Mono No Aware (one post of many)

 I think this happens to all of us, but today my brain through a series of unconnected thoughts went from a Threads post asking what the reader's favorite A24 movie is to a memory that took place last year that hurts my heart every time I think about it. But then I realized that the first thought and the last thought actually were connected.

My favorite A24 movie is of course After Yang. It's my second favorite movie of all time. I haven't really talked about it on my blog but if you're a Facebook friend of mine, you're probably tired of hearing about it. Have you seen it though? No? Well I'm gonna keep bugging you to watch it.

Anyway, I knew that I had a picture of the poster for After Yang on my phone so I started scrolling to find it. As I scrolled, I saw a poster for a Netflix show that I started watching but never finished. But I used to listen to the soundtrack all the time, because the composer of the Netflix show Beyond Goodbye is the composer of the After Yang soundtrack. Her name is Aska Matsumiya, and she's fantastic. I love finding new composers and have discovered several again this year.

I stopped listening to the soundtrack because it made me too sad. It's not because of the show itself, although it is a sad show about a woman who marries a man who dies tragically and meets someone else who reminds her of him.

It's because of a memory tied to the first song on the soundtrack.

I'm a dreamer. I'm someone who closes his eyes and can imagine an entire movie plot. I actually spend hours doing this. At first I was kind of embarrassed about it because it felt like something you should give up as a kid. Daydreaming, pretending to be someone you aren't. But now I don't care. I do it all the time.

(There are studies that show that engaging your brain in this way is a good way to keep dementia and Alzheimer's away for longer than you might develop them if you don't.)

Sometimes when I'm experiencing something, a song from a soundtrack comes to my mind, and from that point on I connect the two always.

That's the case with this first song. I feed a lot of stray cats in the town I work in. A lot of stray cats. And lately I've been getting in trouble with the city over it. The city manager believes that no one should feed the stray cats and so he's sending out the police force to prevent us from doing so. 

It's not working. Yeah, I had to go to court over it because of what I have realized was a "sting operation" to catch me in the act of feeding the cats. Funny, huh? But there are three or four of us that still feed the cats.

It's very rewarding. And extremely heartbreaking. You'll develop a bond with one of the cats and then they disappear and you have no idea what happened to them.

Enter Georgie. Georgie was a little kitten when I met him. Immediately I fell in love with him. Most feral cats are very shy and won't let people hold them or pet them. Not Georgie. He would run up to me and want to be picked up and he would give these silent meows that were just adorable. He was my buddy. Loved that boy to death. The first song - it's called "The First Time" - is a playful, joyful, sweet romp of music. Just like Georgie. A sweet boy, full of joy, full of life.

And then one day I found him dead in the road. He had been run over sometime from when I saw him the day before to when I discovered him that morning. And I broke down. And I cried. And I took off my hoodie and picked up his lifeless body and placed him in it and laid him down under a tree and then came back after work knowing that a father/daughter duo who also fed the cats would be there and he always has a shovel in his van and we buried Georgie.

And that first song of the soundtrack - well I just can't listen to it. In fact, I haven't listened to it in ten months. Until today. Because today felt the right time to listen again. And it hurt. And it healed.

I still see Georgie's sister (although she may be his brother, I don't know). And I see Georgie's mom. I pick up Georgie's sister (I never named her, I stopped naming the cats because it makes it hurt more when they are gone) and give her kisses and she isn't exactly like Georgie affection wise but she knows I'm her person. So does Morpheus. And Mama. And Sweetie. And Sable, oh sweet Sable who keeps having babies that don't last long (although we finally got her fixed). 

After Yang is about many things. Memories, family, what it means to be human, etc. But it also introduced me to the Japanese concept of "mono no aware". There are many definitions for this concept, but basically it's this: the sadness at and the acceptance of the impermanence of life.

As a culture (although I would argue that America has so many splits in culture and politics, that we don't really have a shared culture anymore), we don't like thinking about death. About things fading away. Cats disappearing. But here's the thing: when we face the truth that nothing lasts forever, that even things we love the most aren't going to be around much longer, what it should do for us is make this life; those things; that cat...even more precious. And if we have a proper view on what we love, on what brings us joy - then we should never take them for granted.

There's an incredible book I listen to at least once a year called This Life by Martin Haggland. His whole premise is that if there is an eternity, if things last forever, then they are meaningless. It's the fragility of the things we love that create in us the ability to cherish them even more.

And when we live life in a "mono no aware" mindset, we will treat this exact moment with the people in our lives we love, the things that give us joy, as if it may be the last time we see them, experience them, love them.

And sometimes it is the last time we experience them.

So I pick up Georgie's sister everyday and give her a couple of kisses as I take her to where I feed all the cats. I attempt to act every second of every day as if it may be the last. And I fail. A lot. But I'm trying.

Most everyone knows the following Mary Oliver quote:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

But. As one person wisely observed:

Just a reminder that Mary Oliver's own answer to her question was to stroll idly through the fields noticing things. The question out of context could appear to be about achieving more.

It's not.

Notice.

Observe.

Treat everything as if it may be the last time you experience them.

Because it may very well be.

Forgiveness

 I've been trying to write a poem a day to get my creative juices flowing. I haven't really talked about it much, but I'm in the process of researching for some steampunk novels I'm going to write. I'll talk about it more in a later post and it's something I'll keep updating in case someone here wants to eventually read them.

But for now, I've been writing poems and I've also been reading poems (my post last month about the poem "She Had Some Horses" is an example). And just like most of the time in life, when you start observing something, the universe brings it to you in spades. 

One of my favorite websites is The Marginalian, and when I opened it today, of course there was a poem that Maria Popova wrote on Forgiveness. And of course she put it to music and had her friend Nick Cave read it.

That's the universe, man. It will mess with ya.

Enjoy!

Forgiveness

(Here's the text of the poem)

FORGIVENESS
by Maria Popova

May the tide
never tire of its tender toil
how over and over
it forgives the Moon
the daily exile
and returns to turn
mountains into sand
         as if to say,
you too can have
this homecoming
you too possess
this elemental power
of turning
the stone in the heart
into golden dust.

Glen Hansard

 I've always been a voracious reader.

I listen to books more than I read them these days. The responsibilities of my job are such that I can listen to podcasts and audiobooks all day long. It's one of the joys of my job, which sometimes can be few and far between.

When I was in high school, I had a one hour a day reading class, and the first class I did not understand the assignment. I've always been a fast reader and I also back then had a near perfect photographic memory, so I devoured books. Well the first week of class you read and based on how many words you read, was the amount you had to read for the whole semester. And I read a lot that first week. So that class actually became one of my hardest classes, because I had to read so many books that semester. I was reading War and Peace and Centennial and Shogun and every Stephen King book my mom had just to make it by the end.

This will lead to Glen Hansard. Don't worry.

There are some books that you end up loving so much that you read them over and over and they never get old. 

When I was young, that book was Where The Red Fern Grows.

When I was in high school, there was a fantasy trilogy by Patricia McKillip called The Riddlemaster Trilogy. I still read (now listen to) that book at least once every year.

And when I was in ministry, the book I read more than any other was a little known book called The Wind In The Wheat.

(In the below picture, you can see that it is still on my bookshelf, along with Where The Red Fern Grows on the far right, hidden by the photograph)

The author of The Wind In The Wheat is Reed Arvin, who played piano and produced several of the musical projects of Rich Mullins. (If you go back in my archives, you can find a post about me talking about how the death of Rich and the death of another person was one of the many paper cuts that killed my faith.) I think that one of the reasons why this book never gained much traction is because it sounds like some kind of historical romance novel.

It was not.

It was a thinly veiled portrait of Rich Mullins. 

Most of the details surrounding the main character of the novel were different from Rich's life, but it was pretty obvious who the source was that Reed was drawing from. In the novel, a young gifted musician named Andrew Miracle is discovered by a Christian music producer and agent who takes him and develops him into a bonafide star. It's about that journey, and how the pressures of the music industry, as well as the fandom, can change someone's life in both good ways and bad. 

Andrew Miracle played piano. I mostly played guitar (I mean I still can but I don't play much anymore). But there was a part of this book that I read over and over again because I felt like it described how I played guitar when I was leading worship. Here's the excerpt:

"What kind of thing is it? John told me that what happens when you play is extraordinary." She looked slightly away, avoiding Andrew's eyes. "He seemed to think there was some unique spiritual event happening."

Andrew sighed thoughtfully. It was hard to say just what happened in those Sunday services. He pictured the church in his mind, packed with parishioners. He saw Paster Mathews, squeezed into his suit, wrapping up his message, and giving Andrew the signal to begin. What happened next was something he never really understood himself.

"I guess I just minister," he said at last. "When you break it down, that's about it. I sing, and I play, usually after the sermon, but sometimes even in place of a sermon. The pastor kind of gives me the floor, and it gets real quiet in the place. I sort of close my eyes, and..." Andrew's voice trailed off uncertainly. "And what?" Carolyn asked intently. She seemed to be trying to see in her mind what Andrew was talking about.

Andrew looked up at her, uncertainty showing in his eyes. Talking about his gift was uncomfortable in the best of times because he knew deep down that he didn't control the gift and there were times that it actually controlled him. Those were times of ultimate trust. It was beautiful, but it also seemed wild and unsettling. At those times, he thought about some of the prophets in the Old Testament, how they had ranted and acted almost like madmen with visions...Andrew liked Carolyn, and he had no desire to come off like some mystic freak. It seemed a great risk to reveal this most intimate thing in his life. But as Carolyn gazed back at him expectantly, he suddenly, inexplicably felt safe. He decided for the moment to open the door.

"I guess I just pray with my hands," he said slowly, "if that means anything to you. I sit down, and I start praying. Only I don't speak. I just play."

Andrew goes on for awhile and explains that actually not everyone likes it. Carolyn asks how that could be, and Andrew says:

"They just don't. I mean I don't always play sweetly, you know? It's not always a peaceful thing. It's not always exactly safe."

Even today, I still think about that interaction. Andrew then tells a story about an old woman at a retirement home that he would volunteer to play at, and that story gets me every time (maybe I'll talk about it in a future post).

And now we get to Glen Hansard.

I first discovered Glen like most people did by watching the movie Once when it came out in 2007. I don't think I saw it in the theater, I think I bought it when it came out on DVD. And like most people, I ended up loving that movie very much. The story of a street busker meeting an immigrant in Dublin, both with broken hearts and dreams of making music, was so moving and sweet and sad that I have watched it several times. But what really got me was how Glen played the guitar. It didn't feel like it was an instrument, it was an extension of who he was. He played loud and he played hard and he sang forcefully and you could feel every emotion, every single heartache and joy, in the way he performed.

And I was hooked.

And if you ever saw me lead worship after that, you saw me in my small way emulate what came naturally to Glen. There was always a running joke about me breaking strings on stage and having to change a string in between services. Before I got my Breedlove guitar, I had a Larivee (I eschewed the normal worship leader guitar route, always went with smaller independent brands. My first guitar which I still have is a Takamine, which is the same brand Glen used) and I had played it so hard that I was developing a hole in the body, just like Glen had on his.

And if someone asked me why I played so hard, I would echo Andrew Miracle. Because I prayed with my hands. My guitar wasn't just an instrument. It was almost like a weapon, an agent of violence. Not violence in a bad way. Violence in that it wasn't always nice and peaceful. Sometimes it was angry. 

When my brother died, I remember a few months later leading a song at church, not knowing if I still believed the words anymore. I remember almost yelling out the words and playing my guitar so hard that I probably looked like a madman. When I was alone, practicing and most likely weeping, I would hammer out songs on my guitar and let all my emotions just pour out. On stage, even though most of the time I wasn't always authentic about who I was and what I was struggling with, I prayed with my hands. As I've told people who have asked me about those last days in ministry and church, I couldn't at that point figure out where the line was between bleeding all over the stage, letting people see how mad I was at everything and how sad I was about my brother - and acting like the good Christian, the Jesus junior who had all the answers and didn't struggle with anything because...God.

Glen was only eight months older than me. He died in a single motorcycle accident, probably doing what he loved. He was a man who had his faults, just like all of us. But if you've watched some of the videos that people have posted recently, you saw a flawed man who loved being with people, who wore his heart on his sleeve, who never forgot where he came from, who befriended anyone and everyone, and who would occasionally still stand there on a corner in Dublin, this famous performer, and play in front of a few people. And his intensity and his passion was always the same, no matter who he was playing for.

They say to never met your heroes. I think Glen was an exception. And I wish I had met him more than through his music and movie. Thank you Glen for praying with your hands. The world won't be the same without you.

(Look up "Say It To Me Now" from the movie Once on Youtube to get a brief glimpse as to Glen's playing)

She Had Some Horses

BY JOY HARJO

I. She Had Some Horses

She had some horses.

She had horses who were bodies of sand.

She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.

She had horses who were skins of ocean water.

She had horses who were the blue air of sky.

She had horses who were fur and teeth.

She had horses who were clay and would break.

She had horses who were splintered red cliff.

She had some horses.

She had horses with eyes of trains.

She had horses with full, brown thighs.

She had horses who laughed too much.

She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses.

She had horses who licked razor blades.

She had some horses.

She had horses who danced in their mothers' arms.

She had horses who thought they were the sun and their

bodies shone and burned like stars.

She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.

She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet

in stalls of their own making.

She had some horses.

She had horses who liked Creek Stomp Dance songs.

She had horses who cried in their beer.

She had horses who spit at male queens who made

them afraid of themselves.

She had horses who said they weren't afraid.

She had horses who lied.

She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped

bare of their tongues.

She had some horses.

She had horses who called themselves, "horse."

She had horses who called themselves, "spirit," and kept

their voices secret and to themselves.

She had horses who had no names.

She had horses who had books of names.

She had some horses.

She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.

She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who

carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.

She had horses who waited for destruction.

She had horses who waited for resurrection.

She had some horses.

She had horses who got down on their knees for any saviour.

She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.

She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her

bed at night and prayed as they raped her.

She had some horses.

She had some horses she loved.

She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.