cave of the heart – The Kingdom of Enough

A Poverty of Attention

In common things that round us lie

Some random truths he can impart,

— the harvest of a quiet eye.

William Wordsworth at the end of “A Poet’s Epitaph”

Photo of iPhone, candle, and the book "The Sabbath"

I don’t need a research study to tell me that my attention span has decreased since reading more on screens and digital devices. I feel it halfway through a Zoom meeting when I start to slouch and squirm. Sitting up straight and scolding myself barely check my desire to pick up my phone and do the New York Times Mini Crossword right now. Although I stay in my seat trying to listen, even the strictest self-admonishment doesn’t prevent me from mindlessly reaching for my chocolate stash or getting distracted by the blue jay that just landed on the garden arch outside my window.

More distressing than a case of the fidgets on Zoom is that I can no longer immerse myself in a book for as long as I used to. All those long summer vacation afternoons lazing in the sun with an Agatha Christie or a juicy romance, the pre-Netflix late nights when I dismissed all thoughts of an alarm clock just to read one more chapter lie far in the past. As much as I still love to read, I no longer spend hours lost in a book.

Part of the problem may be information overload. According to a 2009 study at UC San Diego, the average person reads the equivalent of 100,000 words a day. (As a point of reference this post has 506 words.) If you feel overwhelmed by all the information that lands in your email and pops up in your social media feed every day, you’re not alone. How often do you quit an article before you finish and move on to the next thing? Sorry, TLDR. (Too long, didn’t read.) As the Nobel-winning economist Herbert Simon predicted back in 1977, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

But surely another factor in our distractibility is that we consume those 34 gigabytes of word-stuff in short bursts across multiple digital devices. When your phone is at arm’s reach and you know that at any moment a seductive alert could notify you of a text, tweet, or coveted thumbs-up on Facebook, it’s hard to find the quiet eye that Wordsworth talks about in “A Poet’s Epitaph,” the sustained observation and musing that can harvest the gifts in the real world around you and within your own mind that lead to a new idea, a deep thought. When I have popcorn brain, it’s hard to hear the soft voice in the cave of my heart.

So, besides loosening the tether between my phone and me, another reason I decided to try a tech Sabbath was to see if stepping away from the wealth of information my devices offer could help restore my quiet eye. I want to build a palace in time that holds a wealth of attention.

How has your ability to pay attention changed in the last ten years?

A Clanging Cymbal

The rumble and buzz of cars

that blots out birdsong

is but one bleating sound

in a constellation of noise,

a devil (if I believed in the devil)-

designed distraction from

the voice in the cave

of my heart

that I do believe in.

So, I will arise and go now,

and go to New Camaldoli

and there a cell of silence seek,

a shady seat beneath

the fruiting fig tree, and

Mother Pacific,

O Father Sky,

a view of blue further than I can see.

Drench me in Your breezy quietude

and remind me in the cooing of the dove

that I am nothing if I have not love.

With appreciation to St. Paul (1 Corinthians 13:1-3) and W.B. Yeats (The Lake Isle of Innisfree)

A collage of sunbeams streaming into the sanctuary at New Camaldoli, a bench on a cliff overlooking the ocean, and a garden

Second Wind

What gets you through adversity? Last spring my friends Kate Aver Avraham and Melody Culver decided to answer that question by gathering diverse voices to share prose, poetry and art that speaks of how we get through 2020, make the most of our changed lives, and move toward a meaningful future. The resulting book, Second Wind, has just been published, and I’m honored that it includes a few of my poems, including this one I began my blog with five years ago. As we face a pandemic and a divided nation, I look forward to finding hope and resilience in this lovely book.

Copies of Second Wind are available at Bookshop Santa Cruz and on Amazon, and all sale profits will go to the Santa Cruz County Community Foundation Covid-19 Relief Fund.

A Map to the Kingdom

Let me draw myself a map

out of the world of scarcity

into the kingdom

where everyone has enough.

The map I’m talking about

requires a subtle yet revolutionary algorithm

to rewrite the neuronal pathways of my brain.

Let my ears hear the soft call to prayer

from the cave of my heart

instead of the 21^st-century symphonic blast

begging me to worship at the altar of the mall

and buy more apps for my iPhone.

The promise of productivity

and the buzz of news and games

want to trick me into believing

they can fill me up and give me purpose.

But no.

Rewire the neurons.

Let me rejoice in the gift of each moment

instead of fretting about what I don’t have time for.

Then I can find the cartographers

who will collaborate with me

in mapping our way to the kingdom of enough.

In that place time is the currency,

and communion is all we want to buy.

What does the kingdom look like? This week I had a chance to share my reflections on the parable of the ten virgins with Deacon Joe DePage of Holy Cross Church.

A Temple in Time

On the winter solstice a few days before I turned fifty, I rose before dawn, smudged with burning sage, and drove to a park overlooking the ocean where I could walk in silence and plan a ritual for my upcoming birthday. Although I didn’t know it then, my musings that morning turned out to be the genesis for this blog.

The sickle of the old moon hung in the eastern sky, and frost glazed the fields. As the sun rose over the hills behind me, I knelt and touched my forehead to the earth “for all my relations.” Two days earlier I’d asked a friend who was turning seventy if she had any words of wisdom to share. “Know yourself and accept who you are,” she answered. Her advice was in my mind as I pulled the hood of my down jacket up over my head and walked towards the ocean.

From the cliff I watched sandpipers on the beach below race away from an oncoming wave, then chase it as it receded, and they reminded me exactly of the frenetic way that I plunge into activities, then rush through them so I can hurtle into the next item on my to-do list. I work fulltime, I commute, and I never have time for everything I want to do: read novels, garden, knit a sweater, hike, cook dinner for friends, listen to my beloved play love songs on the ukulele … Sometimes I also worry about money and being alone in my old age and whether I’m a good enough person, but mostly I’m tormented by a lack of time. Who was I? A person afraid of not having enough.

Yet here I was looking out at the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean in a wide open morning lush with stillness and winter sunlight. The night before, my writing sisters had sent me off into the silence of this sacred world with laying on of hands and blessings, and now the whole day lay before me. How could I really feel that I didn’t have enough?

Then an NPR story I’d recently heard on my way to work suddenly came to mind: about how climate change is making the world’s oceans so acidic that many sea creatures can no longer survive there. I gazed out at the Pacific. From up here it looked peaceful and pure. Further out beyond the shelter of Monterey Bay gray whales were hurrying south to the lagoons of Baja where they would mate and give birth in a few months. This blue ocean that stretched further than my eye could see had always seemed to me like the great mother, the epitome of bounty, yet in her unseen depths the creatures that called her home might be dying.

We actually don’t have enough, I thought. Not enough clean air to keep our climate stable, not enough oil, food, water …

But on the heels of this thought followed a crucial phrase: we don’t have enough if we keep using it as we have been. If we as a species somehow decided to start being good stewards, there would be enough. Maybe not a superabundance, but enough. And what was true of the human population on the planet was true for me in my personal life too. Yes, there are limits. My time in this body is finite, and I can only do so much, but if I recognize my limits and use my time, energy, and money wisely, I have enough, not so much that I can squander it, but enough for what is important.

Is that what this blog is all about? Triage and time management? When I told my sister about “The Kingdom of Enough,” she said, “So it’s about simplifying your life?” Well, yes, I imagine writing about the virtues of thrift and sustainable living, but I also envision more. Life is short, and we live in a crazy, consumer culture that is busy bombarding us with demands and desires, yet in the cave of every heart peace reigns. I want to explore how to touch that grace.

Later on that winter solstice morning, I climbed down to the beach and collected small gray stones polished smooth by the ocean, cradled them in my hand and hoped the years were polishing me in the same way. A little cove offered a meditation spot, and for a long time I sat alone with the sound of the surf and chirping birds. I felt like I was in a temple in time. Yes, constraints exist for me as an embodied creature, but in the life of the spirit there are no clauses or caveats. The soul has all eternity, and the power of love is infinite.

A Map to the Kingdom