On Being Blog
This morning we’ll do the “final” listen to our program with Eckhart Tolle, which goes out to stations around the country and live on our web site next week on August 14th. It’s not final really, but it’s the last listen to the program in draft form, and it’s where a lot of fine tuning and fussy tweaking occurs.
At this stage in the process, we’ve been neck deep in the work for a little while, and we begin to use a sort of lingua franca based on the material — words and phrases from the guest or their writing populate our speech, to serious and comic effect.
With the Niebuhr show, one of our favorites was, “I am my own most vexing problem,” intoned with overdone gravitas. It’s a twist on Niebuhr’s famous dictum: “Man is his own most vexing problem.”
This week, we are making casual diagnoses of our pain bodies, and sharing earnest stories about how focusing on the now in normally stressful situations really works!
There are some great moments in this program with Eckhart Tolle, and this sample of the interview will give you a feel for it.
What are the catch phrases or terms you find yourself quoting most from Tolle’s work? Has his work or his books had an impact on your stress level?
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Last week I took a microphone to a “singing” that happens regularly at the University Baptist Church in Minneapolis, where a group gathers to sing four-part a cappella spirituals from a book called The Sacred Harp. We’ve had several listeners over the past few months write in to suggest producing a show about this folk singing tradition (and we have been looking for a music show). Developed in the southern United States in the late 19th century, it’s called Sacred Harp singing, after the title of its song book, and there are now groups all over the country who meet weekly to sit in a square and sing together.
The sound clip here is of the University of Minnesota Student Singing last week. Each singing begins with an hour of song, followed by brief announcements and a short break, then another hour of song. Any of the participants can propose a song, stand in the middle of the hollow square (the name for the square sitting formation), and direct the rhythm. There is no official leader. The first thing you’ll hear on this recording is preparation for the song: a woman announces the number, 455. You can hear silence as people find the page. A bus goes by outside. Then they begin to tune, deciding where the pitch of the song should be. They raise the pitch. They sing the first chord together, then the whole song once through on the syllables fa, sol, la, mi. Then, finally, they sing the song once through on the words, “I want a sober mind, an all sustaining eye.” After the song is over the next song is proposed, and they begin again (though, as you’ll hear, there is no rule against a joke in between).
I am fascinated by this tradition, in part because of its unusual musical notation, which you can see in the image above. More deeply moving, however, is the enthusiasm these songs inspire in the singers and the communities that grow up around the songs. Small groups are proliferating all over the country. The Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association lists singings in 35 states. From Hoboken, Georgia, where there is a group of singers (mostly family, mostly Baptist) who have been singing together for so long that they don’t know how long, to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where the singing takes place above a bar, people in many parts of the United States are finding connections across the hollow square.
I am moved by the joy and kindness these people demonstrate to each other, and I am excited about one woman’s project to arrange Leonard Cohen for her Sacred Harp group. Maybe there, some day, we’ll find our music show.
—Bill Gates, from a recent piece in TIME about “creative capitalism,” no doubt inspired by our program this week.
Shortly before heading out of town for my first vacation in nearly five years, I was able to squeak in some action from behind the glass. I shot this clip of Krista (from Studio P in St. Paul) conducting a remote interview with Jonathan Greenblatt (from APM’s studios in L.A.).
More often than not, a guest’s response to Krista’s opening question about his/her religious and family background makes for good listening. And, more often than not, that part of the interview doesn’t make it into the final production for the radio or podcast. I used to lobby for including these preambles, but now I see the wisdom of cutting most of these stories. The show’s narrative arc wouldn’t hold up because we’d have to cut another interesting section.
Nevertheless, we have a blog now; we release Krista’s interviews in their entirety for you to download. But, this time, I thought Greenblatt’s description of how his grandparents’ flight from Nazi Germany informs his sense of service today was worth isolating.
Even after five years here, I find these long-distance interviews utterly fascinating. Do you like these SoundSeen videos from behind the glass? Are they worth your while?
If you didn’t know it, each member on our staff, including Krista, pretty much reads every piece of e-mail that’s sent to our inbox. And we receive a healthy amount of correspondence! But we’re also aware that there are many more conversations and responses to our show taking place in the greater online world, especially in blogs and social networking forums.
I thoroughly enjoy reading the increasing number of blog posts and articles about SOF, and commenting on others’ sites. Sometimes they’re simple observations or recommendations about a particular show, or entries that gave us new insights and ideas for future shows, as well as feedback on our productions. With a little link love, I thought I’d point out a few:
In her blog, Experiments in Physical Chemistry, Dawn Dennison wrote a gritty post about the power of play in her own life. She has a wonderful sense of the importance of play, and some good humor to boot:
I am often scraped and bruised and dirty, but I never think I’m too old to be falling down as much as I do. I fall down hard at least once every week. I’m always happy that I usually jump right up continue the ride. Mostly, though, I’m happy that I’m still doing things that occasionally make me hurt myself. I think an interesting survey would be to ask people in their 30’s and 40’s “When was the last time you fell down while playing?”
Tennis with your wii doesn’t count.
The blogger known as Life Junkie wrestles with issues of reconciling faith and science so that they complement one another:
Most religious people I’ve heard have to suspend rational thought when they talk about their faith but John Polkinghorne didn’t do that. Speaking of Faith is a great show and I’m enjoying exploring the faiths of others and broadening my limited Catholic-influenced perspective.
Sometimes the comments section of a post are as interesting as the post itself. I found this to be the case on Kenneth Kemps’ LeaderFocus Weblog:
After a recebt week of “light saber sword fights” and “gang tackle football” with four energetic kids aged 8, 6, 4, and 2, it’s taking a while for this old body to recuperate but every ache brings a smile.
(and)
Can’t wait to show this to my wife :-). Wonder if my bosses will buy it?
As I read more, I’ll highlight other entries and hopefully you’ll find some of them relevant to your own lives. Man, there are some keen observers out there.
The picture above, taken with my iPhone, is the view from my desk on a rainy day. The flowers in the vase are fake, the vase itself a left-over from Mitch Hanley’s wedding, the artifacts hard to make out on the shelf include an amethyst and a piece of old tile from a town on the Croatian coast called Opatija; one of the pictures too backlit to make out is a photo of Albert Einstein with Rabindranath Tagore.
I took this photo of the view I see before me even as I type (though it is brilliantly sunny today) to remind me of something. The something is, to wake up to what is before me; to not become inured by habit into thinking any moment of my day need necessarily resemble the previous moment; to remind me to throw off the routinization to which I am so prone, and in which I take equal amounts of dread and comfort.
Being alive to the present moment, which Ram Dass gave us decades ago as the injunction to Be Here Now isn’t a new idea, but it’s back in a big way and it has a massive new audience because of the work of Eckhart Tolle, whom Krista interviewed recently, in a warm and wide-ranging 90-minute conversation we are about to produce into an episode of Speaking of Faith that will be distributed on August 14th.
It’s a change up for us to interview someone so much in the limelight of popular culture as Tolle, thanks to the exposure of his new book A New Earth in Oprah’s Book Club and in several web seminars with Oprah. Normally, to be honest, we seek out people who are somewhat under the radar, whom we feel a duty to bring to public attention, given the significance of their story, their thought, their work. People like V.V. Raman and Ingrid Jordt, who may never become household names but have incredible intellectual and spiritual wealth to share. We also do interview big names: Jimmy Carter, Elie Wiesel, Rick Warren, Barbara Kingsolver all come to mind.
In this case, as Krista and other staff members sank into his work, we felt it was an opportunity to explore the mind of a genuine spiritual teacher and philosopher who is having an unprecedented experience of celebrity, to hear the story of his own spiritual development, and the effect of his unexpected fame. We found this understated man to be fun and warm, and we’re excited to offer up our very particular conversation with him. I’m reminded in the conversation with Tolle of our recent conversation with Kevin Griffin, who says in that program on spirituality and addiction that after all there is nothing difficult about being mindful except remembering to be mindful. That’s the hard part. And, to complete the circle, I love this nugget from Ram Dass which is cited by Tolle: “If you think you’re so enlightened, go spend a week with your parents.”
Stay tuned for our delightful program with this thinker, philosopher, and teacher.
Our rebroadcast of ”Play, Spirit, and Character” allows me a natural entry point into sharing the incredible and unforeseen paths this program has taken over the past year. It also reminds me how important it is to get out, attend events, and experience what other people are imbibing. Doing this is one of the best ways of finding interesting program topics that are truly relevant in one’s daily life.
Over the past year, this program has resulted in a strange and wonderful lifecycle, which I’ll quickly recount with bullet points:
- I attend the 2007 PUSH Conference at the Walker Art Center and hear Stuart Brown speak, then
- Hearing the audience response to Stuart Brown’s presentation, I recount my experience while speaking with Krista and the staff. Krista says book him, then
- Krista interviews Dr. Brown. The conversation takes a rather serious tone to begin and rather dark by discussing mass murderers. We question whether it would make an interesting hour of radio since the conversation lacked the levity and playfulness we expected when thinking about a show on play, then
- Mitch collects compelling audio of kids swimming, dogs frolicking, and immigrants playing softball that illustrate points made. A show is produced, then
- I contact National Geographic photographer Norbert Rosing and pair his images with Stuart Brown’s talk to produce a brief narrated slide show. Digg.com and other social sites pick up “Animals at Play”resulting in more than three million views on speakingoffaith.org and 125,000 views on YouTube and Vimeo, then
- We partner with USC’s Annenberg School of Communications and the News21 Initiative to present a student’s production of young adults swinging on the rings in Santa Monica, then
- I get a call from a documentary producer at the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) asking about the popularity of the polar bear/sled dog video for their documentary on polar bear fever, then
- Photographer Norbert Rosing phones to tell me the traffic to his site has more than tripled and that he’s moved his polar bear photography books and photos to the home page because they are selling so quickly, then
- An editor from a London tabloid paper e-mails asking for the original scans of the polar bear/sled dog images for a feature piece, then
- Paul Holdengraber from the New York Public Library on 42nd Street invites Krista and Stuart Brown to be part of their NYPL Live! series. The evening results in a sold-out house, then
- The following week The New York Times Magazine’s cover features an in-depth piece, “Taking Play Seriously,” keying off of the event and Stuart Brown.
I attended an “ideas” conference with the thought that I would learn a little something new and meet a few people in the process; I had no intention of doing research for future SOF shows. That is, until I heard gasps of awe from the crowd during Stuart Brown’s presentation of polar bears and sled dogs playing in the wilds of Canada, and passionate discussion about raising kids with a sense of play and bringing that same sense of lightheartedness to work.
The journalist in me kicked in; I’m supposed to act on behalf of you, of those who can’t attend such events and share that information. Some of my colleagues were skeptical about the conference. They professed that the connection of ideas was nothing new or groundbreaking — but that wasn’t the point.
We work in a rich media environment in which we’re constantly bumping into other areas of discipline and making those connections. I get the privilege of actually sitting next to folks who work on documentaries, epicureans who write cookbooks and produce wonderful food shows, classical musicians and new media gurus, investigative journalists, and so on. Oh, and MPR brings in fabulous speakers like critic Terry Teachout, former CNN anchor Aaron Brown, classical musicians Trio Medieaval, and Ray Suarez to speak to us when they’re in town.
Most people don’t experience this panoply of big ideas on a daily basis; they work in very specialized industries making the numbers work and the products better. They may love their jobs, but they thirst for greater understanding and to simply play at the idea of an interconnected world of seemingly disparate ideas. I believe we did that with this show, and it makes me proud.
Last week as I was fleshing out the particulars for our program “Recovering Chinese Religiosities,” I stumbled upon an interesting article about a discovery that the director of the Harvard Yenching Institute referred to as “like the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.” In 1993, Chinese archeologists uncovered several bamboo strips near Guodian, China. Those strips were found to contain what is thought to be the oldest written version of the Tao Te Ching, as well as many writings from supposed Confucian disciples. The texts are said to have challenged many previous assumptions about both Taoist and Confucian history:
For years scholars believed that Confucians were little concerned with human emotions. But in the Guodian texts, the element “xin,” — a pictographic image of the human heart — appears over and over again as part of several Chinese characters. It’s a startling display, both philologically, in terms of understanding the evolution of Chinese characters, and philosophically. “These texts conclusively show that emotions or feelings as we understand them today were major philosophical concerns,” Tu says. The Guodian texts offer detailed descriptions of a range of human emotions. They also extensively explore the relation between heart, mind, and human nature; between the inner self and the outer world; and whether human nature is good or evil — a cumulative emphasis on the inner dimensions of man that most scholars formerly believed came much later in Chinese intellectual history.
Continuing the lesson we learned from our program with David Treuer, here’s another example of how meaning is often tied to language — the deeper symbolic meaning of the pictographic heart is lost when the text is translated to English. I was also struck by the fact that, while the linguistic elements of this story are specific to Chinese culture, it also displays how the metaphorical relationship between the human heart and emotion seems to be a cross-cultural one.
I can’t help but wonder: What exactly is it about our own biological blood pumps that seem to inspire so much symbolism and meaning?
This sentence in The New York Times yesterday nearly made me choke on my organic lettuce (purchased at the coop):
“The highest form of luxury is now growing it yourself or paying other people to grow it for you,” said Corby Kummer, the food columnist and book author. “This has become fashion.”
One of the gifts of perspective that Barbara Kingsolver offered me in our conversation is in seeing that the way most of us eat now — the cheap and easy habits we’ve come to take for granted in a handful of generations — are elite in the extreme. Once upon a time not so long ago, lettuce for salad in October was a party trick for the very, very rich. What Kingsolver’s family did for a year — living off what they could grow and raise on the land around them — is still the way most human beings have lived forever and many in the world still do. We’re collectively, it seems, in the midst of a culinary and dietary version of “remembering forward.”
And I’m happy to learn — also via the New York Times, such is the world we inhabit — that our dear public radio friends and colleagues down the hall at The Splendid Table are coming to the rescue. Lynne Rosetto Kasper and Sally Swift have commissioned 15 people in various regions across the country to prepare food 80% locally for a year — and to chronicle just what that takes, just how humanly possible or impossible that may be in a spectrum of contemporary lives. At their Locavaore Nation site, you can follow their adventure for yourself.
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