soulmailing

Almost makes you blush, doesn’t it? So lush, open, shamelessly lovely. The tulips in my side yard really came into their own today. They seemed to enjoy the warmth of the sun as much as I did. It was a pleasure just to walk by them, which I did several times.

Days like this there is nothing better to do than be in the yard and dig in the dirt. My jeans got stained from kneeling and digging out isolated tufts of grass to make way for an ample spread of mulch. Knocking loose the dirt with my spade felt good, solid hunk in my hand, clods flying every which way. Nothing between me and the soil, just grabbing chunks of it and shaking it loose, no complicated matter at all.

The scent of the fully bloomed magnolia permeated the yard. That and the sun and the irises got me drunk. I didn’t want to be anywhere else.

Two days ago my head was buried. Nothing seemed to come out of it except numbers and plans and worries. All that went into it was data, the complex calculations that I use to try to transform my students’ work into some sort of standardized measure.  It is hard work to be fair and precise and yet open to variation. I woke up the next day exhausted, my head congested with abstractions.

Dirt by contrast is not abstract. Plow your hands into it and it resists. Kneel in it and it clings to you. It is cold and solid and deep, the stuff that holds us up and soaks up rain and fertilizer and dog shit and bears fruit and fragrant flowers that bloom gaudily like can-can girls.

Spend a day in dirt and it scrubs your mind clean of numbers and plans and worries. No wonder dogs love to roll in it.

I recently had the unmitigated delight of hearing Leo Kottke and Bob Seger on consecutive nights, a sort of dream doubleheader for a music disciple like me. Leo played the State Theatre in Kalamazoo, an elegant den of iniquity featuring classical statues and clouds on the ceiling, while Bob rocked Grand Rapids’ Van Andel Arena, which packs 12,000 fans together with the sonic intensity of an airplane hangar.

Together, my totally significant other Andrea and I most willingly let ourselves be taken on the embryonic journey of music, led by these two aging masters of that ever-expanding universe. They took us to parts unknown, new yet familiar landscapes of sound and soul, like diving into a lovely inland lake you haven’t seen for years.

Leo’s journey was crooked, funny and wonderful as always. A Kottke concert, of which I’ve experienced half a dozen, is equal parts jaw-dropping musicianship and droll commentary. He was in rare form on both counts. His guitar playing remains stunningly beautiful from the simplest melodies to the most complex convolutions.

He led us back to his very roots with “Vaseline Machine Gun,” a slide stunner from his landmark second album, “6- and 12-String Guitar.” I first saw him play this on the “Midnight Special” ‘70s TV show. Leo wowed me then with his furious picking and his obvious joy in it. His State Theatre performance, if more staid, was no less joyful.

Ditto for “Last Steam Engine Train,” a lickety-split country-blues romp that Leo said he always credited to his musical godfather, John Fahey. He said Fahey credited it to Sam McGee, but that Chet Atkins said McGee never wrote anything like that. So Leo happily claimed it as his own.

Other tunes were less sunny and more complicated. Leo has a tendency to get lost in layers of rhythm and riff, repeating and reshaping fugue-like motifs until you wonder if he’ll ever find his way out. Just when you think he doesn’t know what he’s doing, he comes out whole and smiling.

It’s as if he’s searching for something through his guitar – a secret passageway to the very heart of melody, rhythm and resonance that beats like a Holy Grail at the end of the cosmos. If he could just find it everything would fall into place.  He takes us with him, exploring the deep mysteries of sound and feeling.    

His vocals, from the buoyant favorite “Rings” to the crowd-pleasing “Pamela Brown,” warmed us up with his deeply resonant and eminently likable voice. He once famously likened his singing to geese farts on  a muggy day — an observation as misleading as it was hilarious.

Speaking of hilarious, he was more so than usual with his rambling tales between songs. The oddity of standing on one’s legs, walking on his hands as a child, the indignity of nicknames: He expounded on these and many other topics much longer than one would think possible. Like his convoluted fugues, you wonder how he’ll ever find his way back out of these stories. Sometimes he seems to wonder the same thing, but laughs along with us, incredulous at his own absurdity.   

It is joy that emanates from Leo’s smile and guitar, as much today as when I first saw him at Michigan State University in 1972 or so. He is no longer baby-faced but is still the happy boy. He seems to realize how blessed he is to make his living by music, the very thing he would love to do most if no one paid him for it.

And it was joy that shone from Bob Seger’s face the moment he hit the stage the following night at Van Andel Arena, greeted by roaring fans like a favorite cousin pulling in the driveway. Pumping his fists and beaming through glasses and grey hair, Seger was our Michigan boy, still rocking hard and running against the wind after all these years.

As captured by my bandmate and colleague John Sinkevics’ excellent review on mlive.com, Seger seemed very much at home among us, as well he should. The love palpably passed between us as Seger belted out “Hollywood Nights” and “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,” and passionately crooned “Beautiful Loser” and “We’ve Got Tonight.”

For all his hardcore Detroit-rock cred, Seger is the sweetest rock star you’ll ever see. The sweetness this night was about seeing a man with an aging body but still-powerful voice, giving his all for more than two hours for fans who have weathered much themselves in this hardest hit of recession states. When Kid Rock joined him for “Real Mean Bottle,” the bedlam buried the needle.

Two men who love to make music, two people who love to hear them, two nights of unmitigated joy. Not a bad way to start April.

While I was growing up in a rural mid-Michigan town, we owned a dog who embodied boundless energy. Annie was her name. She was a beautiful English setter. Translation: She could not wait to run wild.

As soon as I let her out of her hay-filled pen in the barn, she took off like a rocket. Literally. Annie was a white blur careening around our square acre of apple and cherry trees. She ran like the wind; no, she ran like a hurricane.

Never have you seen such joy in the mere act of running.

After running many laps around in the property in her whirlwind of ecstasy, Annie would come in the house, where she would proceed to run around again. I mean, it was so much fun, how could she not? The house was just another steeplechase to her, with furniture providing interesting obstacles to dodge.

Finally she would come to a halt, claiming some few square feet of rug on which to lie for the next hour or two. There she would watch us for awhile, alert to any new chance of burning off energy that might arise. Finding none, she fell asleep, often twitching and whimpering at some inner dream of running around an endless acreage of fruit trees, squirrels and furniture.

Sounds like my typical day.

Often I find I do not fully relax until forced to do so by sheer exhaustion. If I run around long enough out there in the great wide world, doing doing doing until I can do no more, I finally come inside, plop down in the recliner and read (or, in that magic time of year, watch the Tigers). What else can you do when you have run yourself ragged?

Even then, my thoughts continue to tug. They yank and yank on me as if Annie were on the far end of a leash. Come on, come on! she tugs. There’s more stuff to do out here! Don’t you see that other dog down the street? We’ve got to go check this out!

Alas, it seems there is always more to do. Always something else tugging at my attention, beckoning me to see something else or at least think something new. A new way to solve a problem. Another aspect I had not considered. Another opportunity to do things in a better way so that I can then really relax.

Generally speaking, this leash-tugging thing is an illusion.

Sometimes it’s true that if I get up and do something else, I will solve a problem in a way that allows me to then really relax. As Sir Paul put it, it’s me fixing a hole where the rain gets in and stops my mind from wandering where it will go.  

But usually not. Usually it’s just doing one thing more, to be followed by yet more ideas as to how I could have done that better, or how I could now do something else better.

If I think of my life as a river, it’s just me swimming harder with the current. And the point of that is? I maybe move downstream at a somewhat faster pace. But I would get there anyway if I just let the river carry me.

It’s like rushing from one stoplight to the next. You’re in a hurry so you gun it, hoping to beat the next light. But nope, there you are, idling for one minute, and next to you is the guy you thought you’d left in your tracks. He got there just like you did but at half the speed.

I once had a powerful dream about a river. People were carrying baskets to it. My dad was one of them. The details are fuzzy at this point because this dream was many years ago. But at some point my dad and these other people were putting baskets in the river. In the basket that dad put in the river was me, as a child.

It makes so much more sense to submit to the flow of the river rather than obey the tug of the leash. Dear Annie, bless her heart that has long since stopped beating, she had no patience. She just had to run around, see what’s out there. Burned off enough of her boundless energy to finally come to rest for awhile, only to dream of running around some more.

That’s the way an English setter should be. Annie was being true to her nature.

But it’s not such a great way for people to be. Enough of those tearing-around days and I am utterly exhausted. Yet still the leash tugs at me. There must be something else to do, something more to think about.

Of course there is. There always is. But there’s no need to chase after it. The river will carry me there soon enough.

my cat Abbey, center of calm

Henry David Thoreau sometimes spent whole mornings doing nothing but sitting in his doorway gazing at the trees while the birds sang and flitted through his house. He called this “the bloom of the present moment” and considered it more important than any work he could have spent that time doing.

I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.

This choice passage from “Walden” gently rebukes the American mindset, which values doing over being. Spend a whole morning just sitting there? That’s great if you’re up at the cabin for the weekend, but who has time for that in normal life? If I’m going to just sit there, I can at least spend it scanning the Web or watching “The Office.”

But the Walden passage is one of many ways Jon Kabat-Zinn urges us to just sit there in his 1994 ode to mindfulness, “Wherever You Go There You Are.” It is worth visiting or revisiting this slim volume for even a few minutes each day, if that’s all you can spare. Kabat-Zinn makes it worth your brief while with gentle rebukes to the illusion that only by doing things can you get anywhere.

What we frequently call formal meditation involves purposefully making a time for stopping all outward activity and cultivating stillness, with no agenda other than being fully present in each moment … Perhaps such moments of non-doing are the greatest gift one can give oneself.

In this little lull we call the New Year it is tempting to commit to various things to do over the next few hundred days. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But neither is there anything wrong with a firmer resolve to do nothing for at least brief portions of the day.

For many years I was a fairly faithful meditator, if you call 20 minutes a day faithful. I still meditate daily but not in the way I was taught in the mid-‘70s by a Transcendental Meditation instructor swathed all in white who gave me my secret mantra and a flower.

I’ll testify to TM’s benefits anyday, its critics notwithstanding. I once spent a week in Fairfield, Iowa, home of Maharishi University of Management and epicenter of TM consciousness in America. Believe me, these people are mellow. And daily practice of TM or any other form of meditation mellows the mind with a kind of waking restfulness (and more restful sleep).

But lately I meditate by reading before the day gets moving and my mind gets going. Granted, this is once removed from true meditation, since reading qualifies as doing. Yet in the mere act of focusing my attention on someone else’s thoughts I find a blessed calm not available elsewhere most days.

I also find my cat, Abbey, often sitting on my lap during this meditative reading ritual. To simply gaze on her dozing there, her plush coat rising and falling as she breathes in and out, calms me wonderfully. To watch her simply be invites me to do the same.

Sometimes it takes a cat to raise a man. The guilt of not doing something can be extreme. What the Buddhists call the monkey-mind quickly gets antsy. “Come on, time to get on with it!” the monkey insists, impatiently drumming its fingers. But this is getting on with it, Abbey gently rebukes me. In fact this is it itself: just sitting, just being, doing nothing.

It is not time subtracted from life, as Thoreau put it. It is life itself, briefly pausing to appreciate the wonder of a sacred moment.

“What the world needs now is love, sweet love. That’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.”

No one sang it better than Jackie DeShannon back in 1965. Her hauntingly lilting hit was written by the world-beating songwriting team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. You’ve got to forgive the stranded preposition of a line that so eloquently sums up our eternal love deficit. The world needed love then and needs it now, “No, not just for some, but for everyone.”

What the world most decidedly does not need now is another blog. And yet info-culture seems to have an undying craving for words in motion. Friends and associates keep telling me, “You need to have a blog.” But I already have a cat, I protest. No matter; a huge open journal covers our land, a public diary with no lock. Apparently it’s time to add my entry to the swirling narrative.

I submit mine as soul mail – dispatches delivered from a life spent writing about what others think and do. They reflect 30-plus years of newspaper reporting, 15 of them covering religion, the most hazardous and fascinating of beats. From this comfortable corner of the world in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I have had the privilege of writing about the meaning of life for The Grand Rapids Press. I never run out of material.

I have done my best to capture fleeting spiritual insights while writing about missionaries ducking bullets in Sierra Leone, faith-fueled activists fighting wage theft and the tribulations of The New Pornographers and Calvin College. The man wailing out his demons in a Pentecostal service and the nun who gave up a dancing career both have something spiritual to offer. Perhaps in telling their stories, I do as well.

Jackie DeShannon’s story is quintessentially American – a powerhouse singer and songwriter born in humble Hazel, Kentucky, a tiny burg in the state’s tobacco-covered western tip. While living in nearby Murray I often passed through Hazel on my way to hear music and drink legal beer in Paris, Tenn. You could buy antiques in Hazel, but you’d never expect to uncover a pioneering pop star.

That’s  what DeShannon became by force of her considerable will, her songwriting skill (some 700 songs including the fabled “Bette Davis Eyes”) and her affecting voice. You can still feel the love of that voice when you check out her vintage performance of “What the World Needs Now” on Shindig. The arhythmic finger-snapping is a bit bizarre, but the plaid skirt, tumbling ponytail and unironic idealism are pure sweet Sixties.

So is the let’s-all-save-the-world spirit of her 1969 mega-hit, “Put a Little Love in Your Heart.”  Its unapologetically naive opening line, “Think of your fellow man, lend him a helping hand,”  sounds heartbreakingly cheesy in post-idealized Palinized America. All the more reason to hum along.

After all, we’re in the midst of a season that’s all about love and child-like wonder. Our eyes still mist over when Linus quotes the angels’ save-the-world lines to cowering shepherds, “on Earth peace, goodwill toward men.” Surely we can make room in our hearts for “Lord, we don’t need another meadow … Oh listen Lord, if you want to know: what the world needs now is love.”

It was true then and it’s true now. Feel it, own it, celebrate it. Maybe even lend a helping hand.