"After kissing my husband and dog good night and putting them to bed in a separate room, I put magnesium lotion on my feet, do my Duolingo lesson, pull up my meditation app and, of course, go to the bathroom one last time."

From "The Little Rituals That Prepare You for Sleep/Origami, cleaning countertops, talking to plants — here are some ways readers wind down for the evening" (NYT gift link).

"As a Frida Kahlo portrait glared protectively at me over Madonna’s shoulder, we talked past, present, future, prayer, dicks, nutritional yeast, and more…"

Writes Mel Ottenberg, introducing "The Madonna Interview" in Interview Magazine.

EXCERPT:

OTTENBERG: When was the last time you confessed?

MADONNA: Well, every song on this record is—not every song. Some are just joy. “Love Sensation” is just joy. But a lot of the songs here are confessional.

OTTENBERG: What about the last time you confessed in a church?

MADONNA: Oh, that’s been a while.

OTTENBERG: Do you have a relationship with organized religion?

MADONNA: Well, I was raised a Catholic and I’m a cultural Catholic.

"Well, I can’t do meditation. I get bored. But people who do meditation embrace the boredom and utilize it as a way to at least calm their mind..."

"... and maybe center their mind on something that they don’t usually go to mentally. And often things for maintenance are done by Japanese with a great deal of ceremony. Just changing the lights of a street lamp. There’s guys in uniform. They have a special routine. They do with a ladder where they go up the pole and do a little formal thing at the beginning and another little formal thing at the end. And it turns a simple task into a somewhat more complex dance. Moving together in time is one of the profound things that humans have been doing for a very long time. So ritual is one way to make really, really repetitive maintenance less onerous...."

Says Stewart Brand, who has a new book, about maintenance. He's talking to Ezra Klein:

Brand is promoting his new book, "Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One" (commission earned)(only $10 in Kindle). If that sounds a lot like "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," that's not hidden. The next thing Ezra says is: "You quote quite a lot from 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,' which is a classic book.”

"[Cesar] Chavez became infatuated with so-called Silva Mind Control meditation and what he believed was its power to influence events and people."

"Challenges to his authority, real or imagined, would prompt purges or mandates that one potential rival or another relocate. He taped meetings and dispatched union officials to root out what he called 'spies' and 'infiltrators.' He began managing according to the principles of Synanon, a drug-treatment program centered on verbal abuse, attack therapy and public humiliation...."

From "'The Cult of Cesar': Inside the Mountain Compound Led by Cesar Chavez/In his remote headquarters, the United Farm Workers leader began to see himself as not just a union leader, but a visionary healer" (NYT)(gift link).

"Retirement Plan."

An Oscar-nominated short, by John Kelly:

And here's David Sedaris brilliantly admiring it, in "The Dream of Finishing One’s To-Do List in 'Retirement Plan'/In John Kelly’s animated short film, narrated by Domhnall Gleeson, nothing’s off limits when it comes to thinking about the future—particularly when there’s so much left to do" (The New Yorker):

"A day into the silence, I felt like taking a nap, and the urge intensified into thorough exhaustion. I took a walk outside..."

"... and gobbled a few cookies in hopes of a sugar boost, to no avail. I fell asleep before dinner and, after rallying for the evening meditation session, was out for the night by 8:30 p.m. The instructor said she often sees this reaction. Some people experience an adrenaline crash as their stressed minds and bodies adjust to the calm. But it also turns out that suddenly shutting off external stimuli and turning attention inward can demand a startling amount of energy."

Writes Dana Milbank, in "I went into phone-free silence. Something disturbing happened. Suddenly shutting off external signals and focusing inward can demand a startling amount of energy" (WaPo)(free link).

I was surprised to see the cookies, especially the gobbling thereof. Even if cookies are available at a silent retreat, I would think slow, mindful nibbling would be seen as necessary. I mean, gobbling, it suggests obnoxious sounds coming from the mouth, and it is the word we use for the alarming awful sound made by turkeys. 

"I’ve come to lean on the daily mechanics of the kitchen for much-needed meditation, and on my kitchen meditation — if it can be called that — for the energy to cook...."

"It’s exactly what makes daily cooking so demanding — the volatility of the materials, metal pans that conduct frighteningly high heat, the perishability of vegetables and meat and milk — that shapes it into such good material for noticing.... Find a time when the sun is low and, without self-censure, take an inquisitive inventory of the flotsam beneath your kitchen table. Mine is an elaborate collage. There are two kinds of beans.... There’s a chunk of sourdough bread. There’s a chink off a chestnut, a piece of apple core, some leaves, a coil of thin white thread. Beneath my table is a topographic model of my family’s life, painted in golden light: the beans and leaves and string that we’ve shelled and tracked in and with which we’ve sewed. It looks, suddenly, too sweet to alter, too poignant to sweep up. Who dropped the bread and decided, absorbed in conversation, to leave it there?"

Writes Tamar Adler, in "My Antidote to Early Evening Despair" (NYT), which is adapted from her book "Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day" (commission earned).

I liked that romanticizing of detritus. And the notion of kitchen meditation is a good counterbalance to the TikTok trend of de-normalizing cooking:

"When I woke up, everything was, of course, still dark. Was it midnight? Dawn? I imagined it would be liberating..."

"... getting out from under the tyranny of the clock or the sun. Mainly it felt destabilizing: Apparently time tells you what to do and, by extension, who you are. I made my way to the pass box and found I’d slept through a [food] delivery. It was Saturday, midmorning, I decided. Von Bujdoss had prepared a delicious bowl of what might or might not have been kugel; I reached for my spoon, held the bowl to my mouth and gracefully shoveled its contents in. I was midbite when a projector switched on inside my skull. Gaza. Ukraine. Sudan. School shootings. Terrible images came roaring out of some corner of my mind.... In normal life, I struggle to summon visuals in my head; here I was Rembrandt.... One moment I saw my children navigating their climate-crisis future; the next I watched Seth Meyers slicing blue cheese in a galley kitchen. Here was a friend’s death, and then my own gravestone; there was my wife looking cute...."

Writes Chris Colin, in "'You’re Going to Lose Your Mind': My Three-Day Retreat in Total Darkness/The author spent days in a room with no light. Who would he be when he emerged?" (NYT).

"Winners at the April tasting... included melt​ed snow that had been filtered through Peruvian volcanic rock, and deep-sea water that had been pumped up 80 miles off the coast of South Korea."

"There was water gathered from nets hung in a misty Tasmanian pine forest, and a Texas brand laced with lithium called Crazy Water.... Hotels are adding precisely designed water bars. Home wine cellars have become water cellars, where children are encouraged to select bottles with their parents. Water sommelier programs continue to grow. And of course, water influencers gather more and more followers...."

From "You’ve Heard of Fine Wine. Now Meet Fine Water. Bottled waters from small, pristine sources are attracting a lot of buzz, with tastings, sommeliers and even water cellars" (NYT).

It sounds like comedy, but it's really happening. As for that water pumped up from the "deep sea," it sounds salty, and it had me wondering if it's possible for unsalty water to somehow exist below the salt water. The NYT article doesn't impinge on the fantasy of the specialness of the water, but I believe these waters are processed, are they not? That deep-sea water must be desalinated and then a chosen mix of minerals is added, right? And "water gathered from nets"? Does that sound ethereal to you... or unclean? Why not water gathered from towels hung in a steamy bathroom?

"This garden is very interesting in that it’s part of a spiritual practice: It’s used for meditation. Moss is very tiny..."

"... and being in the garden, looking so closely to distinguish one type from another, requires a special kind of attention. It opens up a completely different kind of universe."

Said Harvard architecture professor Toshiko Mori, about the Saihoji Kokedera Temple and Moss Garden in Kyoto, quoted in "The 25 Gardens You Must SeeWe asked six horticultural experts to debate and ultimately choose the places that’ve changed the way we look at — and think about — plants" (NYT)(free-access link, so you can see all the photos and read about the other gardens).

I love the story of the creation of this garden: "In 1339, Muso Kokushi, a Buddhist high priest and master gardener, created what’s believed to be the first-ever karesansui (dry landscape)... carefully placed rocks and swaths of sand or gravel raked to invoke rippling water... In the nineteenth century, Saihoji was flooded repeatedly when a nearby river overflowed its banks... Rather than fight nature, the monks embraced change... With more than 120 varieties [of moss]... Saihoji looks quite different than it did in Kokushi’s day, but, in the hands of the monks who continue to maintain it, its purpose of encouraging serenity and contemplation hasn’t changed....."

The monks carry on a traditional practice of meditation, bound to this site for 7 centuries. But what would it be for you to drop in one day?

"Walking is a way to slow oneself down, to cultivate attentiveness and to return to the elements, as the roundabout entrances to the museums on the islands..."

"... of Naoshima and Teshima encourage visitors to do. A country that lacks Western-style addresses, where simply extricating yourself from a train station can take 10,000 steps, is made for the flâneur who recalls the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s observation that not finding your way is very different from getting lost...."

From "Why Japan Is Best Experienced By Foot/In Japan, the simple act of walking has long been connected to working toward enlightenment" (NYT).

Every place worth living in or traveling to is best experienced by foot. That's what I say. If you want to feel that you are on a path toward enlightenment through walking, it's a bit insane to begin by flying half way around the word — racking up a massive regression — and needing to extricate yourself from or into complicated buildings.

I remember something about walking meditation from "Dharma Bums," the Jack Kerouac book I listened to — while walking — recently. I was searching the text for "walking," thinking I'd find the exactly right text, but I found this: "Standing on my head before bedtime on that rock roof of the moonlight I could indeed see that the earth was truly upsidedown and man a weird vain beetle full of strange ideas walking around upsidedown and boasting, and I could realize that man remembered why this dream of planets and plants and Plantagenets was built out of the primordial essence."

There were lots of handmade/"handmade" signs at Madison's anti-Trump rally yesterday.

What would you do if it was your job to create the look of a truly grassroots uprising? Wonky lettering. Off-beat slogans. One thing I noticed was that the signs — most of them — were on uniformly sized white poster board. I'd go with more unfolded boxes — corrugated cardboard — and spray-painted old sheets. And the sign-holders were densely packed in front of the speaker's podium. That's photogenic, but lacking in chaotic energy. 

I was merely driving by the protests, so I can't comment on the mood. Were they angry? But these are people who just had a big political win 4 days ago — the Wisconsin Supreme Court election. They could be happy. Whatever. I'm not a source of information as I was 14 years ago, during the anti-Scott-Walker protests. 

I remember when that mild-mannered character was "Hitler":

"Rawdoggers seem to believe they have invented a new form of meditation, and who am I to say they have not?"

"Whereas the Buddhist might accept the captive circumstances of a long flight as an invitation to let go of worldly snares, the rawdogger seeks to overcome them through refusal and its public performance. He rejects the movie. He rejects the frail crinkle of the plastic airline-refreshment cup. He rejects the tender sorrow that cruising altitude somehow always amplifies. Having ascended thanks to the ingenuity of humankind, the rawdogger now rises above the very idea of ascent.... The practice evolved from the broader rise of asceticism, especially among (young, very online) men.... What is natural... about being hurtled through the troposphere in a pressurized metal tube burning petroleum distillates refined from dinosaur debris?... But to pursue a state of purity—even a fictional one; even a made-up, obviously impure one—still feels righteous. To act on an attempt to become closer to nature, or some imagined state of unadulteratedness, also makes one feel as if one is getting the best of it...."

Writes Ian Bogost, in "Young Men Have Invented a New Way to Defeat Themselves/Rawdogging is a search for purity that cannot be achieved" (The Atlantic)(free-access link, in case you need "rawdogging" defined, etc.).

I'm giving this my "scrupulosity" tag.

"No music, no streaming, no snacking, no sleep."

"'Raw-dogging' has become the buzziest travel trend of the summer, seeing stealth plane passengers forgo the modern comforts of flying to stare at either the in-flight map or nothing at all during lengthy trips."

From "Men are ‘raw dogging’ it on flights — here’s what the weird travel trend means" (NY Post).

This gets my "meditation" tag.

"The Natural Law Party was founded in 1992 on a platform that included promotion of transcendental meditation, responsible gun use, flat taxes and organic farming...."

"For 22 years, [Doug] Dern, a bankruptcy lawyer with a small practice outside Detroit, has almost single-handedly kept the Natural Law Party on Michigan’s ballot."Each cycle, the party runs a handful of candidates in obscure state races to meet Michigan’s minimum polling requirements for minor parties. 'Keep that ballot access,' Mr. Dern, 62, said in an interview on Friday. 'Because someday, a candidate is going to come along who’s going to be perfect for it. Someday, the third parties are going to be hot.'... "

I'm reading "How R.F.K. Jr. Got on the Michigan Ballot, With Only Two Votes/The independent candidate persuaded a tiny party to give him its line on the ballot in a key 2024 battleground state, sparing him a costly, arduous organizing effort" (NYT).

"Mr. Kennedy was formally nominated at a brief convention held Wednesday morning in Mr. Dern’s law office. The only two attendees were Mr. Dern and the party’s secretary.... Mr. Dern... has worked as a stage magician and also has a law practice for drunken-driving arrests.... 'I’ve just been plugging away, year after year, making sure there are people on the ballot,' he said."

Nothing goes together like transcendental meditation, drunk driving, and magic.

Thanks to Doug Dern for keeping the Natural Law fire burning, lending a hand to Bobby, and throwing a monkey wrench into the 2-party system.

"The anxiety that’s been ricing my lungs turns steely and sharp when I see a pale wooden door built into a hillside, framed by lava rock."

"It looks like the entrance to Bilbo Baggins’s house. I go in. A stairway tumbles down to a windowless, 300-square-foot room with textured walls, a bathroom, and a wooden bed that smells like sage. A single low-wattage bulb hums faintly overhead. It’s controlled by a switch covered with a hard plastic guard, which makes it difficult to turn off and on. That’s the point. This room and two others like it in these secret woodlands are the heart of what might be the country’s only established commercial dark retreat. This is a spiritual place, where visitors pay good money to spend long periods of time in crypt-like blackness, devoid of all light and most sounds, in an attempt to uncage their minds and, they hope, discover something deeper within... I flip the switch to see just how dark the dark is, and terror presses into me like 13,000 vertical feet of seawater...."

Writes Tim Neville, in "The Darkness That Blew My Mind/Embarking on four days of total blackout, inside the sensory equivalent of a tomb, our writer went on a dark-cave retreat, the same one that quarterback Aaron Rodgers did" (Outside).

"We love what we take care of, and we take care of what we love. Instead of groaning at the task of treating my cast-iron skillet..."

"... I now treat it as a fulfilling act of service; I know that my time seasoning it with salt and oil will affect its life span and the palate of future generations. I scrub away at the hand-me-down dinnerware from my father-in-law, and I’m connected to him. In an unexpected way, pride has seeped into my kitchen work. Cleanliness is a matter of principle.... Carl Jung once said, 'Modern man can’t see god because he doesn’t look low enough.' Will you find God in your kitchen sink?"

Writes Tyler Shane, in "You don’t need to meditate. Just wash your dishes by hand" (WaPo).

A sense of profundity attaches to one of my cast-iron pans — the one that I grew up hearing called the "spider." It is, I believe, older than I am. I use it all the time and can't imagine what one might do to it that would make it need any more seasoning. Is that low enough?

"I have this fear of being buried alive in a box."

 

That scene from the old Bob Newhart show [see correction below] was cited by the psychiatrist/neuroscientist Judson Brewer, when he was asked about C.B.T. by Joshua Rothman, who's written this new New Yorker article, "Can Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Change Our Minds? The theory behind C.B.T. rests on an unlikely idea—that we can be rational after all."

"Kennedy maintains a mental list of everyone he’s known who has died. He told me that each morning he spends an hour..."

"... having a quiet conversation with those people, usually while out hiking alone. He asks the deceased to help him be a good person, a good father, a good writer, a good attorney. He prays for his six children. He’s been doing this for 40 years. The list now holds more than 200 names. I asked him if he felt that his dad or uncle had sent him any messages encouraging him to run for president. 'I don’t really have two-way conversations of that type,' he said. 'And I would mistrust anything that I got from those waters, because I know there’s people throughout history who have heard voices.' He laughed. 'It’s hard to be the arbiter of your own sanity. It’s dangerous.'"

 Writes John Hendrickson, in "The First MAGA Democrat/Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is feeding Americans’ appetite for conspiracies" (The Atlantic).

"It’s a darkness retreat... It’s just sitting in isolation, meditation, dealing with your thoughts. It stimulates DMT, so there can be some hallucinations in there..."

"... but it’s just kind of sitting in silence, which most of us never do."

Said Aaron Rodgers, quoted in "NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers completes ‘darkness retreat,’ ESPN reports" (CNN).