The Ashes of Wednesday

Freshness finds unknown spaces
within our chest walls,
unnoticed dark innocent

       untouched

Spaces perk to the touch
of freshness when
those encounters happen with a foreign

Pronoun it he she any
sounds of it
images of she
ruddy aroma of he

Brings forth freshness
In a way that literally draws breath in--
to places we wager must be nooks of the lung
somehow virgin to air

until now.

Wednesday ashes of burned
palm branches dried for nearly a year
during communal anticipation
to set those accordion necks ablaze!

O how we love to burn things!
To see that flame feel that heat,
to change something so completely

When there's so much we cannot
as it he she changes us with annoying ease!

Power sparkling bright within us
yet feeling the limited time of July's fire of rainbows
about to fall to
invisible,
 we feel the edge of madness
and shout,

"Burn!  Burn!  Burn!  At least I can burn you!"

And the ashes
get smeared on my forehead where
women of another faith
dot themselves with red dyes
from stirring sacred communal preparation.

Ashes as such once meant dirtiness to me,
innocent biological dirtiness, that is, really
light gray or black flakes of dirt

that lift

with the faintest air.

Now, today
ash is a fresh Pronoun
(even though it's so familiar and old
since my dad helped me to spell a-s-h
for that test
on wide-ruled paper)

Fresh again because the priest looked above my eyes,
his cheeks so kind in their pudginess
pressing his thumb with that burned soft blackness
a cross my forehead
repeating "Remember
you are dust and to dust you will return."

How could those kind, pudgy cheeks be so harsh?

morbid. heavy. words.
they startled my pleasantness
for a moment
I forgot those spaces existed,
had just been discovered with accidental joy!

Then air hit another space

       untouched

within the chamber walls this time
of my ear, so much closer to my mind
than the heart, and thus quite significant

When spaces of fresh faith open and
are found
so near to the skeptical waves
and doubting synapses and thin myelin sheaths and--

"I will make your life again
from those very ashes
with my hand that molded Adam
in the playful joy of children
forming castles from chaotic sands and seas."



by Troy Ahrens
Composed Ash Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Standing Cliches

From a distance to the pond, I don't even notice the beads.  Not even the wetness of the feathers just moments ago submerged.  Sunlight mostly reveals the silhouette of features common so long now to the decoding mechanism in my visual cortex.  I've been able to recognize a duck since before I could read, since before I could say, "duck."

As I stand in the shower, I remember this moment in splices of time.  Many similar as if one.  The pond is not distinct nor the duck.  The pond could be from my childhood park in Redlands or one of the few I visited frequently around Walla Walla during my 20's.

Even if I could get a better read on the pattern and color of the duck's feathers, I would fail the Jeopardy question.  My dad would get it probably.  He spent a few years looking at birds in a field guide, combed over that book often.  Every once in awhile he sees some bird and spouts, "Green-winged Teal," or "Barn Swallow," or something the like.  He does it so nonchalantly.  So unassuming.  I get such a good laugh each time.

It is so unexpected, coming from the man I revered as a kid for stuff like a golf swing or follow-through at the foul line.  Dad knows birds?  Ha!

I restrain from the towel.  I tell myself to be still.

Stand there, Troy.  Be.  For but a moment, be.

Light drops can be heard around me.  Then I notice the cool of sensation as little swirls of air, unseen, take heat away from my skin.  I close my eyes and hear my mind associate a cliche with the dripping of water down my body: "like water off a duck's back..."

Have I ever actually seen the beads of water fall off a duck's back?

I've seen ducks come up from a dive.  I've seen light rain fall upon them as they propel.  I've seen them shake beads of water into all directions.  I can't recall ever seeing actual beads of water roll off the surface of all those interlocking, hydrophobic feathers.  I can't recall those beads hanging there on its back, even for a flash of sight.

I can't see it in my memory.

It is magic.

The stuff of the hand being quicker than the eye.

Gravity, surface tension, preening oil and intricate complexity of feathers, skeletal angles, all combine to perform an act of water off a duck's back that is invisible to me in real time.

One glance at my forearm and I see several beads.  Though I've been out of the shower's downpour for several seconds, beads.  Visible.  Glistening.  Distinct.

How optimistic cliches can be.  We tell a friend to let the stress of this or that be like water off a duck's back.  We don't want them harboring over something so significant to them and yet inevitably unresolvable by mere rumination.

"Let it whoosh off your back; be a duck, man!" we encourage.

Yet because the bead of stress is already clinging to the back of our friend's brain, the cliche fails.  Metaphorical beads upon a duck's back don't cling.  They don't hang around long enough to see, let alone ruminate upon.

But such a metaphor continues in our pull for sage advice out of love.

Why?

Maybe it is less a reflection of optimism and more the desire to bring magic into a human moment that is so heavy.  We could use some hope—the sensation that spars so well with the realist's burdens.

Sometimes, we need a cliche akin to a child's eyes.

We need wisdom, delightful—contained in the utter, believing wonder of a handkerchief vanishing from an unmoved, and now, unclenched hand.

Water Off a Duck's Back

It has been over a month since my last post. Though I would prefer to get these articles out more frequently than that, I'm still quite pleased that I made it back to write at all. I've attempted two blogs in the past, both with intentions to keep them alive with writing that would be regular. But, alas, like a person who loves plants but fails to keep watering them, those blogs died almost as quickly as they were birthed by me.

Will this blog survive by my waterpot this time?

Time shall tell.

I can say, in the least, my enthusiasm for the theme of this blog continues strong. I think much potential rests within the shell of this bizarre theme: to improve the world by encouraging us to take longer showers.

If this is your first encounter with this blog, I encourage you to read below, especially a few of the earliest posts, for a theme as strange as I just shared needs some more background.

So where are you at with taking longer showers, with increasing, at least for a few seconds, that rare and precious time of reflection that a shower can provide?

Have you forgotten to reflect with intention in your showers of the past month? I confess. I have forgotten this intention, most of time. However, in the few times I did remember in the past few weeks, here's something that I found myself doing: I would turn off the shower, pull back the curtain, but before reaching for the towel and exiting that haven of reflection-potential, I heard this inner voice: "Don't grab the towel yet; just relax; stand here; give just a few moments of focus on the cool sensation you are feeling right now; relax your arms; feel the drops of water fall over your skin, randomly, without pattern."

So I did.

Before I share some of the pivotal moments I've had, how about you try it for the next day or so? I welcome you to post some thoughts that occur to you during that time.

On Thursday I'll share some of my experiences of standing there in the shower, like a duck with water literally dripping off its back. In the meantime, let us all be ducks for part of our day.

Falling Leaves, Falling Wonder

Often, most of us, see a leaf fall from trees preparing for winter, but we don't recognize the leaf.  Our eyes see it spinning, but our minds don't.  No, our minds our spinning over something else.

The falling leaf is just background to the "more important" stuff of life, occupying our thoughts and activities, occupying, say, the grounds of Wall Street over injustice of things much less clear and tangible than that dappled, colored leaf.  We occupy clearly defined tents over issues so much less distinct and graspable than what REI and The North Face produce.  Ironically, we are seeking financial and political answers as clearly defined as the edges and veins of that leaf, but humanity these days seeks stability in so-called material things, like money, that are far from the distinct, vivid qualities of Fall's colored messengers.

In the age of credit cards, how material is money actually?

Most of our "money" is represented by digital code that is not confined within any physical space.  We can't touch digital code.  We can't count physical units of digital code and then receive or give it away into our warm, life-blooded hands.

Little of our money is the physical paper in our wallet we call, "cash," but even that "money" is only a symbol of gold bars we never see in the National Treasury.  Those gold bars, however, aren't full encapsulations of what we mean by "money."  Those gold bars represent value that we can trade to get other things of value.  Somehow, then, we own or seek to own value, but this "value" is certainly not material.  Whether represented by "value" or "digital code," our money doesn't have a temperature, like our hands, because it is immaterial, intangible, yet so much of our worry, focus, and dreams depend on this thing, or better, ideas without warmth or chill.

We rely most on the immaterial for our material needs.

All the while, that leaf, full of texture we can touch, taste, and feel, is falling unnoticed.

All the while, in the shower, our naked bodies feel the warmth of water drops fall over the minutia of grooves in our skin and over the countless hairs protruding from our skull, our armpits, around our excretory holes and sexual organs.

Our bodies feel the warmth, that is, but often, our minds don't.

Like the leaf falling unnoticed, so goes the mystery of our ability to notice an incredible intimacy with the water molecules pouring out of the shower spout above us.

                    Our minds have the ability to notice but almost never do.

We have bought so heavily into the regard of such material things as water drops and falling leaves having small value, unnecessary value even.  How ironic that in an age of materialism, we are actually quite out of touch with the material world.

Remember when I asked you to listen to the drops of water hit the tile and floor and curtain about you, to listen to their impact, for just a few seconds even, in that daily shower of yours?

It strikes me that our minds are so often consumed by the immaterial that we are, in a sense, more akin to the unconscious tiles and curtain around us.

That stuff of ceramic or polyesters has no ability to see, hear, or feel the water drops that impact it.  Like that stuff, we don't hear or feel the water or leaves falling.  We are so consumed in our minds with the immaterial that we, too often, betray one of our greatest gifts: seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling material things as material beings.

The thing that separates us from other animals, we've been told, is reason, the ability to be aware of the Self—the mystery of human consciousness and creativity still so elusive to complete explanation by philosophers and neurologists.  This mystery allows us, even delights us, to focus our attention for long periods of time on the immaterial world of ideas like money, love, and video games.

These ideas, however, are not all a human can engage with.  But it seems to me, we spend so much attentive time with these ideas that we miss out, to a significant degree, on what else being human is; we are disengaged with the material stuff we can experience as the other animals do, yet as we can do with even greater appreciation because, ironically, of that immaterial capacity of our brain to bridge with what our neurons see, smell, taste, touch, and hear.

We, humans, are better than any generation before us at explaining things, yet our explanations have done us as much disservice as service.  For we are also better than all previous humans at disengaging with the material world.  Our scientific discoveries of what lightening actually is or what clouds actually are have dulled our interest and, thus, attention of such riddles because they are solved.  We believe them to no longer be riddles.  Why look up into the sky anymore?  The next unexplained thing keeps our attention downward.

And while our skill gets better to dull our focus on the already explained, so does our affinity to not see and appreciate the Mystery that still remains within those "solved" riddles.

In short, we have less wonder in our hearts than any generation before us.

Society's Squeeze

So how did the hearing assignment go?

          Emphasis on how.

                    Why such emphasis?

Well, in a world full of valuations, assessments, and judgments, in a world where businesses entice us with impressive sweepstakes to survey their customer service, where many jobs are not confirmed until a 90-day assessment period has ended, where marketers pay millions to improve their Google or Yelp public reviews, in such a world of incessant judgments...

          ...we could use a little more emphasis on how we are doing, don't you think?

So again, how are you doing, in retrospect, of that listening exercise?

If you'd like to share, I'd like to hear.  Just post a comment below...

          I promise to read each with openness.

Hmmm...openness...now there's a beautiful word for the world we face everyday, a world of judgements and, thus, a world of so much closemindedness.  You see, to expand on this theme of incessant judgments, I'd like to make an evaluation of our society itself, the one so keen to evaluate everything from the food we eat to the toothpaste we remove that stuck food with to the toilet bowl where the remnants of that food drop to the pipes that send it to sea.  Yes, why not evaluate such a society obsessed with evaluating:

          A judgment on some product or an assignment on someone's performance presumes a preset standard from which the evaluator uses to evaluate a particular object...or person, though don't you feel like an object in such situations?  And such an evaluation against a standard is a closed process, for a standard of measurement already has an established—a closed—set of rules, boxes, formulas, and examples by which to measure the object.

An "open interview," for instance, is a public relations ploy.  Such an "open" exercise in the job market doesn't exist.  An "open interview" is impossible by the very nature and definition of the activity itself.  To interview someone implies the use of a preset box of standards and expectations for a position already formed and prepared for filling.

If you were being interviewed to join a company rather than fill a position, then maybe, you could truly have an "open interview."

          But what company wants to hire you for you?

No!  Companies have workforce needs that are first determined.  Only after these needs are identified and prioritized do the "positions" and "job posts" appear.  For it to be profitable, the need of the company must precede the need of the employee.  In other words, a predetermined set of of job functions—and thus closed ones by nature—are established long before you even start filling out that tailored resume.

                    So again, how are you after the hearing exercise?

Remember, I asked you to listen to the water drops but "do nothing more."  That latter part about "doing nothing more" was just as intentional as the "hearing" part.  For the purposes of this exercise, I'm actually not seeking what thoughts occurred to you during or after this exercise.  Nor do I have some standard in mind of what an "A student" in water-drop-hearing would be.

                    I simply wanted you to hear nature.

I simply wanted you to have a moment encountering the only raw form of nature inside your shower besides your naked self.

That water cleansing your body, where did it come from?  Likely from some river, sourced by some mountain lake, sourced by some glacier, sourced by some snow from a cloud, sourced by some sea, to where your water is flowing right now.

In the shower you recently took, everything those water drops hit are manufactured, except you.  You were listening to the sounds of the un-manufactured.  You were listening to the sounds of raw nature within a cubicle full of unnatural chemicals—the tiles, the shampoo (Can you understand half the ingredients listed on that bottle?), the spout, the plastic bottles, the grout, the drain, the "mold-free" curtain (yeah right! Where's the survey on how effective those "mold-free curtains" end up being?).

Everything in your shower, but the water drops and you, are the product of human manufacturing and evaluation.

This whole Shower Time exercise of encountering the natural—within the confines of the unnatural—coincides well with a new movie trailer, Dr. Suess's The Lorax.  Check it out:

And back to the original question we go: How might taking a shower improve the world?

How about the simple act of hearing those water drops might spark a softness and openness within you for nature itself?  Maybe that softness and openness inspires you to hear more nature throughout the rest of your day.  Maybe those encounters with nature inspire a growing love for the natural in the midst of your world so crammed with the unnatural, the closed, and its boxes of judgments.

          What grade or evaluation exists in simply listening to water fall?

          Openness happens within me when I simply listen to nature, in moments free of judgment.

                    Not surprisingly,
                    my love for the natural in this world grows,
                    as does my desire to do something about preserving it...

Comedy and Catalysts

          My mom is a funny woman.

          Her curiosity is larger than her appreciation for suspense.  She reads the last chapter of novels first, and then reads the novel.  She enjoys it better, she says, knowing how it ends while she's in the middle of a story.  Seriously.  She does this!  She often finds out what happens at the end of a movie before seeing it.  Just recently, she asked me to tell her the end of Sherlock Holmes.  Others I can recall: The Shawshank Redemption, Gladiator, The Usual Suspects, and Titanic (ha! Ok, yeah, she knew the end to that one).

          "I'm going to enjoy the movie much more, so just tell me the end," she will assert and smile.

          Point in case: after reading this blog, she wants to know where I'm going with this crazy question about showers and world peace.  Interestingly, this time she hasn't directly asked me the blog's endpoint.  Rather, she's been laying out her theories to see if I'll bite, I think, and then divulge in speech before I write.  This time around, I'm not telling her.  I'm giving her some teasers, but my Endpoint remains sealed.  I'm enjoying her suspense way too much!

          So what does she do?  She takes a longer shower a few days ago to see if the actual experience will help her solve my riddle on the Power of Showers.  But apparently the answers weren't coming quick enough in her shower because she was late to an appointment!

          I told you she was a funny woman.       

          She often makes me laugh because she starts laughing at herself.

          Isn't that true of some really good comedians?  Jerry Seinfeld, with that almost permanent smirk, often seemed on the brink of losing his composure on his sitcom, obviously a previously recorded show.  Were the best takes easy to choose for the editors?  Easy because they were the ones where Jerry actually managed to keep his composure when looking at Kramer being, well, Kramer?

Steve Carell hides his enjoyment in the moment of comedy better than Seinfeld; but it's still there.  Look closely at Steve's eyes in an episode of NBC's The Office or when he's being interviewed on The Ellen Show.  Whichever of his plethora of facial expressions he exhibits in a moment, right there in his eyes is the most genuine emotion: Steve, the real person not the actor, is enjoying this; he's laughing!

How about Saturday Night Live?  Jimmy Fallon was often losing his composure in his SNL days, and we loved him for it!  Some of the most memorable skits are those with actors either barely keeping it together or nearing tears because their repressed laughter is so intense!  Remember the cowbell scene? (Famous SNL Cowbell Skit)  I think my favorite part about Late Night with Jimmy Fallon is that, when I catch it, you can count on him laughing at himself and the crazy things they do.

Something incredibly intimate happens between a star and the average fan when they find themselves sharing in genuine laughter together.

          These rare moments make the stage disappear.
          They make the screen vanish.
          Such laughter joins all without regard to income or accomplishment.

Such laughter is spontaneous and, thus, genuine.  It is a catalyst that sweeps us from individuality into moments of community.  All participants of such genuine laughter, regardless of background and worldview, are indeed lost in the likeness of being simply and wonderfully human together.

          I believe this miracle of human togetherness is an intangible quality of some of the best comedians.  We love them because they are accessible.  Even through endless lines of coax cables,  they seem very close to us.   Why?  Because they are laughing with us.  Seinfeld, Carell, and Fallon transcend the selfishness of entertainment that is fueled by hedonism where only the audience gets fed.  It's like their saying through their smirks and composure-breaks: "Laugh with us!  Join in!  Don't be a numb Couch Potato!  Feed us some Doritos too!"

          In my first post below, I made a bold, strange claim.  I said that longer showers would improve our world.  In the second post, I started to unpack my reason behind the claim.  Key word being: started.

You see, the reason cannot be explained in a definition.  Though the act of showering is simple, the use of this act as an answer to tons of problems in our country and beyond, well, adds profundity to showering.  How so?  An influential answer to the list of world grievances and woes cannot be simple.  To think so would either be a joke or a proclamation of insanity.  The act of showering, as I stated in the last post, harnesses a potential that most other basic, daily tasks have lost.  The answer to improving the world in a noticeable way by showering, then, must imply something very profound that can be unleashed within the act itself.

In other words, our showers today, tomorrow, and the next can be a catalyst for something world changing.

                                        What is that something?

The "something," the reason behind this entire inspiration within me to pen this blog, is not capable of being contained in a definition.  It simply can't be.

Something significant enough to improve a host of global dilemmas must be alive and moving deliberately and with awareness.  It can only be encountered and learned through experience, through stories, through anecdotes of life.

Remember a key difference between your iPhone and you:

Only one can take a shower.
          Only one of the two can be naked,
          with absolutely no protective covering,
          and remain a working entity
          under showers of water.

So let's go further in the discovery of what this catalyst toward greater world goodness and peace might be.  To do so, you're going to have to join me in the journey.  You're going to have to get that participatory spirit of my mom.  I'm entreating the wisdom of Seinfeld and Jimmy Fallon here (How often are "wisdom" and "Jimmy Fallon" used in the same sentence, I wonder?).  You need to "laugh with me."

          So here's an assignment for you (and me):

Right before you're about to turn off the water to your next shower, right when you see your hand reaching for the lever, pause for a few seconds and listen to the water hitting upon the shower floor, the tiles, the inner curtain, your body.  For just a few seconds, listen to the sound of water drops contacting surfaces much more tense than them.  Hear the sound, but do nothing else.

          That's it.  Just hear the sound.

          Once you do this simple first act, you have truly joined this journey with me—a journey toward Profundity through a Simple act of life.

          Once you hear the water drops, you'll be ready for my next post this coming Sunday.

          But you must do the assignment.  Closing your eyes in a dry moment of imagination doesn't count.

          Hear the water drops...

The Power of Showers

Alas, here is the reason for my quirky yet serious belief in longer showers by Americans being incredibly important:

The time in the shower is fundamentally unlike all other locations where we spend our typical day. And this uniqueness of Shower Time still holds a potential for effecting world change that has been lost by all other common activities shared by Americans.

The shower is the one habit, daily for most, when we leave our smart phones and laptops behind. All other similar habits of daily living allow for us to be plugged into the Web of incessant information.

We can jog, chew, work, pretend attentiveness in a meeting or classroom, commute, play, tend to mother nature, and participate in almost all other typical daily activities while still being hooked into the Real Matrix of Virtual Connectedness--while still having those head phones in and those apps churning. Most all of our day hooks us like this, most all, except for the shower. Our smart electricity doesn't work under water, but we do, and in fact, have to be able to do so in order to survive as a species.

Unless you swim often or are paranoid enough from being separated from the Internet and have the money to convert your shower walls into some waterproof computer-touch tiles, there is little else in your day that momentarily separates us from finding out which wife Henry VIII killed, whether Cafe de La La is still open, or whatever else our busy minds must know next.

I know the reason for my call to a new season of longer showers is not a new critique on our society's immersion in the Web of endless information. But even an "old reason" can remain relevant. In this case the relevancy of such a rare "unconnected moment" in the shower only increases as does the number in front of the "G" in cell phone speeds.

But it msut be clear at this stage in the investigation that "unconnected" from the Web does not mean unconnected from others. In fact the reason for the power inherent in a shower is a host of crucial CONNECTIONS that are weakening due to our living in the Age of Information.

The showers we take daily hold an influential and innate power, and more posts are to come on what exactly is so groundbreaking in those few minutes we have completely under water. But today we see that Shower Time is very different than most other activities of our day. The power in that Time is about the absence of a very common thing--already called by various names above. But the power is also about what is inherently there for all of us in that absence.

Here's where our study starts to get really enjoyable! For even as I write this, I know only a little of this what behind the power of showers to change the world for the better.  By us engaging on this further, we will all, me included, become students to this original question I posed and find a multitude of satisfying answers. For even though this question is quirky, it implies a topic, a process, that can guide all of us to live well for the rest of our lives.

I hope you stay tuned because I need more than me if this power of the shower is to offer more truth. I need not just my voice but others.