Waiting for Epiphany
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/05/2016 - 21:46Again, I sit down to write after a long day. There are a lot of directions I’d like to go with this. I’d like to write my reflections on the daily mediations I read today, reflecting on God’s self-disclosure to us as a lover reveals himself to his beloved. The idea of scripture as God’s love letter to us.
I think about this, as I get in the car, listening to some poetry put to music. I would like to write about the poetry I’m listening to, that I’m reading, and how it fits into my daily life and disciplines. There are a couple blog posts that this could create. In between thoughts about God’s self-disclosure and the poetry I’m reading, I think about the tasks of the day. I’ll spare the details, but it leads back nicely to my thoughts about continuous partial discernment. How does the daily commute, the thoughts about work, the poetry, the daily meditations, and all that I see as I drive each day fit together.
Wednesday is Epiphany. I love that word. It reminds me of Denise Levertov’s poems. I try to find the poem, I think it was “Chekhov on West Heath”, and I stumble across a blog post from ten years ago. Happy Epiphany!
Now, ten years later, I’m waiting for Epiphany. According to the liturgical calendar, it is tomorrow, but I’m thinking about this as a year of epiphanies, a year of living prayerfully, or perhaps a year of praying dangerously, I’m not sure which.
At the end of the day
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/04/2016 - 21:28“At the end of the day you’re another day older”
The lyrics from Les Mis come to mind at the end of this day. I’ve started using Workflowy to try and organize all the material that comes at me in a day. It is an interesting experiment. At the end of the say, I have over twenty tabs open in my browser. I sent about two dozen emails at work, have about fifty unread emails from today, but did manage to clear out about 250 work emails.
There are also 42 new unread personal emails. Since I was at work for most of the day, I only got a chance to write one outgoing personal email.
There are about 100 items in my RSS reader. I’m currently using the Digg reader.
There continues to be more coming at me than I have time to process. Can I use Workflowy to organize things so I get a higher percentage of the information coming at me processed? Can I use it so that I manage to read the most important stuff?
I’ll try to clean things up as much as I can this evening. Get some personal reading done, and get some sleep. Then, I’ll monitor to see if any tools or techniques can really help manage the flow of information.
What are you Seeking?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 01/03/2016 - 19:40Today’s Daily Meditation from Richard Rohr is What You Seek Is What You Are.
Only when we are eager to love can we see love and goodness in the world around us. We must ourselves remain in peace, and then we will find peace over there. Remain in beauty, and we will honor beauty everywhere.
I guess this is something similar to, you are what you eat. I’ve written about this in the past, Does Facebook Make You Sad? It does seem like these days people seek conflict online.
Google’s US Trends for 2015 says a lot. Paris Under Attack. Adele’s Year. The Oscars. Caitlin Jenner. The 2016 Elections. This is what we searched for in the United States. It is similar in other countries, with Cricket or the Tour de France showing up as top topics.
This evening on Twitter, #OregonUnderAttack has been a hot topic as everyone puts their political spin on the events there.
I’ve tried to keep my focus elsewhere. The Society of Saint John the Evangelist’s word for the day is Rejoice, and they link to a post, Remembering Joy. That post talks about Ecclesia Ministries seeking ‘to take the gifts of church out to people who, for whatever reason, cannot come inside to receive them”.
Part of my focus is poetry. The poem for the day is Carl Sandberg’s The Answer. This poem captures some of what we seek.
My daughter Miranda shared a link to Adrienne Rich on Creative Process, Love, Loss, and Public vs. Private Happiness. I listened to a couple poems by Adrienne Rich on YouTube: What Kind of Times Are These and North American Time.
What are you seeking?
Resolutions
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/02/2016 - 22:24Today was a quiet day with a bit of reading and writing. I still ended up with over a dozen tabs open in my browser at the end of the day, and I’m seeking better ways to organize my thoughts as well as my reading.
Several things I read today were about keeping New Year’s resolutions. Lifehacker had Top 10 Strategies for Making Your New Year's Resolution Stick. Underlying much of their suggestions is SMART criteria: Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant and Timebound.
I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with ‘SMART’. Are the goals that matter measurable? How do you measure awareness of God's presence? How does time-bound and achievable relate to the coming of God's kingdom? I often talk of about the goal of living each day more fully and more lovingly than the previous.
On Facebook, people talked about maintaining focus which promoted a discussion about the The Pomodoro Technique®. I must admit, I’m always a bit skeptical of any technique that has a registered trademark. One link to help people with this was My Tomatoes.
Another tool that people mentioned was Workflowy. I’ve started using this for note taking, building to do lists and tracking links. It has an ability to share lists. I’ve set up a Sample Shared List. I can imagine using this for Rhizome like activities, book study groups, etc.
I used Workflowy to gather my thoughts for this blog post, and figure I’ll keep experimenting with it, at least for a little while.
In the Episcopalians on Facebook group, Daniel Pigg posted an interesting thought about Nine Ladies dancing and relating it to Perichoresis and the dance between the persons of the Trinity. It fit nicely with the chapter of People of the Way by Dwight J. Zschieile about sharing communion. As I thought about this, I wondered about our shared communities online. I am particularly struck by this in terms of various daily devotions online, few of which seem to have much community around them.
What I’m Thinking 1/2/2016
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/02/2016 - 13:39Last January, I wrote several blog posts about what I was thinking. They fit with some of my current thoughts about Shaping Ava, Continuous Partial Discernment, and The Rhizome - Perhaps 2016.
So, here are things that I’ve been looking at over the past day, part of the rhizome, part of shaping Ava, as part of my journey. One friend on Facebook posted something which seems to me to follow a similar line of thought about trying to be more focused for 2016 and looking for tips. I responded, in part:
Write something every day. Do it digitally. Have a few things that you can fall back on. What did you read online that caught your attention? (If there are a few things, how are they related?) What was the most beautiful thing you saw today? What kind act or compassion did you experience, either as giver, receiver, or observer?
Try to connect with others making similar goals. If you post something on Facebook that I see on this line, I will try to respond. Try to find others to respond to in the same manner.
So, here are a few things that caught my attention. Somehow, I stumbled across the Spiritual Formation in the Episcopal Diocese of Western MA Facebook page. This led to their blog, Sharing the Season in the Episcopal Diocese of Western MA Reflections on Advent and Christmas.
One of the posts was about Barbara Crafton speaking at St. Francis Church in Holden, MA on January 27th. Another was about the possibility of a book study group around Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus. The Facebook page, the blog, and the book are on my reading list.
Also from Western Mass I found a link to The Awakening Conference. It is scheduled for April 28-May 1st in Holyoke. It looks interesting, but probably isn’t for me.
Someone, I suspect from an Episcopalian group on Facebook, shared a link to Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation. I’ll add these to my list of daily meditations.
Someone else mentioned Marcus Borg, another writer to explore. One final link for today is BEST OF RNS: Coloring books for grown-ups: A spiritual practice?
As an aside, I started looking at various daily meditations and poems I receive. I looked to see if I could organize them into a good RSS feed. Unfortunately, some of them are available only as emails. During my search I got back to my old RSS feeds, which I’ve used various tools to manage. Right now, I’m thinking I’ll use Digg’s RSS reader, and I’ve added a few new daily mediation blogs there.
Another blog I stumbled across over the past day or two is Between the By-Road and the Main Road. It has a tag line, “Exploring the intersections between art and learning”, and the most recent post includes Billy Collins poem “Forgetfulness”
For other daily reading, there is Poem A Day from Poets.Org and a word of the day email I get from The Society of Saint John the Evangelist.
