Streams of Thought
I was feeling insecure at a house show, and then I remembered this frog haiku
Friends,
After going to a house show last night, Lindsey could tell something was wrong, so she asked me, “you seem upset—why are you upset?” I didn't know I was, but then I thought back to the last few hours and the steady stream of internal thoughts poured out:
Oh man there's that person again. What was his name? I gotta figure it out before we're close to each other, I'll look it up on my phone—oh but what if he sees the blue light on my face and guesses I'm looking up his name on my phone and then he hates me and tells his friends ah!—oh gross, I can't stand stouts they're so milky, I should've brought some beers, yikes there are lots of people here I don't know [musicians and writers, courageous and beautiful, start sharing their work] ugh I still need to write Still Life, when am I going to get that done, these songs are good but the sound is murky, I wish there wasn't that weird echo on the vocals, damn that song was really gorgeous and well-written, I wonder why I stopped writing songs, I'd like to write again—maybe poems or something, I'll start writing poems when I get home, [applause the event is over], do I like to be in front of people for the validation or is it sincere, is this neighborhood safe, I know there have been an uptick in carjackings, oh pretzels! I love pretzels...
Oh, right. I was upset because I had slowly tangled myself up in insecurities and opinions and yearnings for attention. It was a lovely evening (Mike, those songs were contemplative and strong! Josh, your imagistic poem about fish getting stuck in a wedding ring was silly and deeply romantic! Joel and Inga, what a generous gift to open your home!), but I was so in my head throughout it that I was skimming across the surface of the night. By the time we got home, I was literally lost in thought. I didn't even realize I had thought all of that stuff until Lindsey pointed it out.
Has that ever happened to you? Where you just skim off the surface of life, caught up in endless ego-driven thoughts? What do we do about that? One thing I did was go back to a poem for some insights, so please won’t you join me (this is Still Life after all). More specifically, let’s travel back in time to the 17th century and listen to the Buddhist poet Basho's famous haiku:
The old pond;
A frog jumps in—
The sounds of the water.
Three lines. Not a lot going on here, right? It's even kinda boring. Nothing happens, just a frog doing it's froggy thing, making a splash and that's....that's it? On one of level of reading, yes that's it. And the invitation here is to clear our minds, take ourselves out of the center of our lives, and notice hidden, simple things in the natural world. But to this Western mind, I can't help but look at Basho's poem as a kind of metaphorical landscape, an image to live into and reflect on. It's like when a coworker told me “Michael you think in metaphors more than anyone I know,” I responded without missing a beat: “Why, yes! They're structures for thinking!” Basho's poetic structure has some wisdom to teach us. So let's turn to that now.
In this short poem, the frog isn't sitting on the side of the pond gorging on flies, and it isn't croaking for attention. The frog isn't looking at its frogself in the water's surface, and it's not sitting on rock with a banjo singing about how hard it is to be green. Of course, we all do this kind of thing all the time: the constant hunt for attention and validation, the croaking and posting and writing and hand-raising and opinon-giving. If there's anything you can say about life in the 2020s, it's that we've got lots of opinions and, to mangle Thoreau, many of us are living “lives of quiet loud and exhausting desperation.” This is what Emily Dickinson gets at in her short poem:
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
Dreary, indeed. No, Basho's frog doesn't give a shit about attention. The toad one pond over surrounded by ten thousand tadpoles listening to its every word? Who cares! Envy is a distraction to this frog's deeper desire: not to react to the world in a murky stream of thought, not to croak for attention, but to act—purely and simply—and not get caught up in their froggy reflection or what's going on in other ponds (for more on this see my letter on letting go of personas to live a more creative life).
So the primary effect of the poem happens because of the frog's actions, not the frog's words or thoughts or opinions. It reminds me of St. Augustine's definition of virtue: rightly ordered loves. Here, the frog acts, and then we hear and see the ripples—not the other way around. So what does that mean for us?
Well, at the core of my stream of insecure thoughts above are some of those age old distractions: desires for attention and acclaim, to avoid shame, that flimsy lie that what I produce makes me valuable, that I have to build a platform, etc. etc. Our socially mediated age didn't make these things up. We humans have been chasing after fame and fortune and power and external validation for………..a while? So, the insight of this poem, for me, is to focus on that action—that breaking through the thresholds, whatever that might mean for us, and then letting the rest go. Or, as the Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist David Brazier wrote in his book The Feeling Buddha:
What should the seeker of enlightenment do? Fearlessly look into the seat of trouble. Where grief is the strongest, the doubt most disturbing, the turmoil most opaque, the ignorance most dark—that is the place where enlightenment breaks through. Lotuses only grow in swamps.
That takes courage to let go of our murky streams of thought and act more directly in our lives. So let's be our little froggy selves and do it! Let’s face the thresholds within and without with courage and kindness. Want to write that poem? You don't have to pine after getting published—you just need pen and paper. Write it. Want to play guitar? You don't have to watch another YouTube video or bow to the demigods on the Guitar Center posters, just strum that Emaj7 chord loud and proud. Play it. Want to paint? Draw? Wander a museum? Learn how to act? Finally learn how to use that sewing machine? Finally go to therapy? Do it.
Want to go to a house show, self? Go for it! And leave that ego at the door, because if you don't you'll miss seeing all of these beautiful people sharing their open hearts, you'll miss that one young child at the party wandering around giving high fives, you'll miss the warmth of friends and the deep pleasure of sharing art and music in community. Let’s not let shame or insecurity distract us any longer. It wastes our time and dampens our creativity and compassion. Who cares if it looks bad or sounds bad or we make a mistake or no one ever reads what we write (remember: Emily Dickinson wrote thousands of poems in her short life and only ten were published).
Basho's poem is simple enough. Just a few lines, and a simple action. But we've got a lot to learn from that lil' frog if we sit with these words enough. If we lean in and listen, we might hear that water rippling through the centuries and reaching our ears today. And we might find some courage. Courage to let go of all the distractions rippling around us and move through them into a larger world.
Take care,
Michael
Poem in Thanks by Thomas Lux Lord Whoever, thank you for this air I’m about to in- and exhale, this hutch in the woods, the wood for fire, the light—both lamp and the natural stuff of leaf-black fern, and wing. For the piano, the shovel for ashes, the moth-gnawed blankets, the stone-cold water stone-cold: thank you. Thank you, Lord, coming for to carry me here—where I’ll gnash it out, Lord, where I’ll calm and work, Lord, thank you for the goddamn birds singing! * * * * * * A Haiku by Choshu The moon in the water, Broken & broken again, Still it is there.
A short animated introduction to Basho and his poetry
I deeply love Matsumoto Hoji’s grumpy frog painting
Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s poems on scraps of paper
Jesuit Fr. Robert E. Kennedy is a Catholic priest and a Zen master
The Grumpy Frog! i want to steal that!!! Thank you Michael once again and especially here for your transparency. Today I see those inner voices as part of my high sensitivity which is biological and attributed to 1/5 of our species, equal across genders. I think artists and mystics are born with high sensitivity as an evolutionary strategy. we go through many initiations as we learn to navigate more intense encounters with thoughts and sensations
Thank you! Very needful reminder for me this morning.