Yak Glovelettes

Shopping for clothes these days is complicated.  It used to be that all I had to worry about was finding something that looked and felt good on me, but now when I buy so much as a t-shirt I worry that on its way from the farthest corners of the globe it has consumed its weight in fossil fuels and left polluted rivers and impoverished villages in its wake.

So I am grateful when designers demonstrate awareness of ethical and environmental matters.  Gudrun Sjoden offers "Swedish design with a green soul."  Eileen Fisher's site showcases a collection of progressive corporate practices, encompassing employee health and happiness, environmental responsibility, and efforts to empower women in developing countries.

Why then did I snort with derision at a certain item in Eileen Fisher's latest flyer?  The model is wearing a jacket of boiled wool and made-in-the-USA organic cotton jeans, and her hands are warmed by fingerless "glovelettes."  The glovelettes are "encrusted with crystals...[and] knit with yak herded by nomads."

Yak indeed.  And not, God forbid, feed-lot yak, or yak herded by people who go back to their village every night, but yak herded by nomads.  Remember the three wise men crossing the desert on camels with their cargo of gifts?  It used to be you had to be the Son of God to rate such exotic goods, but now all you have to do is point and click.

I mean, really.  It's just a pair of gloves.

And yet, I know that nomadism as a way of life is disappearing from the planet, and soon highways and suburbs and slums will obliterate the high pastures where the nomads wandered with their herds.  So maybe buying gloves knit from nomad-herded yak is not just silly, but an act of kindness to the nomad and his yaks and the grasslands with their earthworms and their bees.

Can it be that shopping these days has become a spiritual act?  I think it has, and that's o.k.  In this cold and soulless world, we have to take our spirituality wherever we can get it.

Sundays At The Church Of The Internet

For the first quarter century of my life, I went to church every Sunday.  I didn't mind the Mass so much, but the sermon did me in.  As a child I fidgeted in the pew, but as soon as I became capable of critical thinking, I fidgeted inside my head.  Proud of my book learning, I passed the time identifying logical fallacies and deploring the oratorical style, or lack thereof, of the man in the pulpit.

After the Ite, missa est released us, I would tear the chapel veil off my head and complain to my mother about yet another ridiculous sermon.  She, who probably had the same objections as I, would counsel humility, the suspension of judgment.  "But," I would counter in full adolescent preen, "if God didn't want me to use it, why did He give me a brain?"

Then for many years I didn't go to church at all.  But when life got difficult and my sense of invulnerability faded, I became aware of an annoying longing for spiritual guidance.  This led me to join crowds of lapsed Catholics and Jews at the local Unitarian church, but my old critical habit soon reared up its wizened head, and I stopped showing up.

After we moved to Vermont I started listening to On Being because it came on NPR while we were eating Sunday breakfast.  And because I usually missed part of it while I was out feeding the chickens I would later, when I thought of it, go to the website.

And I was off.  With the wind of the Holy Ghost in my sails, I discovered Viktor Frankl,  Richard Rohr, Pema Chodron, Sylvia Boorstein.  Eckart Tolle, who looks like a Dark Forest elf, reminds me of the German nuns who were my first teachers.  Also, he owns a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.  Do these sound like frivolous reasons to listen to a spiritual teacher?  If those priests of my childhood had owned a dog--or had a wife and children--I might have understood them better.

The vagaries of links led me to someone I would never have looked up, Geneen Roth, who lost all her money to Bernie Madoff and wrote beautifully about it, and to the illustrator Jennifer Orkin Lewis, whose works make me want to draw, or write, or something...

I know all too well the orthodox rebuttal to my digital spiritual wanderings.  I am picking and choosing what feels right--as opposed to what IS right--which is utterly non-Catholic.  But I'm not so sure about that.  No Sunday sermon on the dangers of mortal sin was as stark as Pema Chodron's message about the need to accept the impermanence of all things, to give up hope for good.

These digital homilies are hardly touchy-feely--at least the ones I read.  They deal with the inevitability of suffering and the need to be present, because the present is all we have.  And if an internet sermon makes me want to write or draw or stop thinking for a minute and just look into the green woods, isn't that all God's work?

All Those Prayers...

During my years in Catholic school, from age six to seventeen, I spent a lot of time praying.  I'd say my morning prayers while I was putting on my uniform.  In school, at the beginning of each class, we would stand up and say a short prayer, like a Hail Mary.  Sometimes we would sing.  I especially liked "Come Holy Ghost," the English translation of the 9th century Gregorian chant, "Veni Creator Spiritus."  In times of stress, such as before an algebra test, I would sing it silently to myself as I waited for the test paper to be placed on my desk.  At the end of each class we would all stand up again and say another prayer.

Two prayers per class, six classes a day, five days a week makes 240 prayers a month.  And that was not all.  My high school had a chapel where daily Mass was said before first period.  Attendance was not required, but sometimes I would go.  On Fridays confessions were heard in the chapel.  You said your prayer of contrition--mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa--and then whatever prayers the priest assigned you as penance .  During lunch period--and this seems incredible now--my friends and I would often whip out our chapel veils and stop by the chapel for a visit to the Blessed Sacrament.

At home, before dinner, instead of a formal blessing we would just cross ourselves.  But sometimes in the evening my parents would  pray the Rosary, led by my father:  five Our Fathers, fifty Hail Marys, five Glorias, and the litany of the Virgin Mary.  My father recited the litany in Latin, and it used to feel like a reward for sitting through those endless Hail Marys:

...Mystical rose,
Tower of David,
Tower of ivory,
House of gold,
Ark of the covenant,
Gate of heaven,
Morning star...

During the long May evenings my parents and I would kneel before the statue of Mary that lived on the chest of drawers in their bedroom and say the special prayers of the "Month of Mary."

And in all seasons, before falling asleep, I would do an "examination of conscience" before saying a prayer to my Guardian Angel to which my  mother had added various petitions directed to God Himself, such as "let Daddy have plenty of good work," and "let me have a little brother or sister."  The latter was granted the year I turned sixteen.  Who said prayers don't work?

On Sundays we went to Mass and Communion.

After I married, and my father died, and the Church messed up badly on its birth control policies, I stopped all that--morning prayers, evening prayers, the Rosary, the Mass, the works.  Suddenly I had a lot of extra time on my hands.

Now that, a half century later, the vicissitudes of life have steered me on the path of Buddhist spirituality, I meditate in the morning, reciting a mantra that often feels as mechanical as the Rosary used to, and doing my best to tame my "monkey mind."  As I undertake various tasks during the day, I try to remember to center myself.  Before I go to sleep at night, I focus on my breath and do a little metta. 

It feels amazingly familiar and recognizable, like an old friend you haven't seen in years and who shows up wearing exotic clothes.  The habit and discipline of inwardness, instilled by my parents and by the nuns who succeeded each other like beads on the rosary of my school years, has come back into my life.

Today's Spiritual Exercise

My spiritual exercise for today is to not do laundry.

Instead, I am sitting in the crisp Vermont sunshine, vegetable garden to my left, goat and chicken yard to my right, Wolfie baking slowly on the slate path before me, birdsong in the woods behind me. The California poppies against the back wall of the garage are exploding into bloom. They will look terrible in a week or so when the kleenex-thin flowers fade, but right now they're spectacular.

On a day like this it would be a sin to stay indoors. But I haven't always known this.

When I was a kid, it was all about delayed gratification, from waiting four hours between bottles as an infant to delaying sex until marriage. On this brilliant spring day, everything I was ever taught—by my parents, by the German nuns who educated me, by the Church in general—tells me that I should be in the house right now, doing laundry. I should be in the kitchen, freezing spinach before it bolts. And I should be making some effort towards preserving at least a portion of the rhubarb that refuses to stop growing. Not until all this is done should I go sit outside.

A recent article in the New Yorker talks about children's ability to delay gratification, and the strong correlation between this ability and the child's future success in life. In my case, I spent the first half of my life becoming a virtuoso of delayed gratification, and the second half trying to learn to grab gratification before it vanishes.

I find it much harder to learn to be a grasshopper than I did learning to be an ant. Right now, for instance, it's really difficult to distract myself from the thought that our supply of clean underwear is running dangerously low.

But then a half-remembered quote from the gospel comes to me, the one about the lilies of the field, who neither spin nor weave but are better dressed than even Solomon in all his glory.

So, no spinning, no weaving, no laundry, but instead, lily-gazing to my heart's content: that's my spiritual task on this Memorial Day.