I was intrigued to read more about ultrarunning, from an accomplished racer. Many people think that running a marathon is a mammoth achievement. But that’s only 26.2 miles. Ultrarunners do 50k runs, they do 50 mile races, they go head-to-head in competitions that span 100 miles….and more. And they even compete against each other in 24 hour races – round and round a track for 24 hours. 

As a (very) amateur runner, I was curious to read about ultrarunning. However, Scott Jurek isn’t just a jock with a few good stories from the road, he opens up his heart in Eat and Run, and he lets his readers see his inner wounds. The reader truly takes a journey through the entirety of Scott’s life, from his ailing, dying mother and his distant and demanding father to divorce and the suicide of a dear friend.

His story is similar to many professional cyclists, from what I have read. Cyclists have often faced a good bit of personal adversity, particularly when they are young. They develop a deep strength of will, to endure suffering, like an iron-will, something inside that will never let them quit. It seems similar across the board, with all endurance athletes. As Scott puts it, citing an anonymous quote, “You’ll never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have.”

The is also about food. All of Scott’s accomplishments were made with a vegan diet. That’s right. No dairy, no meat. All vegan. In fact, it will startle some readers to hear Scott say that he credits his vegan diet for fueling his many race victories. Between all the advice on running, the book is packed with helpful ideas on how to fuel with vegan power.

Many critics and thinkers have talked about how “American” the subject matter of the road is. We are a people of travel. Of pioneers, of travel, of summer vacations and road trips, and of discovery. We often find ourselves in the journey, in the unknown. Scott’s life as an ultrarunner strikes me as a deeply authentic version of the American story, a narrative of pushing one’s self to the absolute limit in the places where few people set foot. Ken Burns, take note. A documentary film on American ultrarunning should be in your que.

Scott is also a seeker, of a philosophical, psychological, and spiritual nature. His book reflects a deep engagement with writers who great thinkers who speak about the depth and richness of life. He talks about going into a very Zen-like frame of mind. What the Tao Te Ching calls “doing, not doing.” It’s that sense that artists have, where they feel like the poem is writing the poem, like the art is coming from somewhere outside of themselves in such a way that they are merely the instrument being played by the greater cosmos.

Scott’s interest in these deeper reflections comes from his fascination with the mind. It is the will, the discipline of the mind, that takes an ordinary person into the extraordinary. Scott does not claim to be an exceptional athlete, only to have accomplished exceptional feats by power of the will. While his career is clearly a thorough study of physiology, it is psychology that is the real game changer. “As powerful as our legs are, as magnificent as our lungs and arms and muscles are, nothing matters more than the mind.”

Taylor grows up in Kentucky in the care of her loving and wise mother, but she’s got an itch to see the world. She avoids men because she doesn’t want to get pregnant and find herself stuck in her small town. Then one day, she buys a beat up car and points it southwest. Before the car completely breaks down in Arizona, she’s picked up a Native baby–whom she names “Turtle”–along the way (who it turns out comes from an abusive home). So much for avoiding children. Still, it doesn’t stop her from having adventures, including illegally smuggling undocumented immigrants.

The Bean Trees was a lot of fun for me. I particularly enjoyed the Lou Ann character development. On the Enneagram, Lou Ann is a classic Type Six personality: nervous and anxious about all the possible dangers in the world, on her guard against perceived threats, and on the lookout for people and things she can rely on to navigate this perilous existence. I found this particular exchange between Taylor and Lou Ann particularly hilarious:

Taylor:  ”You were just looking for a disaster, that’s all. You can’t deny you hunt for them, Lou Ann, even in the paper. If you look hard enough you can always come up with what you want.”
Lou Ann: “Am I just completely screwed up, Taylor, or what? I’ve always been this way. My brother and I used to play this game when we were little, with a cigar box. That box was our best toy. It had this slinky lady in a long red dress on the inside of the lid, with her dress slit way up to here. It’s a wonder Granny Logan didn’t confiscate it. She was holding out a cigar I think, I s’pose she was a Keno girl or something, but we said she was a gypsy. We’d make believe that you could say to her, ‘Myself at the age of fourteen.’ Or whatever age, you know, and then we’d look in the box and pretend we could see what we looked like. My brother would go all the way up to ninety. He’d say, ‘I see myself with a long beard. I live in a large white house with seventeen dogs’ and on and on. He loved dogs, see, and Mama and Granny would only let him have just Buster. But me, I was such a chicken liver, I’d just go a couple of weeks into the future at the very most. I’d look at myself the day school was going to start in September, maybe, and say, ‘I am wearing a new pink dress.’ But I’d never, never go up even to twenty or twenty-five. I was scared.”

The Bean Trees was funny but was also a serious exploration of the power dynamics at play in immigration laws. Taylor befriends two undocumented immigrants whom she is particularly fond of. She sees their struggle for survival, and she finds herself experiencing their pain and frustration. As she reflects on her own young life and her own experiences, she finds herself at the end of herself: ”There’s just so damn much ugliness. Everywhere you look, some big guy kicking some little person when they’re down–look what they do to those people at Mattie’s. ‘To hell with them,’ people say, ‘let them die, it was their fault in the first place for being poor or in trouble, or for not being white, or whatever, how dare they try to come to this country.’…I didn’t know how to explain the empty despair I felt. ‘How can I just be upset about Turtle, about a grown man hurting a baby, when the whole way of the world is to pick on people that can’t fight back?”

The response to Taylor comes from her own life, from the story of her life in the novel. That one person who cares can make a difference, even if it is only in the lives a few people. For those people, that difference means everything.

I’ve got deep family ties to South Dakota, so I decided to explore the state through the eyes of an acclaimed writer and fellow contemplative and mystic. Kathleen Norris moved to South Dakota from the city, after she inherited her grandparents home. Her reflections on her home state are deeply wise as well as folksy. The land is in her blood, and reading her book is a privileged opportunity to understand the deeply holy nature of the place.

She presents a people and a world of tensions, deliberately so. “‘Extremes,’ John R. Milton suggests in his history of South Dakota, is ‘perhaps the key word for Dakota…What happens to extremes is that they come together, and the result is a kind of tension.’ I make no attempt in this book to resolve the tensions and contradictions I find in Dakotas….” The tensions in the Dakotas seem to seep into Norris’s own writing. One such example is that she is harsh, even bitter, on several occasions when she denounces the scapegoating and infighting of small towns. On the other hand, when Norris writes about small town gossip, she does so with admiring, even sacred language:  ”Surprisingly often, gossip is the way small-town people express solidarity….Gossip is theology translated into experience. In it we hear great stories of conversion, like the drunk who turns his or her life around, as well as stories of failure. We can see that pride really does go before a fall, and that hope is essential….When we gossip we are also praying, not only for them but for ourselves….At its deepest level, small-town gossip is about how we face matters of life and death….”

What I think I appreciated most in my reading was to relate to the landscape. “Above all, one notices the quiet, the near-absence of human noise.” As someone who has spent time in the Dakotas, I am deeply appreciative of the stillness and quiet of the Dakotas. On the one hand, to some people, this kind of silence can be maddening. For me, I find it soothing and contemplative. The land stretches on, dotted sparsely by farms and tiny towns. I feel like I can breathe that kind of stillness, and it gives me an incredible level of clarity.

The characters are first and foremost thrown into a class system — rich, poor, or middle class — and this struggle to maintain and advance their standing forms the defining paradigm of existence. Gatsby manages to advance from rags to riches. Tom and Daisy are born into wealth, which places on them the burden of maintaining their societal status. Nick is from the Midwest and represents the middle class. In all cases, the characters are, by default, thrown into the class struggle. To work, by hook or by crook, to make it. What complicates this, however, is love.

Gatsby loves Daisy. But, of course, love is not that simple, even though Gatsby has gone from pauper to prince. Daisy returns his love, but there are forces greater than love conspiring against the two.

Nick, the narrator of the story, becomes slowly disenchanted with it all, with the whole system. Because there is no serious contemplation of the natural world throughout the novel, this paragraph, this musing of Nick’s, took me a bit by surprise. Nick is starring off into the night, and he becomes transported to the past, when the island was still wilderness:

“Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailor’s eyes–a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

Given the lack of reflection on the natural world, this quote at first appears out of place. Upon reflection, however, it appears to be the authors intent to place a bit of perspective on American civilization  and in doing so, it becomes a powerful existential statement demonstrating de-humanizing disconnect that results when industrial capitalism turns us away from being able to realize these “transitory enchanted moments” that come with the wonder of opening one’s self to the natural world.

But it is more than just the wonder of nature. The economic mechanics of modern American life, the struggle within the class system, it keeps us from connections with others and with ourselves. The characters of The Great Gatsby are never quite able to connect with one another in the way that they want. They are never able, either, to fully conceptualize the ways in which they wish to connect with each other. ”At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others–poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner–young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

Reading Faulkner feels like thunder. Writing a review of Light in August feels a bit like reviewing the fallout from a thunderstorm. I felt that I was most impressed by the feeling of destiny that ran through the novel. It wasn’t the same feeling of destiny that one senses in archetypal mythology, where the hero and the villain are moving toward a climactic moment where each fall on the other side of the moral battle with good ultimately triumphing over evil. Rather, the characters in Light in August are living out a destiny of desperation, the destiny of broken psyches and unfulfilled lives.

There is the Reverend Hightower, the displaced minister who is psychologically stuck in the glory of Civil War battlefields, unable to ever truly forge a connection with others or with himself. There is Byron Bunch, who misplaces his love. Then there is Joe Christmas, the man who was beaten as a boy by his legalistic Christian who adopted him. Joe is half white and half black in the post-Civil War South, a world where there is no space for gray.

Outsiders. They drift and search. I was fascinated by how they carved out spaces for meaning and feeling in irregular and abnormal places. Hightower finds solace and escape every evening as he watches the sunset, transported back in time, he rides with his Grandfather. Joe Christmas finds a home, of sorts, and something that resembles love. Byron firmly believes that he has found love. In each escape, in each space, the characters do find a meaningful grounds for hope, but eventually life descends upon them and forces them to confront the reality of their displacement and the source of their despair. Faulkner, of course, brings this all to a head at the same time, at the end of the novel, a perfect storm.

Naturally, I was also intrigued by the religious and racial commentary. I felt that Faulkner’s post-Civil War South was, itself, a macro version of displacement, a violent displacement, a displacement resolved in and through violence. The South, itself, now displaced, displaces others. The characters of the dominant culture insist that their problems are with race or religion. So there is Mr. McEachern, the abusive father to Joe, fighting Satan in the name of righteousness, battling against the Satan in Joe, or the Devil who is Joe. Then there is Joe’s lover, Joanna Burden, who must engage the curse that she believes the negro race has brought upon the white. As a young girl, she is haunted by ferocious visions of white babies with black crosses, cursed by the black race.

So it is with the whole of society. They exorcise their own inner demons by naming them in the forms of others. Once named, they can destroy. Yet the violence does not purge, it only forces the living to reckon with the ghosts of the past. Says Byron, “A fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he’s already got. He’ll cling to trouble he’s used to before he’ll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he can’t escape from.”

Hansen is a neuropsychologist. In Buddha’s Brain, he approaches spiritual disciplines and practice from the perspective of neuropsychology. He puts traditional methods of spiritual self-improvement (particularly from Buddhism) in dialog with modern neuroscience to demonstrate that regular spiritual practices change and re-wire our brains.

For various reasons, our habitual mental patterns do not always serve us well. We may have developed unhealthy responses in our brain as a result of coping with childhood trauma, or we may be wired for fear and anxiety in a Darwinian world of survival. Whatever the reason, we find ourselves burdened with responses of fear, anger, or pride. We are quick to be critical, we have difficulty being attentive, we can’t say “no,” we are easily stressed, we are beset with anger issues. These habitual responses can be changed.

Change isn’t easy, nor is Hansen’s book an attempt to suggest that traditional spiritual practices like meditation and mindfulness will fix any and all problems. However, for many of us, we can change the way our brain functions to increase our attentiveness, make ourselves more serene and more grounded, and to develop greater equanimity.

For many, spiritual practices are adopted by some manner of faith. We find a spiritual discipline and it sort of resonates with us. Then we find a teacher, or we read and study on the tradition of that practice. And then we just do it, and hope to God that we are doing the right thing! But Buddha’s Brain and other studies of neuropsychology are increasingly demonstrating that there is hard evidence that supports the fact that regular spiritual practice changes us on a chemical and molecular level.

I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in science and spirituality, but I would particularly like to see skeptics of spirituality take a crack at it. For me, personally, Buddha’s Brain helped to add a different dimension to my spiritual practices. Yes, I still have faith, but it’s nice to know that when I sit in silence for 15 or 30 minutes that I’m not just wasting my time. I’m changing my brain. And I’m changing it in ways that will help me to live life in a way that is more full and rich.

Note: Rick Hansen has several very good YouTube videos, if you would like to hear more about him before investing in any of his writings. See particularly: http://www.youtube.com/user/BuddhasBrain

I appreciated the honesty of the novel. While The Color Purple in no way flinches in recounting the brutality inflicted on black women, it also refuses simplistic categories like “white people are bad” or “men are evil.” Walker complicates her novel by tracing the spiritual evolution of some of the most abusive characters. They transform by coming to the end of themselves and managing to recognize the misery of the abusive behavior.

Along side the unique struggle of African American women, Walker also writes about Africa and colonialism, taking the reader into a small African tribe, driven off their land by white business opportunists. This, of course, is a practice that continues to this day.

The novel is above all truthful and honest, but I also appreciated how deeply warm and even funny it could be.  ”Us didn’t make this world,” says Sophie, one of the leading characters of the novel, a strong and bold young black woman. Despite our advances, we find ourselves still reeling and still suffering from colonialism and imperialism. The Color Purple is a novel that gets to the heart of this narrative that we inhabit, and her characters fight, love, survive, thrive, grow, regress, transform, and above all, they deal with their world. 

Note: I listened to the audiobook, which was read by Alice Walker. Her reading of the book is quite amazing, adding a completely new dimension to a reading of her novel. I very highly recommend it.

The contrast between King’s philosophy and Malcolm’s is found in their backgrounds. King grew up in a comfortable middle class family and was well educated. Malcolm’s father was killed by white supremacists, the family then was poor and often hungry, Malcolm’s mother went insane from the trauma and hardships, and and Malcolm eventually wound up on the streets working as a hustler and petty criminal. ”Malcolm’s great strength was to speak on behalf of those that society and state had denied a voice  due to racial prejudice. He understood their yearnings and anticipated their actions.” Marable Manning succeeds brilliantly in weaving together Malcolm’s personal history together the historical context that informed his worldview and also the worldview of a significant number of northern blacks living in ghettos and urban centers.

Like Bearing the Cross, the aforementioned biography on MLK, I appreciated that Manning, an accomplished historian, tried to present the historical Malcolm, to demythologize the Malcolm X found in Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X and the Malcolm of Spike Lee’s film. As such, there is plenty of controversial material, from a troubled marriage and allegations of infidelity on behalf of both Malcolm and his wife Betty, to the allegation that Malcolm may have had a gay sexual relationship. But these more sensational details aside, the historical Malcolm that Manning presents is that of a man who grapples with the oppression of modern society. There is no easy way forward for those born into a society that hates and oppresses them. All of the forces of anger, fear, pride, love, and beauty all emerge in various forms as Malcolm evolves and becomes not only a victim of violence but a spokesman on behalf of those who have suffered.

The theme that Marable Manning chooses for the biography is “reinvention.” Malcolm’s strength was his ability to reinvent himself. As a youth, Malcolm was the hustler and trickster, a product of the streets. After spending time in prison, he converted to Islam and eventually became a minister, an important and deeply esteemed position within African American society. Later in his life, after his break from Islam, he began to forge a new path, a global and internationalist approach that sought to unite those of all races who suffered from imperialism and colonialism. Intellectually gifted, personally charming and disarming, and a passionate and influential public speaker, Malcolm X’s startling reinventions and dedication made him one of the most influential and controversial figures of the 20th century.

I definitely recommend this biography to anyone intrigued by the life of Malcolm X, as well as those interested in the struggle for black power and dignity that rocked the society of the 1960s. It is also of interest to anyone interested in voices from the 20th century that struggled against imperialism and colonialism. Manning’s biography is well-written, historically detailed and thorough, and there are few persons who lived a more engaging life. I give it 5 stars, and I feel as though I am a deeper person after having read Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.

The job hunt can be depressing. I’ve worked hard, but until a few days ago, had only had very limited responses. Until a few days back. This coming week, I’ve several interviews lined up, which has me very excited at the moment.

This afternoon, I am in San Francisco, downtown at a coffee shop. I am living in “South Bay,” which is a bit of a trip from downtown San Fran, and this only my second trip into the city.

I haven’t had the time and ambition to blog recently, but inspiration struck in the form of a very long article that I just finished from my favorite magazine: Orion.

I’m thankful that you cannot spend significant time in my mind, observing my thoughts. Frankly, it’s been nice to have my brain as a strictly private place to think! However, if you were to spend a bit of time in my cranium, you’d notice that I spend a lot of time thinking about why we human beings seem to have such a limited capacity to plan for the long term benefit of our species and of the planet.

These are the kinds of questions that I ponder: Why do we as an American society not care about climate change? Why do so few people research the negative long-term impact that industrialization is having on our air, soil, and water? How is it that we in the States have a movement calling itself “conservative” yet are interested in conserving nothing and consuming everything, without restriction or accountability? Why are people so hostile to global warming? Why do so few people realize that oil is getting more difficult to find, extract, and refine? Why are so many good midwestern folk unaware that the aquifers are getting lower and lower and that they can’t last forever? Why are so many good Christian people I know seemingly unconcerned about the sustainability of our lifestyles?

My answers over the years have invariably involved some sort of judgmentalism and a moral condemnation: People are consumeristic, greedy, intentionally ignorant, or lazy?

Recently, however, I’ve begun to consider the problems from an evolutionary perspective: maybe in many ways, we are just a bunch of monkeys competing with each other to make sure we have everything we want.

Because I come from a fundamentalist Christian background, it has been easy for me to relate to the zeal of radical environmentalism. It is natural for me to frame these issues in moral and spiritual terms: the battle of right versus wrong, good versus evil. I am also predisposed to being a sucker for dramatic apocalyptic sermons: repent or thou shalt be doomed. For a former religious fundamentalist, it is only a small step for me to identify with radical “the end is near” environmental groups. For one thing, the end very well may be near, scientifically speaking. The data suggests that the earth will only continue to get hotter as we continue to burn fossil fuels with no restrictions; but more than the scientific evidence is the tone of the discussion. I identify with the “turn or burn” language of apocalypse……But I’ve begun to wonder if maybe it is a little easier on the blood pressure to just think of us as a bunch of monkeys competing for resources, more primate than we care to admit.

In a long article in my favorite magazine, Orion (“State of the Species”), Charles C. Mann walks us through the evolutionary process. “Our [humans] ability to change ourselves to extract resources from our surroundings with ever-increasing efficiency is what has made Homo sapiens a successful species. It is our greatest blessing. Or was greatest blessing.” From an evolutionary perspective, we are “hard-wired to focus on the immediate and local over the long-term.”

We have thrived as a species because we have consumed so much. Consumerism may be destroying the planet at this point, but after thousands of years, it’s hard to stop. We are destroying our world; can we stop before it is too late? It’s possible, says Mann, but it would be unheard of: “Hara hachi bu is shorthand for an ancient injunction to stop eating before feeling full…Evolutionarily speaking, a species-wide adoption of hara hachi bu would be unprecedented.”

Still. We’ve made progress as a species: the work to abolish slavery, the advance in women’s rights as well as gay rights, and (as some have argued) a decline in violence over the last 70 years.

“Truly, if someone were to renounce a kingdom or the whole world while still holding on to themselves, then they would have renounced nothing at all. And indeed, if someone renounces themselves, then whatever they might keep, whether it be a kingdom or honour or whatever it may be, they will still have renounced all things.” – Meister Eckhart, The Talks of Instruction

Note on photo: Glacier Bay National Park, summer 2012