1) The music of The Shins / Approximately two to three times per year, I reach a point where all I want to hear are various versions of “Simple Song” by The Shins. Maybe this can be that time of year for you too.
2) The Antlers, “Green to Gold” / Seven years since their last record, this indie duo makes a return welcome with a lovely, blanketing set of songs. “Green to Gold” is mood music with something to say—it’s strong enough to keep your interest, soft enough to let you imagine.
3) Scott Cairns and Whitney Rio-Ross in conversation at Fare Forward / The venerable poet Cairns is a friend and, quite frankly, a writing hero. So I was grateful to be privy to his thoughts on pilgrimage and the spiritual discipline of becoming in this interview with the terrific writer Whitney Rio-Ross. Just a few highlights:
“My understanding of what a life is, is a journey or a pilgrimage. That’s been the case for a long time. Certainly it’s what led me into Orthodoxy, capital “O” Orthodoxy. But, you know, prior to becoming Orthodox I read a good bit of the fathers, and I had a good sense of a sort of a spiritual development model rather than an arrival model and a payoff, you know, for having arrived. So that notion of incremental becoming who we’re called to become and the notion that that is in fact an endless prospect—I guess that’s been operative in my thinking for decades.”
“So personhood, as we all can probably attest, requires relationship. Even our theology attests to the fact that we’re made in the image of a God who we apprehend as being a relationship, a circling dance of three. And our personhood is imaged in that way, and so I think to be a human person is to be in relationship.”
“So dive deep into yourself, dive deep into those people who have shaped you. Whether or not you do deliberately return to those texts, when you do accidently come upon a text you’ve read before, that fed you before, you notice it feeds you again. But maybe it feeds you differently. Then you realize the model there is that the conversation continues. You may have read that poem a thousand times, but you read it a thousand and one times, and on that thousand and first time, you see something else that you for some reason or the other—probably because of your experiences in the interim—but you’re now seeing different. You’re seeing those lines differently, and they’re provocative, and then you respond.”
4) Claire Wahmanholm, “The New Fear” for Image Journal / This Wahmanholm poem wrecked me in all the best ways, gracefully granting language for this fever dream of a year. Her meditations on fear and anxiety would ring true for me at any time, especially in this one.
“… If our pupils were dilated it was because it was always dark; if our hearts were beating faster it was because we were always running. Our blood sugar was so high that our wounds had stopped healing. We were either a tapestry of Band-Aids or very careful. …”
5) Prasanta Verma, “5 Indian American Stories that We Urgently Need” at Curator Magazine / To briefly hear more of Verma’s story, tangled up with this list of necessary stories, was sobering and yet a privilege. We all need to read more about one another; white men like me especially need to read more about lives unlike our own. Verma offers a soulful springboard, one we should all show deep gratitude for.