintaining and practicing our capacities to love, to care for each other, living and dying well together.

Also, Naomi Klein has just started a substack. Check it out!!

Patterns by Naomi Klein

Intellectual scaffolding for our age of serial shocks and deliberate discombobulation

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There was once a general of war who had been fighting in wars all his life. Now he was weary and wished to end his career as a fighter. Having perfected all the arts of war but one, he thought it a fitting project to learn what he had neglected. He decided that he would spend the rest of his days studying archery. For he had heard that there were people who practiced archery neither to hunt nor to make war, but merely to perfect their skill. He began to search for someone to teach him.

After a long journey he found a monastery deep inside a range of mountains where the monks practiced day in and day out. He entered the monastery and asked if he could live there and study. They said, “Yes,” and he thought that his life was now over as the remainder of his days would be spent in study and meditation behind these monastery walls.

Ten years passed. One day the abbot of the monastery came to him and told the former-general of war that he must leave. “You are now a Master Archer,” said the abbot. The former-general protested saying that his life in the world outside the monastery was over and that all he wished was to spend the rest of his days here. But the abbot insisted, saying that the Master Archer must now leave and go into the world to learn what there was still to learn.

The Master Archer had to do as he was told. Having nowhere to go when he left the monastery he decided to return to the village of his birth. It was a long journey and as he neared the village he noticed a target on a tree with an arrow dead-centre – right in the bulls-eye. He was surprised by this only to notice more targets on trees and, in the centre of each, an arrow. Then, on the barns and the buildings of the town he saw dozens, hundreds of targets with arrows in the bulls-eye of each one.

The peace he had attained in ten years of study in the monastery had left him and he approached the elders of the town, indignant that, after ten years of devoted study, he should return to his own home and find an archer more skilled than he. He demanded of the elders that the master archer meet him by the edge of town in one hour and he turned and strode away without looking back, expecting, like the general of war he had once been, to be obeyed. Waiting by the mill the Master Archer saw no one coming to meet him though he did notice a young girl skipping along the road. The girl noticed him and came over.

“Are you waiting for someone,” asked the girl, looking up at the Master Archer.

“Go away,” he said.

“No, no,” said the girl, “you look like you’re waiting for someone and I was told to come and meet someone here.”

The Master Archer looked unbelievingly at the little girl and said, “I’m waiting for the master archer responsible for the hundreds of perfect shots I see around here.”

The girl looked pleased and said, “Then it is you I was sent to meet. I made all those shots.”

The Master Archer looked even more skeptical, convinced that this girl was trying to humiliate him. But he said to the girl, “If you’re telling the truth, then explain to me how you can get a perfect shot every single time you shoot your arrow.”

“That’s easy,” said the girl. “I take my arrow and I draw it back in the bow and point it very, very straight. Then I let it go and wherever it lands I draw a bulls-eye.”

I learned this story from my friend dian marino who was a visual artist and professor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto until here death in 1993. Dian had been a student of American artist Corita Kent who was a teacher at Immaculate Heart College in California and whose work continues to be influential around the world. Dian liked to tell this story to the incoming class of Masters students whose first task was the creation of their individual curriculum called a Plan of Study. The process of designing one’s own Master’s curriculum is an opportunity for creativity and fun. Unfortunately, few experienced it as such. So Dian would offer them this tale that could act as inspiration for some and solace for others.

I told this story to a group of Masters students last week and found myself remembering the words of 13th Century Persian Sufi poet Saadi of Shiraz: “ None learned the art of archery from me who, in the end, did not make me the target.” I have contemplated this thought for decades now and find it to be one of the most bracing pieces of wisdom i have come across for educators. It is an onion of a saying with layer after layer of meaning that leads one to deeper and deeper mysteries.

I am in the last weeks of writing a dissertation on popular education and this story and Saadi’s words are guiding me to my destination.

If you find this story intriguing, i encourage you to learn it and tell it. I have told it to the young and the old and have seen that most times the young are faster than their elders to grasp the delight and the challenge of this tale.

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Poetry and Writing Update

As i’ve mentioned on my FaceBook and Instagram pages, i’m taking a break from posting a poem-a-day (on weekdays) which i’ve been doing now for over five years. These weekly substack posts (which compile my daily posts from when I began) will continue. I’m taking the summer (Happy Summer Solstice, by the way), both to finish writing my dissertation on popular education (for which i really only have another month) as well as developing some new forms of writing, poetic and otherwise. I hope you substack readers enjoy my poetry (and other) posts. One thing i’m hoping to work on this summer is both increasing my readership including the number of paid subscriptions - though my posts will always remain free and accessible to all. While I am desperate for income for me and my son, i simply can’t countenance using a paywall for writing on popular education for which i have been a beneficiary of so many people’s experience, generosity, sacrifice, and more. That said, if i don’t resolve my income challenges, then i won’t be able to continue publishing (if not, also, writing). So if you have means and value my writing please consider subscribing for what you can afford. And/or, please promote my substack to those whom you think might have an interest in what I write about. But as much as I need, as we all do, money to carry on, I value engagement even more. It is hard to understand Substack’s analytics, but it appears that almost 80% of my subscribers, read my posts in their email which sounds great. But I only ever hear back from 2 or 3 at most through email. So it’s impossible to know if what the analytic of email openings actually represents the posts having been read. Within the substack app one has the options of “liking” a post (i.e. clicking the heart icon) or “restacking” a post which presumes that you have a substack with your own readership. But these are minimalist forms of engagement. The real value of this medium is the engagement with readers that can happen in comments. And i love every single response I get. But they are few. Of course, one possibility is simply that my posts are not response-worthy for many. I am non-judgmental about this. Especially in this cacophonous age of distraction and attention economies. But I welcome any insight from those of you who have read this far about how you think this engagement can increase/improve, what are its limits, how i can change my own praxis of writing and sharing.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t gotten out into what is a beautiful solstice day here in Toronto (and which i wish for you all wherever you are) then get off the internet and go smell some roses and listen to the birds and enjoy the sky and sun and wind as our earth turns and turns and hurtles around our loving star.

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I first read Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America when I was 18 and it changed how I understood history and storytelling. It exposed me to the horrors of European conquest, genocide, and colonialism. Within six years I was working in Nicaragua to support one of the most important revolutions of the 20th Century. It’s hard for me to overstate Galeano’s influence on how I learned to see the world. Nor has his influence diminished.

In the above passage, Galeano reflects on certainty and doubt, courage and discouragement. And he offers us a powerful reframing of the common sense experience and understanding of discouragement. I think it is fair to say that it is common to treat discouragement as a negative experience - something to be avoided, even if we also believe it’s a normal part of life. And, for sure, this feeling runs the gamut from mild to life-altering. Galeano’s point is a beautifully simple one - a clever use of the word itself which, as you can seem contains the word courage which, in turn, contains the word heart or “coeur.” Courage, etymologically-speaking, means to “have heart.” Which, of course, means that to be discouraged is to lose heart. And, as Galeano points out, “The proof that one has courage lies in the fact that one can be discouraged.” They come as a pair.

I used to think that it was a good thing to be fearless. But that was when I was young and foolish. I haven’t been that kind of foolish for a little while now (call me a slow learner). Somewhere along the way I learned that fear was a very useful thing. Reflecting back over my many years of encountering danger, I can see that many times i ran into dangerous situations. It was my job. And people would say that I was brave. But i can’t say that I ever felt brave and I would demur when people tried to praise me. I’d like to think that that was simply being humble. But in truth I was always confused. Because I couldn’t identify a feeling for which “brave” made any sense. Slowly i learned that fearlessness made bravery impossible. My first clue was when I saw a Bread and Puppet show in the early 80s called “The Story of One Who Set Out to Study Fear.” I would eventually learn that this story was based on a well-known tale from the Grimms’ collection of fairy tales. I would like to say that i understood the story right away and that i carried on with my wonderful life. But, no, i was so filled with certainty when I was young, it’s a marvel that i learned anything. Again and again, I ran into walls, fell down pits, floundered in strange seas, and met ogres and giants and broken wizards who tried to knock me off my path. Each such encounter sent me back to that Bread and Puppet version of the Grimms’ tale. It was an enduring riddle for a very long while. But slowly I came to wonder about what i had thought were certainties. I reflected on the way I would run into danger. I had lots of clues. A lot of people told me stories. On that journey I came across Galeano’s 1986 interview. About 15 years later I saw a clue in the 1999 film Three King in which the George Clooney character gives some advice to a scared soldier: “The way this works is, you do the thing you’re scared shitless of, and you get the courage after you do it. Not before you do it.”

Certainty, as Galeano implies, is over-rated. And yet so many places and people in this world demand certainty. Our environment has been breaking down for decades and now the very real possibility of catastrophic ecological collapse looms before us. The fossil fuel industry, the single most significant contributor to global warming, is experiencing a powerful resurgence, fascism is on the rise in countries around the world, most notably in our neighbour, neoliberalism is experiencing something of a comeback here at home, and so on and so on. But, while people see the signs, they cling to their old certainties: it won’t happen here; or, it won’t happen to me; or, it won’t happen to my children. If ever there was a time to allow doubt to grow, a time to allow oneself to risk feeling discouraged, to actually feel it, now is the time. The promise of feeling doubt and discouragement is that we can come out the other side with renewed courage, a renewed willingness to take risks. And perhaps our vision of the future can take in those “Seven Generations” that the Haudenosaunee speak of - to consider the welfare of our children and grand-children unto seven generations. It’s not a pretty picture. And yet we should all be thinking about what kind of ancestors we will be and whether our descendants will look back and thank us or forgive us - or, possibly, both - for what we did and did not do.

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Sitting in the guest house of the Green Gulch Zen Center in Marin, north of San Francisco, i recognized the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki sitting on a side table. In the 90s I was lucky to be able to visit some friends in Northern California a couple of times. This gave me the opportunity to spend some time at the Green Gulch Zen Center. When I wasn’t walking the trails I was sitting in the austere and beautiful guest room writing my wee fingers to the bone.

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is a well-known book of transcribed lectures given by Suzuki in the 1960s. Sitting in the serene setting of the Lindisfarne Guest House, i read the book over the few days of one of my visits. Such was the power of the context that it felt like Suzuki was speaking directly to me. I was both captivated and enchanted. The book starts out by featuring a well-known saying: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” There is much literature about this notion and there is always the primary advice of simply practicing zen to contemplate this insight. But i’ve also learned that any parent, or any person who is around children, can see the truth of these words in the worlds of children’s play.

Raising a teenager, finishing a PhD about popular education, and working every day to stay engaged with a world of wars (hot, cold, and economic), of deteriorating climate and biodiversity, accelerating capitalist greed and rising fascism, it can be hard to find calm and stillness. I find it necessary to I read a lot of news and commentary as i’m sure many of us do. On a daily and/or weekly basis I read Heather Cox Richardson, Cory Doctorow, Timothy Snyder, Jessica Wildfire, Charlie Angus, Chris Hedges, Manuel A. Garcia, Slavoj Žižek, et al; and lots of art and poetry blogs: Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound, Grant Snider, Maya C. Popa, man of aran, Suleika Jaouad, Austin Kleon, Mike Monteiro. And there are more. Altogether, it feels like a good way to understand what is going on.

And yet, it also rattles the nerves. So i go for a lot of walks and I listen, not so much to podcasts, but to the birds and the sounds of the city. This morning, the sunrise glistened in the pooled raindrops on the leaves of the Solomon’s seal. I’m not much a meditator but I have learned to hold my mind still on morning’s like this, and often when I walk my dog. And sometimes, I can feel all the busyness and information of the world draw back as a stillness and calm seems to pour into me. It never lasts long. But sometimes I think it’s better than coffee (only sometimes, mind you, as i take another sip of my hot, brown morning potion). This morning i remembered a couple of stories that are on regular rotation in my memory. Remembering them, retelling them, sharing them feels like necessary medicine:

Once there was a university professor who decided that he wanted to study zen. He travelled to a local monastery where he was welcomed and shown to the abbot’s study. The abbot was about to pour himself some tea. The professor stood before the abbot who looked up. The professor explained that he had been studying and teaching in the university for many years and that now he wished to add to his knowledge and learning by studying zen. The abbot nodded and began to pour the tea. The professor watched as the teacup filled to the brim and, apparently failing to notice the full cup, the abbot continued to pour. The cup overflowed and still the abbot poured. The professor was reluctant to embarrass the abbot but finally said, “Master, your cup is full and overflowing. It can hold no more tea.” The abbot continued to pour tea into the full cup and said, “Yes. And how do you, who come here with your cup so full, expect to fill it with the teachings of zen?” The professor nodded and smiled and bowed before the abbot.

I have travelled and read widely enough to know that Zen Buddhism (albeit heavily influenced by Taoism) is hardly the only practice to gain and teach this insight. A related story from Sufi tradition comes at this from a quite different angle but one that is, I daresay, kindred:

A friend saw Mulla Nasrudin searching for something in the street out front of his house. “What have you lost, Mulla?” he asked.

“My key,” said Nasrudin.

The friend joined the search. On their knees they both and looked about for the key. After a time the friend asked: “Nasrudin, where exactly did you lose the key?”

“In my own house.”

“Then why are we looking here in the street?”

“There is more light here than inside my own house.”

Suffice to say my teacup overflows regularly. But my dog with her perpetual requests to be let out or go for a walk, reminds me that I have a body. Walking our streets and parks with her reminds me of the world, its seasons, its life, its song and music. Picking up my dog’s poop reminds me that we all have responsibilities of care for our companion species, our wildlife (this morning alone I saw baby racoons and rabbits, listened to cardinals and robins and sparrows), and our neighbours.

I hope you enjoy the stories I share. I’m curious how you manage the deluge of information in our troubled world. How do you find (or make) calmness in your day?

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