Mind: Contemplative Arts & Community Building: Making Mindfulness Culturally Relevant
Creating an uplifted society of sane, balanced learners engaged through both healthy mind and body-based practices was brought to the United States from Eastern Tibet in the 1970s by Trungpa Rinpoche and collected as an instructional manual for how to live one’s life as a warrior. In The Sacred Path of the Warrior, “Sacred Path” is an innovative society-based social-emotional learning curriculum based in contemplative arts and meditation, such as the slogan that knowing how to brew a proper cup of tea is a sign of a completely accomplished citizen. Connecting with our shared origins of creativity is a straightforward way to have a strong, gentle impact within the classroom. Intentional, healthy, uplifted environments and lessons in poetic narrative and visual methods that are tried and true (poetry and storytelling) give us a way to simplify and clarify for our students the importance and the power of writing.
We know that relationships are built on experiences and expressions of love and gentleness. To create a classroom with an ethical structure which allows for creativity and wisdom where there is scarcity, fear, and exhaustion, we need a method. We could equate this practice of building a society with going through the steps for how to make a cup of tea: filling the pot, boiling fresh water, scattering the leaves in the pot, setting the clean, polished, dry cup out, then serving it to one another. How do we learn how to write together, how to share in meaningful conversation? By paying attention to the details of how we study and write together. Meditation/contemplation are tools we use to get to know each other in a simple, gentle, uplifted space. From a place of trust and synchronicity, we can develop our consciousness, our awareness of each other by sharing our writing, in expansive ways that benefit generations. In this environment we create work that is not about ourselves. The Japanese Tea Ceremony celebrates ritual, hands-on learning, refining our inward and outward momentum training ourselves to understand each other and how to be of benefit in the world on levels that are necessary now more than ever. Writing and meditation based in practices associated with the contemplative arts naturally sharpen the environment, bringing healing to school communities. Writing and composing with purpose, holding ourselves with tenderness and dignity at this moment in history as teachers and students.
“Appreciating sacredness begins very simply by taking an interest in all the details of your life. Interest is simply applying awareness to what goes on in your everyday life—awareness while you are cooking, awareness while you are driving...” is how Trungpa Rinpoche describes this experience in Sacred Path of the Warrior, which he wrote after escaping the Chinese invasion of Tibet by crossing the Himalayas on foot. A subsequent scholarship at Oxford helped him make connections in the West after he arrived at a refugee camp in India.
Hands on Learning i.e., Commonplacing, Archives as Narrative
Commonplacing: The art of commonplacing is assembling a self-constructed, self-published bound book of words and images building a personal historical object like a memoir, but which could also be a work of visioning, fiction, or humor. Taking the steps towards self-publishing models for students how to assemble an archive of letters, songs, notes, stories, photos, lists, which in the process naturally become the backdrop for narrative. Commonplacing allows a collective differentiated format for exploring and explaining the world we share.
While historically commonplacing figured mostly as an elite parlor game, a gentlemanly pursuit which took place on the page, a digital version of commonplacing makes sense for our students. Already students have a virtual commonplace book in their playlists, their galleries, and their messaging systems. Using their phones to collect and organize knowledge and firsthand experiences, stories and inquiry with their handheld personal computing device, a format that might work would be to create a social media profile as the holding place for gathering relevant phrases. In this way, the art of commonplacing develops practical relevant planning and research skills of more immediate value than research skills applied to a discussion based historical research paper. Commonplacing encourages research in everyday life. Writers who research form positive personal skill sets, the habits of the writer, the artist, and the anthropologist, the minister/monk. A relevant example of contemporary hands-on learning for students at Yale Center for British Art where they have a collection of historical commonplace books, for example Harriett Sargeant’s commonplace book, written in pen and ink circa 1830.
Another example of poetry as object is a slavery-based practice for keeping track of family wisdom and connection discussed in “All That She Carried,” Tiya Miles’ excellent recounting of anthropological research and a revival of letter writing practices using embroidery floss and sacks to honor and to make material family love and loss. Miles writes “Many of us feel connected to history through women’s handiwork. Some save and repair hand-me-down table linens. Others hunt flea-market aisles for vintage fabrics. A few of us learn the skills of traditional sewing and quilting to reproduce the experience and art of our ancestors. The past seems to reach out to us through these fabrics and the practices of making them that have survived over time. Gathered up like the crisp ends of a cotton sheet fresh from the wash, past and present seem to meet above the fold.”
Working with fabrics and with clothing as a source for poetry and connection makes for commonsense learning for city students who are not always primarily emotionally or intellectually connected to literary works and forms. Slowly introducing the word as poem or symbol as clothing or as a part of an outfit, makes writing tangible and vivid. Meanwhile we create a metatextual community archive. Bringing writing into daily life, finding expressions of meaning and of love as articles of clothing gets us closer to how poetry is the net that binds our awareness mirroring who we are and who we become. This developmental understanding builds positive relationship practices into language arts practices. Wedding practical language with sacred language by embellishing common objects is the core of what learning should be. Looking at poetry as an object, we recall and reconnect to writing as a beautifully relevant activity.
Poetries of Sound
The recording studio setting serves as a classroom in which to listen, to absorb an audio syllabus of poets whose voices and lyrics derive from sound, chant, and music as much as they do from form. Learning to imitate cadences, document forms, musical themes, and anthropological themes makes for better writing with deeper effect. In this way, sound and meaning coemerge as a location and a basis for writing and studying poetry. A sub-syllabus of past and present audio files is followed and edited by the class, serving as an archive for the group, a sound stamp of learning and identity as it evolves throughout the school year, or longer.
The contrapuntal form Tyehimba Jess uses in his epic collection of poems Olio shows how conversation alongside, vigorous, meticulous research melds into lyrical writing bringing to life voices and facts, phrases in conflict moving towards resolution. Researched writing supported by narrative poetic forms from oral narrative history and storytelling, reinvigorates the practice of honoring culturally relevant voices. Listening to Tyehimba Jess recordings, students practice recording their own scripts in contrapuntal verses. Conversation between lyric voices much like rappers laying down beats, expose natural cultural nuance, conflict and the rhymes of colloquial speech blended into socially distinct layers of historical and contemporary literary phrasing.
Presenting powerful living cultural figures like Tyehimba Jess offers powerful motivation for young writers to take their writing process seriously by mirroring his scholarship and talent. Carrie Golius writes in The University of Chicago Magazine “Tyehimba Jess demonstrates classically compelling contrapuntal form in his epic poem Leadbelly — two columns of text, printed next to each other, read either down or across—to tell the story of Leadbelly’s fractious relationship with folklorist John Lomax...for example, Jess juxtaposes an excerpt from one of Lomax’s actual letters …. with an imagined version of the story from Leadbelly’s perspective.”
John William Boone (1864-1927) world-renowned Ragtime pianist.
C
my motto for life
- merit, not sympathy, wins-
my song against death.
E♭
a stroke piano’s
eighty eight mouths. each one sings
hot colors of joy
F
pentatonic black
keys raise up high into bliss,
Here Jess’s writing takes space up on the page visually inviting us to speak it and to hear the conversation. There are natural breaths and line breaks which jump off the page, breaking down tension we feel when reading dense text. The beauty of space on the white page is another inspiration for writing. One can see in this poem that meaning comes by relaxing into the shorter phrase “my song against death” or “hot colors of joy.” Jess models how patterns of speech, or patterns of thought, if we record them directly are already naturally poetic. This is the practice of sculpting verse from the soundscape we live in. Practicing this art teaches us skills artists naturally enjoy, tools to manage our experiences, meanwhile creating a necessary narrative for our community, redemptive, and clarifying. The musical Hairspray includes a line “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the wine” a statement of Black power in poetic meter.
The former poet laureate Billy Collins describes the process for drafting a contrapuntal poem “The writing process for contrapuntal poetry is multi-pronged. Poets will find their way into this poetic form based on their tastes, experiences, and explored ideas, but consider the following approaches:
- Side by side contrapuntal poem: When crafting the individual poems, consider their relation to each other, and craft each line to create a legible third poem when combined. You can use the right-hand poem to respond to the words on the left side or use a repeating refrain to add a new harmonic relationship to the poetry.
- Venn diagram contrapuntal poem: When using a Venn diagram approach, try creating the middle poem first (the overlapped circles), which can be shorter and communicate the key ideas echoed in the other two left and right poems. Then, flesh out the words that come before and after that poem to fill out the rest of the Venn diagram.
Gathering voices from speech and coming from the environment, sounds and the natural rhythm of conversation makes writing relevant and fun. Listening to the melodies in the words around us brings us closer to an immersive understanding of what we value culturally and personally. Listening to each other speaking, working with found language such as overheard conversation takes the academic work out of writing, making writing accessible as song to a wide audience. By juxtaposing voices, we can appreciate conflicting voices, noting where at times the conflict is necessary to highlight tension and meaning.
A second vocal tradition to practice and study is the chant such as the traditional healer Maria Sabina, a curandera of the Mazatec tradition of visioning. She writes incantatory prose reminding us of our connection to the natural world: “Because I can swim in the immense/Because I can swim in all forms/Because I am the launch woman/Because I am the sacred opossum...Because everything has its origin/And I come going from place to place from the origin”
Chants arise in a simple, repetitive spoken word cadenced framework. Sabina as a melodic carrying case for thoughts and logic. The act of reading together gives us another path to insight with melody, connecting us from generation to generation. Chants are a natural extension of the contrapuntal poem.