Kent Nerburn

Driving from north to south or south to north has the unique characteristic of allowing you to move through time as well as space. In my case, I went from over a foot of snow in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to the burnished red and gold of oaks and maples in southern Minnesota. It was like traveling from deep November to early, tawny October.

One of the unique aspects of that experience is the change in vigilance that takes place in you. Rich autumn days fill you with their presence; grey, leaden skies fill you with awareness of something impending. At least a certain part of your consciousness takes on an awareness of potential, and your mind and heart are cast to unseen distances.

I love them both. They produce different types of mindfulness. But driving through heavy snows on a trackless road through deep forests has a unique capacity to focus your attention while still drawing your mind to places unknown and unseen. It is an experience I forget, at least viscerally, until I experience it anew each winter.

It reminds me of why I live in this northern land, and why I often long to get away. There is something authentic in the immediacy of winter, but something oppressive in its enclosure. You live close to your skin, aware of the significance of each moment, but find yourself looking at the skies for avenues of escape.

No one who has not experienced winter can know the power and majesty of a hawk circling above a sea of whiteness in azure blue skies. Without winter you cannot know the holy purity of a landscape covered in a fresh mantle of snow.

But when these leaden skies descend and hold you in and down for day after day, it is as if some great god has pressed his thumb upon your chest. You long for distance, light, and breath.

All of that is coming to me now. I have seen it, if only for a moment. And I have basked in the fiery brilliance of hillsides as rich and variegated as a Persian carpet in their autumn splendor; that is leaving me now. I am suspended in time, watching all of nature retreat to a defensive mode, preparing for what is to come while giving up the memory of the summer past. It is a delicious, bittersweet time.

There will be more writing now. More reflection. More inner work. The mind will change its focus and the heart will move to a minor key. Movements will get harder; moments will take on more significance.

But with this, the yearning for freedom will increase.

The hawk in the sky will cease to be just one small element in nature’s rich symphony. In his lonely and singular presence, he will become a metaphor for freedom and a harbinger of hope.

Technorati : hawk, mindfulness, winter

I’m sitting in my hotel room in Houghton, Michigan, after a wonderful day speaking to classes and sharing the podium with Ojibwe elder, Eddie Benton Benai, in an evening session on the need to listen to the quieter voices of the indigenous peoples of this land.

I had never been to the U.P., as the upper Michigan peninsula is known, except to drive through it years ago on the way to Sault Saint Marie and eastern Canada. It has stunned me with its isolated and lonely beauty. Now, don’t misunderstand me: it is a rich and magical land, but the essential feel of it is isolation in the best sense of the word, and lonely as a hawk circling in the sky forms a lonely presence. The U.P. itself is an arrow of land that exists between lakes Superior and Michigan. And the Keweenaw peninsula, where Houghton is located, is on a finger of land that juts out from the U.P. into the cold waters of Superior.

For those of you who don’t know Superior, it is one of the most truly brooding presences you will ever confront. Even on warm days, there is a sense of something impending, untameable, and unknowable about it. Usually, to associate something with a song is to trivialize it, but Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” captures the feel of Superior almost perfectly.

Anyway, Houghton sits, nestled in forested hills covering an earth of ancient, iron and copper-laden stone, far out on this lonely, isolated peninsula. You can’t see Superior from here, but you can feel its unseen presence in the air, the light, and the stony heartbeat of the land. Somewhere, just out of sight and earshot, you are surrounded by one of the deepest, most secret, most unknowable bodies of water on the face of the continent. Its presence attunes the senses and creates a spiritual alertness that comes anytime one is near great natural forces, whether of land or weather.

I am quite intoxicated by this place. It has a character unlike any other locale I know. The people I have met here love the town, the peninsula, and the power of the land on which they live. I envy them their private knowledge.

The first snowfall came last night, and I am facing a hundred miles of driving through deep forest on snow-covered two lanes. It is my first encounter of the season with winter driving and all that it entails. To have it take place on unfamiliar, unpopulated forest roads creates a feeling of exhilaration and apprehension. My vigilance is up.

I need to get moving so I can make it to Winona, Minnesota, far in the south of the state, in order to speak to students and the public about Neither Wolf nor Dog. NWND has been chosen as the common book for all the freshmen at Winona State University, and I am giving a public reading on Tuesday evening. Since I am constantly taken to task for not announcing my various readings and speakings on this website, I’m taking this opportunity to inform any of you in the southern Minnesota, northern Iowa, eastern Wisconsin area that I will be reading and speaking at Somsen Auditorium on the Winona State campus on the evening of Tuesday, October 17th. Please come by if it is convenient and of interest.

This should be a fun drive for me. Thanks to a large weather front and the cold waters of Superior, I am sitting under the heavy gunmetal skies of winter. As I drive south I will be moving back in time toward the bright colors of early autumn. I’ve mentioned this before, but driving from north to south or vice-versa has the wonderful effect of moving you through time as well as space. Assuming that the road is kind to me, by tonight I will have driven from the wintry chill of a November-like day into the warmer light and color of early October. By Monday night I will be in country where the leaves are still reaching their peak, and autumn is only beginning reach full flower.

The light is filling the sky outside, and my day must begin. For the first time this year, I will don heavy gloves and scrape ice and snow off my windshield. I was not ready for this, but it is ready for me. I hope to see a few of you in Winona in several days.

We are just putting the finishing touches on the CD of Small Graces: The Quiet Gifts of Everyday Life. It contains two discs and has cello interludes composed and played by a friend and colleague of mine, Patrick Riley, who has performed with the Baltimore Symphony and has taught cello at the university level for years.

I hope to have this available for sale in several weeks at the most, because so many of you have indicated that you would like to be able to listen to some of my books, or that you have friends and relatives who are no longer able to read, but still love to hear works read aloud.

I did the reading myself. In the process, I found the book anew. It is a very different thing to read a work than to hear it read, even when you, yourself, are the reader. And the book I heard has a larger heart than I imagined. I see why so many people count it as their favorite.

This is new territory for me. When I write, I always hear my books in my mind. Now, to hear one out loud is to make its reacquaintance.

I like it very much and hope that you will, too.

You are welcome to contact me through the “contact” form to put yourself on the purchase list, or you can wait until we have a direct purchase option on the website. All of that is coming soon, along with some intriguing surprises in terms of ways you can give my books to others. This is my attempt to be responsive to your requests and to offer you a way to give gifts that speak from the heart and have a deeply personal touch.

More on that later. For now, know that the CD is almost here, and it should be available for purchase within a week or so.

Technorati : Small Graces

This is a very strange question. But I’m curious: what do you think your generation’s contribution, for good or for ill, has been to the world?

Perhaps this is an obsession only for those of us who came of age in the sixties, convinced we were changing the world, only to find that not only did we not change it as we had hoped, we planted as many bad seeds as good. But I think other generations must have some reflections on what they have done, as well.

I’d love to hear from any of you. We’re all called to meet certain circumstances, we somehow, as an age group, form an amorphous cultural critical mass, and we respond in a fashion that we neither understand nor control. Yet it is possible to say in retrospect that, yes, we were a cultural force and yes, we did move this world to a slightly different place than it was when we arrived on the scene.

It is a strange cultural phenomenon, understood only in retrospect, and then only dimly. But it is real.

Thoughts? From anyone?

Submit your thoughts and ideas by clicking on the “comments” phrase at the bottom of this entry.

Thanks.

Technorati : Sixties, cultural phenomenon, generation

Just as in child rearing, I tend to have a somewhat “hands off” attitude toward my books as they go out into the world. My greatest pleasure is in seeing them take on an identity, make friends, become travelers, and surround themselves with family. My only request of them is that they be of service to the world in some fashion.

With books this starts by sending them out, introducing them to the right people, and seeing if they behave well or badly. When you introduce a book to someone you respect deeply, and that person tells you, “My, you’ve raised a good book here,” you feel the same pride and validation you feel when the same happens with one of your children.

Hidden Beauty (full title, The Hidden Beauty of Everyday Life) has just had such a moment, and I’d like to share it with you and ask you to participate in it.

There are two people who have quietly been doing the heavy lifting in the world of spiritual writing and thinking — Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat. You probably don’t know their names, and that is typical of their unassuming manner of working. But if you ever check Rotten Tomatoes to assess films, if you ever read reviews of books to see if they have some authentic spiritual dimension, chances are you will have read some of the writings of Frederic and Mary Ann. Here is where you’ll find them. http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/.

They are truly concerned about finding the spiritual in our everyday lives, and they have devoted themselves, in various venues, to looking at creative works to see if they have a spiritual heart. Non-judgmental, non-sectarian, they are like the best of teachers: they open your eyes to what is before you so that you can make your own decisions as to whether a work is something you wish to bring into your life.

So, when they chose Hidden Beauty as the first selection for the Spirituality and Health book group, I was as proud as a parent can be. And when I saw that they have put together a resource guide to help people use the book in discussion groups, I was moved from proud to humble.

I have often been asked to put together book group materials or curricula based on my books, and though I think it is a wonderful idea, I am seldom — no, “never” — moved to do it. It is a secondary act, best performed, to my thinking, by someone who comes to the book fresh. Just as the reading world tells you what you have written and helps shape its identity, it is the reading world that must tell other readers how to look at and use a book in their lives. Mary Ann and Frederic have done this for Hidden Beauty.

I urge you to go to their Spirituality and Practice website and read their review of Hidden Beauty.

I’ll excerpt their opening passage so you can get a flavor of how they see the book:

There is beauty, grace, mystery, and love all around us: all we have to do is pause and take the time to be attentive and to lean into the presence of God in everyday life. That is the wonderful and salutary message in this brief but poignant volume of spiritual essays by Kent Nerburn, the author of many books including Simple Truths, Small Graces, Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace, and Calm Surrender. His lyrical prose is a delight to read. Every word is set in just the right place and with the right emphasis. He has an artist’s eye (his sculptures are at the Peace Museum in Hiroshima, Japan, and Westminster Benedictine Abbey in Mission, British Columbia, and elsewhere) and a knack for speaking from the heart about little acts of kindness and reverence that others might easily miss.

But perhaps even more important than the review itself is the excellent discussion guide they have put together those who wish to look at the fundamental issues I try to raise in Hidden Beauty.

For those of you who want to use Hidden Beauty in a book group, or who simply want to see if it has value for your ongoing spiritual journey, please go to this remarkable website put together by Fred and Mary Ann. You will not only get a better feel for this particular literary child of mine, you will find a web resource of inestimable value in your own journey toward a meaningful spiritual understanding of life.

Truly, it is worth a look.

Technorati : brussat, hidden beauty, spiritual formation, spirituality