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If you are a parent, you must see this — Guerilla Parenting (via web zen)

I watched “The Razor’s Edge” again last night, one of my favorite films of all time. Larry Darrell is one of my favorite characters of all time. (In my daydreams my character is some kind of Larry Darrell/Lloyd Dobler blend. Well, they’re *my* daydreams.)

There was a scene in The Razor’s Edge where Larry was in India speaking to a man washing dishes in the river. The man told Larry that washing dishes was a religious experience for him and that sort of impressed Larry, which I guess is why Larry followed this man up to the monastery on the mountain later in the movie.

What hit me most was the exchange they had that went something like:

Larry: “I worked in a mine for two years to come here.”
Dish Man: “You worked in a mine? What was your intention?”
Larry: “To make money so I could come here to India.”
Dish Man: “That was your reason, but what was your intention. Without intention, it was just an empty action.”

Later that night, several things clicked. (Here’s where Cody finally clues into what must be the obvious for many readers out there.)

In my life, action without intention, or with wrong intention, is just as much a problem, maybe more so, than good intentions with no (or bad) actions. I always thought my problem was simply a lack of proper attention. Turns out nothing is so simple.

Take, for instance, my cake failure the other night. It occurred to me that part of the problem was wrong intention. By that time on Sunday night, I was making the cake grudgingly out of obligation — I said I would do it — and I figured I might as well try out a new recipe while I was at it. A better intention would have been simply to honor my friend. Had I the right intention, would I have paid more attention and would the cake have turned out better? Just maybe.

Monday night, Girlzilla and I baked pretzels from scratch. She had been begging us to stop and buy pretzels at the store so we could have a snack. We made them at home instead. They turned out great. My intention in the process was to spend time with my daughter, teach her a bit about baking biochemistry (”Bread rises because of yeast farts” — try that line on your preteen), and to give her the experience of pride in making something for herself that she’s used to buying at the store. At the end all the intentions were fulfilled and the pretzels were good. Intentions do make a difference.

So this ties in my recent meditations on skillfulness with something I wrote a few months back about the source of my errors in making art. I had characterized my errors in my art as ones of ignorance, frustration, and inattention. Now I can add one more source to the list — wrong intention.

Well, hey, it’s news to me at least. I am a work in progress. Yep, a real piece of work.

This recipe will please chili heads and coffee snobs alike. It took me a while to reconstruct events that led to this tasty discovery. Unorthodox as it sounds, it’s pretty good!

Ingredients:

2 tbsp Fresh Ground Coffee
2 cups filtered water
1 tsp chili oil (in plastic container with snap-on lid)
Sugar
Creamer

Instructions:

1. Remove chili oil container from Chinese takeout bag and place in desk drawer for later use. Make sure that the chili oil is next to your “Coffee Sock” (or other reuseable fabric coffee filter ).
2. Rummage around in desk drawer. Stir contents vigorously.
3. Allow at least a week for fabric in Coffee Sock to soak up chili oil that spilled on the bottom of the drawer.
4. Throw away empty chili oil container. Forget about chili oil completely.
5. Heat water to boiling point. Don’t allow water to come to a rolling boil.
6. Put fresh ground coffee in Coffee Sock. Pour boiling water into Coffee Sock, holding the sock over a coffee mug. Allow all water to drip through the grounds into the mug. Discard the wet grounds.
7. Add sugar and creamer to taste. Stir until dissolved.

Serving suggestions:

Allow enough time between steps 3, 4, and 5 to make your first cup a “why is my tongue burning?” puzzling coffee treat!

Our game of One Thousand Blank White Cards last month was a success. It was a truly Creative Conversation. People left with ideas of their own for Creative Conversation nights. At least one 1KBWC follow-up night is being kicked around. That was exactly the idea for the whole Creative Conversations franchise.

So how to follow that? I’m stealing an idea from a friend’s art magazine — Bad Art Night. (Apparently it’s not a new idea, but it’s new in this corner of the burbs.)

In this world of sophisticated design at the click of a mouse, when you can get slick design with your coffee at Starbucks, when even the liquid soaps at Target are designed by designers like Todd Oldham and Michael Graves, the world needs more bad art. It’s a depressing world where our cheese graters are hipper than we are.

So, we need some personal-level art, some non-professional art, some really bad art. A recent Utne article by David Byrne calls for more Bad Art for the exact same reason. Who am I to refuse the man who introduced me to blip-hop?

I’m not so much interested in propagating the Bad Art aesthetic as I am interested in freeing up people to be creative. People don’t think they have to have professional skills to go running or play softball, but they won’t try their hand at art because they don’t have “talent.” I want to give people a night where they have permission to have no talent. And then reap the conversation that sprouts up among people being newly creative among other newly creative people.

So mark your calendars:

Creative Conversations: Bad Art Night
Kenny J’s Coffe House
Corner of Kirby and Nasa Rd. 1
Wednesday, August 13th
7:00-10:00

Open yourself up to new ideas, new people, new modes of relating. And possibly new futures for yourself and your local community.

I’m showing my age here, but maybe you gen x’ers will know what I’m talking about.

Remember those old cartoons with the sheep dog, the one whose orange bangs hung down over his eyes, and the wolf played by Wile E. Coyote? You know how they’d punch into a timeclock with lunchboxes in hand and say, “Mornin’ George.” “Mornin’ Ralph.” And then they’d spend the day with the wolf trying to steal the sheep and the sheep dog beating the crap out of the wolf? And then they’d clock out when the whistle blew at the end of the day (usually in mid-beating) and say “Goodnight George.” “Goodnight Ralph.”?

Yeah, that’s the one. So, I have a question:

Who *paid* those two? What kind of messed-up company sets its own employees up to such mutually-frustrating job descriptions?

Which brings me to my next question:

Does it ever seem to you like you work for that company?

Just wondering.

I violated a basic rule.

Never try a new recipe on anyone but yourself or your family.

I almost went out and bought a mix. By the time I remembered tonight that I promised to make a cake for a coworker’s birthday tomorrow, there was not enough time to make either my chocolate cheesecake or my Uber-rich chocolate celebration cake. I was tempted to try a mix. Just do it and get it out of the way.

But Jan’s a long time friend and she’s made cakes for me in the past, so I figured the occasion called for more than a mix. El Scratcho Cake-o. So I tried this new recipe for Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake from one of my wife’s “trade magazines” like Good Housekeeping or some such.

Anyway the cake turned out drier than I had wanted. Probably tastes perfectly fine, but I had envisioned something gooey and decadent. Something that would make folks say “Ohmigod” as they clamored for a glass of milk. This is not omigod cake. This is sensible cake. At least the dark chocolate sour cream frosting is good.

As I was frosting the cake, I realized my mistake. I probably overcooked the cake because the toothpick kept coming out brown. So i mistakenly thought it needed more time. What I forgot — a lesson I had learned the hard way on previous cakes and apparently forgot — is that the toothpick will not come out clean if you have chocolate chips or bits in the batter. Damn.

I failed to refactor the chocolate chip toothpick test trap into my cake making knowledge base. Fool me twice, shame on me.

“Regarding one’s own personal needs, there should be as little involvement or obligation as possible. But regarding service to others, there should be as many possible involvements and obligations as possible. This should be the ideal of a spiritual person.

-His Holiness the Dalai Lama”

Which reminds me of my favorite definition of Love, which I attribute to our friend Winnie Honeywell, who happens to be director of our diocese’s Family Life Office:

“Love means being bothered for the sake of another.”

Which reminds me of an old 10,000 Maniacs song:

“Trouble me. Disturb me with all your cares and your worries”

So does that mean that Love is a big pain in the ass, albeit a happy one? C’mon, bother me.

More on skill:

“The fact that skills can be developed implies that action is not
illusory, that it actually gives results. Otherwise, there would be no such
thing as skill, for no actions would be more effective than others. The fact of
skillfulness also implies that some results are preferable to others, for
otherwise there would be no point in trying to develop skills. In addition, the
fact that it is possible to learn from mistakes in the course of developing a
skill, so that one’s future actions may be more skillful, implies that the cycle
of action, result, and reaction is not entirely deterministic, and that acts of
perception, attention, and intention can actually provide new input as the cycle
goes through successive turns.”

— Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Wings to Awakening Part 1-A

Action, result, and reaction. Perception, intention, and attention. I feel a causal loop diagram coming on… Or at least a mind map.

The Buddha is addressing here the meta-skill of acquiring skillfullness. It seems to be a feedback loop that adjusts future action based on the results of previous actions, informed by perception and intention. All of these make a classic Systems analysis problem.

Attention doesn’t seem to fit *in* the system. Attention seems to *be* the system. Attention is the prerequisite to the fact that you are examining your actions at all. One cannot be skillful and mindless at the same time. Perception and intention are themselves forms of attention, albeit to internal and external states, and act as inputs to the causal loops of Skillfulness.

At least that’s how it seems to me. What is the difference then? Is Skillfulness just the application of attention to action?

That stands for “Ho Hum, It’s Friday.” Y’all.

I don’t look forward to Fridays. I am not a “workin’ for the weekend” kind of guy. Weekends are just not that special to me.

I may go to bed a few hours later and then turn off the alarm and let the kids wake me up the next morning. But it’s the same amount of sleep. I don’t go off to my job, but weekends mean a work of a different kind. Entertaining little kids and a caring for a household is work. Usually those tasks that can’t be taken care of during the week are left to the weekends. Different kind of work, but more work.

Not that I don’t like being around my family. I look forward to it. But I just don’t greet Fridays with that “TGIF” joie de vivre.

Besides, when we want to have fun and go on a date, Heidi and I are just as likely to go out during the week as any. We don’t wait for the next weekend. When we need to get away, we get away. And we prefer the “off-peak” mode — visiting all the places you folks crowd into on the weekend at off times when y’all aren’t there.

And I don’t engage in any recreational activities that I have to “sleep off” later. So I don’t need the weekend time structure — where you stay up late and sleep late to compensate — to allow me to pursue any social activities involving controlled doses of self-destructive indulgence. Our average date starts at, say, 5:30 and ends at 10:30. I hear tell from my partying friends that 10:30 p.m. is when the fun’s just getting started. I wouldn’t know, myself.

I like it that way. For me, time has a quiet, happy, mundane continuity to it. I don’t divide my experience into five days of indentured servitude followed by two days of recreation. It’s all an illusion, this concept we call the weekend.

And, best of all, I don’t dread Mondays.

I meant well. I’d let my Lola Savannah beans run out without a new order, so I needed some at-work coffee. I had romantic pretensions of shedding my snobbery when it comes to coffee. That’s why I picked up a package of Eight O’Clock Coffee beans this morning.

I got this idea from my recent dalliances with cheap but serviceable brands of beer. I’ve recently tried Pabst Blue Ribbon and Miller High Life. They aren’t as good as the fashionable microbrews I usually buy, but they are a good value in the taste to cost ratio. They’re half as cheap but they’re better than half as good.

Mixed in there is my romantic pretension that I could rid myself of pretension and snobbery. That I could quaff the brew of the working man, the man’s man. People who build stuff in the Texas heat drink this kind of beer. This isn’t “retire to the pub for a pint of stout” beer, this is a “down a cold one in extended gulps to extinguish thirst and heat, rivulets of overflow beer mingling with beads of sweat on your jowls” kind of beer. “Wipe your sweaty brow with the back of your hand while you drink” kind of beer.

And, faced with similar conditions last week, I found that Pabst and Miller make a decent thirst-quencher beer for a much nicer price. (I had to ignore the sudden urge to go watch NASCAR, though.)

And so I thought that idea could be extended to coffee. The cheaper beans stood on the grocery shelf right next to the Starbucks brand, their $3.97 price card mocking me and my trend-conscious coffee snob self. It said, “You know most of Starbuck’s extra cost is just brand and marketing. Their beans are trucked in from Seattle, my beans are trucked in from New Jersey. You’ll be paying four dollars extra for Seattle.” So I gave New Jersey a try.

I’ve always held the view that a smart coffee snob should be more of a snob about the *way* coffee is made. If you have fresh roasted and ground beans, clean water, clean equipment, and a good brewing process, then the provenance of the beans is a secondary matter. That’s always held up for me in the past.

But it only works up to a point. Perfect coffee process cannot save just plain bad beans. And this was just plain bad coffee.

My romantic notion of having rediscovered a forgotten coffee value — a quotidian coffee, pedestrian but serviceable, a coffee that was good enough for your grandpa — was gone after the first half cup.

Your grandpa didn’t know Starbucks, apparently. And if your grandpa had access to the miracle that is Lola Savannah, he would have plowed under those Eight O’Clock Coffee beans in his vegetable garden as compost.

Looking into the idea of Skill as a practical expression of spirituality, I came across an anthology of Buddha’s teachings translated by this dude Thanissaro Bhikkhu called Wings to Awakening. Apparently the Buddha was foresightful enough to organize his most important teachings for those who would be left behind to write them down. Mighty considerate of him. He made lots of lists — the five strengths, the four right exertions, the seven factors for awakening, the eightfold path, etc. — in which he gave a structure to his teachings. People like lists. I like lists.

(Was Buddha the first Knowledge Management expert?)

So, at the base of this structue, along with Karma (which is a downright practical principle if you grasp it correctly), is the concept of Skillfulness.

(Okay, you Buddhists, I’m aware that I’m presenting centuries old wisdom as if it is new. Please bear with this clueless Christian as I discover this for myself. Feel free to chuckle smugly at my naivite.)

“The fact that each side advanced an interpretation of reality implied that both agreed
that there were skillful and unskillful ways of approaching the truth, for each insisted that the other used unskillful forms of observation and argumentation to advance its views. Thus the Buddha looked directly at skillful action in and of itself, worked out its implications in viewing knowledge itself as a skill — rather than a body of facts”
—- Bhikku, Wings to Awakening, Part 1-A

The Buddha was not very concerned with beliefs in Gods or metaphysics or cosmology, he was concerned in how those beliefs played out into everyday experience. He was more concerned with the actions of people who are motivated by belief and wanted to make those actions more skillful. His teachings, in other words, are for Christians too. The Buddha does not want to change my beliefs, just make my use of them bear more fruit.

I’ve been looking for a spiritual practice that produces results and looking for the motivation to produce more results myself. Skillfulness appears to be that integrative principle that joins intention, attention, knowledge, action, learning, theory, and applications and informs them all by looking at actual, honest to God, real world results.

Maybe I could leave eighth grade after all. Maybe I can skip ninth grade and go to trade school?

“If one wants to know emptiness, how should one do it?” “The one
who wants to realize emptiness should adore reality, develop a skill in living
in the world, and cultivate friends of the same mind. Skill can only be
developed in the presence of reality, not otherwise. Endowed with skill, the
person gives without the idea of a giver and lives in the realization that all
the factors of existence have no ultimate substance.”

-Prajnaparamita

I’m still contemplating these words, but the concept of “skill” resonates with me. It is a one word answer to one of the questions that has been keeping me up at night lately. Skill marries learning and action. It joins study and practice. It is acquired through theory and application. And it usually results in some sort of product or tangible benefit. Skill is not just conceptual, not just talk.

Skill requires a balance between the very modalities of being I have been struggling to integrate lately — acting and thinking. It seems to be a sign post pointing me somewhere promising. I’ll let you know where it leads. When I figure it out that is.

All I know is that for several days I have been thinking that, if I went back to school, acquiring a trade sounds more attractive than getting another academic degree. I’ve been wanting to learn something useful. I ‘ve been wanting to *be* more useful.

Reading Real Live Preacher’s latest entry reminds me that I need to update my sidebar links. He’s a must link.

The entry is brilliant and spoke directly to my heart. It’s as if the Big Guy, knowing what my state was this weekend, had spoken to me directly:

“I got that crappy church catalog in the mail. Thumbing through it kicked up the disillusionment and depression that is always lurking just below my surface. It seemed to me that the church was nothing more than an institution. It seemed to me that the memory of Christ was very far away.

If the communion table seems cheap and tacky, become a table yourself. Straighten your legs and flatten your back. Become a resting place for the weary.”

Too freekin brilliant. Indeed, RLP has done just that for me by being open to share his own disillusionment. His blog has been a resting place for my weary soul.

I love the Internet.

So after some rest, finishing my current fiction book, and gaining some emotional distance, I realize how grumpy I sounded yesterday about our retreat.

It’s wasn’t hardly that bad. In fact it was very good.

It is in my nature (human nature) to focus on the two or three detractors instead of the thirty-five or so couples who worked hard and were affected positively by the communication space we opened up for them. As I said on the weekend repeatedly, the cycle of romance/disillusionment/acceptance applies to all relationships, including areas of one’s life, like work and ministry.

I guess for me it was more like disillusionment/acceptance/romance, but I came around eventually.

So if you’re coming around my site from the weekend retreat, welcome. You were probably one of the best couples there, right? Of course!

I promised you a bodacious blog-a-licious bounty of resource links for further exploration into the process of preparing for marriage:

The Marriage Movement — a blog that keeps up on the latest policy and research news concerning marriage and family. This is the bleeding edge stuff. I’m less interested in the policy and politics stuff than I am the research. Good source for keeping current on the latest marriage research.

SmartMarriages — Smartmarriages is probably the most happenin’ organization in the marriage field today. It’s a coalition of marriage therapists, educators, and religious leaders who are very pro-marriage. Theirs is an atrociously-designed website with a large number of very good resources, articles, tools, quizzes, and references to marriage education providers. Have some patience with this site and your explorations will be rewarded. (Tip: subscribe to the SmartMarriages mailing list and you’ll have the bleeding edge delivered to your inbox on a regular basis.)

Here’s the SmartMarriages articles page that has links to articles of just about every flavor. And when you’re done with that, you can seek out the books on the SmartMarriages books page.

So there’s the tip of a huge mountain of information about marriage and relationships. Maybe more than you want. I know I promised you a bodacious bounty of links right here on my page, but why reinvent it if it’s already sitting out there? Think of these as your “base camp” from which you can continue your marriage education journey on the Internet.

Don’t ever stop preparing for your marriage. Even after the wedding and beyond.

And if you need any specific information or want to talk. I am always right here (and Heidi too).

I’m writing this after a pretty tiring weekend. Another Engaged Encounter weekend followed immediately by teaching Sunday School in the evening to Junior High aged kids. Phew.

I’m happy to have a chance to finally reflect and decompress. As usual, I started Friday night not wanting to be there. Giving up a whole weekend nowadays seems like a big sacrifice in the weeks building up to one of these retreats. I can always tell by the looks on the faces of the couples when we start the retreat which people feel like I do — they can think of lots of ways they’d rather be spending the weekend.

If I were less responsible, I’d walk up to one of them some time when the weekend is starting and comiserate, “Man, I know. I don’t want to be here either.” But I don’t because I shouldn’t. I’m supposed to be one of the leaders after all. Being the leader can suck sometimes.

And then later on during the weekend some things were going on that made me feel like things weren’t going well. Some couples were giving me distinct signals that they were not pleased with the retreat. So by Saturday afternoon I was building up a big case of Bad Attitude. Being the leader can suck sometimes.

And then it hit me. Actually Heidi pointed it out to me gently in our sharing. This isn’t about me. God doesn’t care what I’d rather do with my weekend. He wanted me here. And it is not my job to ensure the quality of the weekend and that every couple is pleased. That’s God’s job. I’m not the leader; God is.

My job is to just show up, do my part faithfully, and turn the rest over to her. In other words, practice some of what we preached on the weekend.

And alas when I did, in prayer, offer my attitude up to God, he answered me. The weekend went well. My pessimism was disconfirmed. And I had some very meaningful dialogue with my wife. So it was a renewing experience for me and, as far as I could tell, good for the couples as well.

I need to learn to shut up, show up, and let God do his thing. I guess that’s why we go on retreats, huh?