Pebble Meditation

Now that I am back into reading to little ones, I’m looking in the boxes of stored children’s books from my own sons. My grandkids are both under three so some books are too advanced but this is one that I will eventually introduce at one of their sleepovers.

Pebble meditation is a technique to introduce children to the calming practice of meditation. It was developed by Zen master, best-selling author, and  Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Thich Nhat Hanh. In A Handful of Quiet: Happiness in Four Pebbles and A Pebble for Your Pocket, he offers illustrated guides for children and parents, so this is not just a children’s book.

Many books in the children’s section of the library and bookstore are worth being read by older people. This meditation can be practiced alone or with a group or family and can help relieve stress, increase concentration, encourage gratitude, and help children deal with difficult emotions.

A very simplified how-to of the process:

1. A participant places four pebbles on the ground next to him or her.
2. At three sounds of a bell,  each person picks up the first pebble and says, “Breathing in, I see myself as a flower. Breathing out, I feel fresh. Flower, fresh.”  Breathe together quietly for three in and out breaths.
3. The next pebble is for “Breathing in I see myself as a mountain, breathing out, I feel solid. Mountain, solid.
4. Pebble 3’s recitation is “Breathing in I see myself as still, clear water, breathing out, I reflect things as they really are. Clear water, reflecting.”
5. And the fourth pebble has us saying “Breathing in I see myself as space, breathing out, I feel free. Space, free.”
6. End with three sounds of the bell.

I would compare my own use of a grief stone to this practice. In some workshops, participants may find pebbles that can represent people in their lives and use those pebbles when they breathe in and out and feel a connection to that person.

There are pebble meditations that focus on specific areas of growth. For example, using the six paramitas, or six perfected realizations, are the elements that help us cross from suffering to liberation. The six are generosity, diligence, mindfulness training, inclusiveness, meditation, and understanding.

Another pebble meditation uses the three jewels (Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha), and another uses the Four Immeasurables (loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity).

Do you have to be a practicing Buddhist to do this? Not at all. The terms used can translate to more common terms in many cases. Some people write words on stones and use them on a regular basis. (I see online that, of course, you can also buy stones with affirmations on them.)

What is there about the physicality of a pebble that helps one connect to a particular idea?

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Thich Nhat Hanh’s meditation presented by Plum Village brother Thay Phap Huu.

Reading Updike on a Rainy Friday Night

I was dusting bookshelves today and as I went past my row of books by John Updike I had to pull a few off and look into them.

I really liked Updike’s stories and novels. My wife and I used to read the books together every summer for a number of years. I also admired Updike’s three pages per day writing requirement. He really worked at his writing.  It paid off. He had a 50+ year career and has 67 books listed on his Wikipedia bibliography that includes 21 novels, 18 short-story collections, 12 books of poetry, 4 children’s books, and 12 collections of non-fiction. Many of my favorite pieces of his fiction are found among his 186 short stories.

I wasn’t reading Updike in 1960. That was the year he was 28 (I was 7) and he published his second novel, Rabbit, Run.  The New York Times called the book a “shabby domestic tragedy,” but also “a notable triumph of intelligence and compassion.” I would read it during the summer 0f 1968 after I had read a book of his stories, Pigeon Feathers, and then his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair.

The stories especially appealed to me, since I saw myself as a budding short story writer and was reading Hemingway, Salinger, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and other story writers too. I would go on to read almost all the stories and novels in chronological order of their publication. I wanted to write little, perfect stories like his “A&P.” I was a high school boy and immediately identified with Updike’s boy working at the checkout counter in an A&P supermarket when three young pretty girls walk in wearing nothing but bathing suits. That little plot unfolds quickly and tragically.

In my freshman year of college as an English major, I was assigned to read his newest novel, Rabbit Redux.  a sequel to the first Rabbit book.

I gave her my copy of the sexy Couples novel when we were dating, and we both read Marry Me when it came out and we were a few years from being married ourselves.  Updike chronicles many marriages and many uncouplings, some based on his own life story.

Updike received two Pulitzer Prizes for two of the four Rabbit novels. There is also “Rabbit Remembered” a long story (or novella) that came later. Those tales chronicle Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, an ex- high-school basketball star who first deserts his wife and son and then explores sexuality, marriage, parenting and also the time he is passing through in America.

I heard an interview he did at the time of his fourth Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, which chronicles the end of Harry’s life. It is a sad book about grandpa Harry in his Florida condo, still dealing with his son, Nelson, and his wife, Janice, and an 1989 America that is a post-Reagan time of debt, AIDS, and President Bush 41. It won him another Pulitzer Prize. What interests me in the interview and book is his own thoughts about death. (He died of lung cancer in January 2009.)

I found a video that has John’s son, David Updike, interviewed about being the child of a writer. David was (is?) a teacher and also a writer and I have enjoyed reading his work. I have his children’s books and his books of stories and they are very good. It certainly must have been more negative than positive to be the son of John Updike if you wanted to be a writer. I like in this video David’s decision that he would give up writing a piece of fiction if it meant hurting someone he cared about. I don’t think his father held that belief.

John Updike received much praise in his lifetime for his writing. He also was pretty strongly disliked by some of his fellow writers and by feminists. He was, like too many famous men I admire, not a very good husband or father. But I think even some of those who are not fans concede that his prose is beautiful, often poetic.

I came to John Updike’s poetry much later than the books and stories. I love reading poetry, and I like some of his poems, but I feel like his prose had more poetry in it than many of the poems. I have used a few of his poems on my poetry blog

I took this passage from Updike’s wonderful story “Pigeon Feathers” and broke the sentences into more “poetic” line breaks using his punctuation most of the time. This “found poem” is about what it means to be dead as seen by teenage David as he walks at night across his farm home to the outhouse and imagines a grave. As I said, his prose is so often poetic, that it is easy to hear the sentences as lines in a poem.

A long hole in the ground,
no wider than your body,
down which you are drawn
while the white faces above recede.

You try to reach them
but your arms are pinned.
Shovels pour dirt into your face.
There you will be forever,
in an upright position,
blind and silent,
and in time no one will remember you,
and you will never be called by any angel.

As strata of rock shift,
your fingers elongate,
and your teeth are distended sideways
in a great underground grimace
indistinguishable from a strip of chalk.

What Is A Book?

What is a book? I’m pretty sure you know what a book is – but I’m not sure how long the prevailing definition will hold. I’m not even thinking here of reading books on a screen or audiobooks. I am thinking about the format of the book, no matter what medium delivers it.

The book that set me down this path is called The Unfortunates. It was written in 1969. It is an experimental “book in a box” by English author B. S. Johnson, but it was only published in 2008.

It has 27 chapters but they are unbound, with only a first and last chapter specified, and you can read the other 25 in any order.

Quick plot summary: The story tells us about a sportswriter who travels to a town to report on a soccer match only to discover he’s been to the town several times before to visit an old school friend who has since died of cancer. Some of the separate sections of the book are recollections of the dead friend; others are memories of the past or describe the day of the soccer match.

B.S. Johnson in a 1968 publicity photo for The Unfortunates

The flashbacks are “random” in that the reader chooses what section to read next.  If that sounds annoying, think of how random memories pop up into our present consciousness.

In the book box, there is a stack of loose-leaf printed pages. Some are bound in groups, some are single sides, and some are double-sided pages.

The author? Bryan Stanley (B.S.) Johnson) was born in 1933 and died in 1973.  Depressed by his lack of commercial success and with family problems, he committed suicide. At the time he was basically unknown to the general reading public and was, at best, a cult favorite. A 2004 biography by Jonathan Coe, Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson, led to a revival of interest in Johnson’s work.

From a review of Coe’s bio in The Village Voice: “His technical ingenuity peaks with The Unfortunates (1969), a narrative in 27 pamphlets, all but the first and last of which can be read in any order. The book is fungible, but not just for fun; instead it’s Johnson at his most searing—a grief-stricken remembrance of his friend Tony Tillinghast, an academic who died of cancer at 29. Narrator Johnson travels to report on a football match (one of his regular gigs) and realizes the city is one he knows well, his late friend’s home. The interchangeable format reproduces the random nature of memory, as Johnson intended, and also affects other resonances. The dwindling stack of pamphlets mirrors the wasting body; the box they come in is a casket. But the book memorializes his friend’s short life by having it power a nearly infinite story—billions of novels for the price of one. Here is the beautiful collision of possibility and rigor.”

You might say the book’s format is just a gimmick, but reviewers say that the quality of the writing and the story are very effective.

I don’t hear the term “avant-garde” much these days. It seems ironically old-fashioned. In college, I had a course where we read Alain Robbe-Grillet, Samuel Beckett, William S Burroughs and other avant-garde writers. Is The Unfortunates a book for that reading list? Probably not. It is really a book about memory, friendship, and loss. Then again, the descriptions of some of Johnson’s other novels, such as House Mother Normal, make me think he does belong on that reading list.

Not That Stephen King

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others:
read a lot and write a lot.”

This past month, after much hesitating, I read Stephen King’s novel, Billy Summers. I looked up which books of his have sold the most copies and it looks like The Shining leads the list, followed by Carrie, Salem’s Lot, Misery, Pet Sematary, Salem’s Lot, The Dark Tower series, and The Green Mile. Of those, I have read one and seen movie versions of three. I don’t think that qualifies me as a fan and certainly not as a King fanatic.

As you’ll see, my favorite Stephen King is not the famous mystery, horror writer that people know. Not that Stephen King. If you asked me what are my favorites by him, my short list would include the short stories “Stand By Me” and “The Shawshank Redemption” which are two that many people would not know were written by him. Both became quite beloved films.

From the top 10 list, The Green Mile is the only one I have read and I only read it after seeing the movie. I recall when it was originally published in 1996 that it came out in six self-contained monthly installments. That seemed like a Charles Dickens experiment or a publishing gimmick which I found unappealing. I read the volume that combines all six parts, but in 1966 the individual volumes were all on the New York Times bestseller list simultaneously, so I guess it was a good idea. The movie came out three years later directed by Frank Darabont who was known for some horror-ish films but also directed The Shawshank Redemption. The performances by Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan were excellent and so it sent me to the book, which returned to the bestseller list with the movie’s release.

I was able to borrow the audiobook of Billy Summers. I prefer that medium for most of my book reading these days. I used to listen to books on tape or on CDs during my car commuting days. Now, I listen on walks and while working outside in the garden.

I was first interested in King after I found out that he had been an English teacher like myself and was writing in his free time. I had seen a story or interview years ago that said he was frustrated and blamed teaching time for his lack of getting published. I did that too back in the day. His wife made a deal with him that he could take a year off from teaching to write and submit his manuscript. If he succeeded, great. If not, he would go back to teaching. Carrie was published. Goodbye to teaching. I searched for that origin story a bit online and didn’t find it, so maybe I imagined it.

Carrie is a horror and supernatural novel and I think qualifies as gothic fiction. He originally meant it to be a short story since that was all he was getting published. He wrote a longer novella version that he didn’t think was good. When he was writing this novel, he was living in a trailer in Hermon, Maine with his wife Tabitha and two children. He was teaching at Hampden Academy. He had published short stories in some “men’s magazines.” His wife and others rescued the manuscript by making suggestions for changes. It became an epistolary novel with “official” reports and has a framing device consisting of multiple narrators. The book sold so-so in hardcover but much better in paperback editions and much much better when the film came out in 1976. That’s when I discovered King.

The last King novel I read before Billy Summers was 11/22/63. A friend who is a big King fan recommended it because he knows 1) I love time travel stories 2) I’m still fascinated by the Kennedy assassination. This is a book King apparently thought about a long time ago but he didn’t feel he was ready to write. The short description is that it is about a man who goes back in time to save JFK. Of course, it is way more complicated than that. (I wrote about the book in an earlier post.) It is a love story too. To travel in time here is easy but to actually get to 11/22/63 and stop the assassination is not easy.

It’s a long book and I always think his long novels need some cutting. The love story of Jake, Sadie, and her ex-husband could be a novel by itself. I wasn’t a fan of the ending, but overall I did like the book. That’s my mixed recommendation, but I would recommend it if you meet one or both of my time travel and JFK interests.

“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story.
When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

But my favorite King book isn’t fiction. It is On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. This short book (right there not typical of King) is, as the title says, both a memoir and a craft book. His advice comes from his life, starting with childhood and into his established writing time. King had a near-fatal accident in 1999 and it is very much linked to his writing which is linked to his recovery.

This book got great reviews and I would add my own recommendation to those reviews. As King was recovering (and at first he could not physically do any writing), he did a lot of thinking about writing and his life. That’s why the book is a memoir about writing. It does have a lot of advice in “toolkits” about writing and even about a good life.

Is it worth reading if you don’t consider yourself a writer? I think so. I think it can be inspiring, even if all you plan to write is a journal for yourself. Can we all be “writers?” He says “You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”

“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.”

The House at Pooh Corner

I read that Posingford Bridge, otherwise known as Poohsticks Bridge, was up for sale. Located in Ashdown Forest in England, it was a place where author A.A. Milne and his son, the real-life Christopher Robin, would go to play a game they called Pooh Sticks. It is the simplest of games. You put a stick in the water upstream, then go to the other side and watch it comew3 out from under the bridge and sail away. The game appears in the Winnie the Pooh stories.

I played Pooh Sticks with my sons on the bridge at our local library, and we read all the Pooh books. I still had my own childhood copies of the Milne books and some newer simplified versions for younger readers.

Pooh’s birthday just passed on August 21st. It is also the real Christopher Robin’s birthday. What a nice coincidence. The stories about Christopher Robin and his toys (His toy Edward Bear became Winnie the Pooh in the books) that became his father’s stories seem like such a nice series of tales. I made up stories about Peter Rabbit and his friends and family for my oldest son at bedtime. For my younger son, the stories were about Curious George. The stories closely paralleled my sons’ lives day to day., and I’m sure I was partially inspired to do this by what I imagined had happened in the Milne household between father and son.

But the real-life Christopher Robin and his father didn’t have as loving a relationship as Pooh and Christopher. Alan Alexander Milne was not Pooh or Piglet. Definitely not Tigger. Maybe a little bit Eeyore. He wasn’t warm and snuggly and was often absent from their home. His mother dressed him in “girlish” clothes and kept his hair very long – both styles that didn’t help him in his earliest school days.

Christopher Robin also had a love-hate relationship with his fictional version. That was true when the books became famous and he was maturing and it continued into adulthood.

Christopher wrote a memoir, The Enchanted Places, and in that book he writes, “At home I still liked him, indeed felt at times quite proud that I shared his name and was able to bask in some of his glory. At school, however, I began to dislike him, and I found myself disliking him more and more the older I got.”

Theirs is not a very happy story and though he did come to terms with his relationships with his father and the character, it didn’t happen until after his father’s death.

Christopher and Edward Bear, 1928
Fair use, Link

The fourth and final Pooh title is The House at Pooh Corner, published in 1928 when Christopher was 8 years old. The entire series of books was a bestseller worldwide by then. The more popular the books, the more Christopher disliked them. He was teased at school and it was no better when he was put into boarding school at age 9.

He saw his father on school breaks, but when he went on to Cambridge University and served in World War II, their relationship was distanced physically and emotionally. After the war, he finished his degree and in his mid-twenties didn’t know quite what to do with his life.

Christopher married at age 27 his first cousin, Lesley. His parents did not approve. The couple moved to Dartmouth and opened The Harbour Bookshop together.

Though he occasionally visited his father when the elder Milne became ill, after his father died in 1956, Christopher never returned to Cotchford Farm. The farm near the Ashdown Forest in East Sussex was a place the family went on holidays from London. It is the real-life Hundred Acre Woods of the books and that’s where Pooh’s walnut tree home and the bridge were located.

His mother sold the farm and his father’s personal possessions, and Christopher wanted no part of his father’s things or royalties from the books. Sadly, after Alan’s death, his mother, Daphne Milne, had almost no contact with her only child and did not see him at all during the last 15 years of her life. She refused to see him on her deathbed.

A few months after his father’s death, Christopher and Lesley had a daughter Clare. She was diagnosed with severe cerebral palsy but lived into her mid-50s.

Christopher Milne gave the original stuffed animals that inspired the Pooh characters – Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore, and Kanga – to the book series editor, who in turn donated them to the New York Public Library. Christopher did not like the commercialization of the Pooh books and characters. The toys went back and forth from the U.S. to England a number of times. The collection was professionally cleaned and preserved in 2015 and returned to the Children’s Room at the Main Branch of the New York Public Library on Bryant Park.

Christopher Milne died in April 1996 at age 75. He had lived with myasthenia gravis for some years.

In the film, Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017) there is a version (not completely accurate) of his relationship with his father that was “inspired” by the more accurate book Goodbye Christopher Robin: A. A. Milne and the Making of Winnie-the-Pooh. There is also a Disney live-action/animation hybrid film “biography,” Christopher Robin, in which the adult Christopher encounters Pooh and relives some of the best parts of his childhood.

The two Pooh novels are Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. Milne also wrote two poetry collections, Now We Are Six (as in being 6 years old) and When We Were Very Young, which feature the very first appearance of Pooh in book form.

Reading Aloud

Now that I have a grandchild and another one about to arrive, I’m reading aloud to children again. I did it with my own sons but in my 25 years of teaching in K-12 (and even sometimes in my undergraduate and graduate classes) I would often read to my students. My draft title for this piece was “Reading to Children” but I realized that it is really about reading aloud to anyone. Reading to the baby yet unborn and to the senior citizen in the nursing home or a patient in a hospital are all terrific things to do.

I enjoy reading out loud. I enjoyed it when I was a student in my post-kindergarten days when I could read. Not a good thing, but I didn’t have a lot of patience for my classmates who were not good readers. I would get in trouble because I read ahead and then didn’t know where we were in the book. I learned as a teacher that you have to let everyone read – the good, bad, and the average readers.

I was inspired to write today because of an excerpt I found online from The Art of Teaching Children: All I Learned from a Lifetime in the Classroom by Phillip Done.

He is writing about reading to the really young ones. as when you say “Boys and girls, please join me on the carpet” and read from a picture book holding it up for all to (sort of) see.

I never had the chance to read to a class of mostly non-readers, but I did get to do that one-on-one and one-on-two with my sons and with my granddaughter. But the advice he gives often applies to reading aloud to any age group. And as a big fan now of audiobooks, the best readers follow most of these suggestions too.

His book probably goes deeper into the research on reading but in brief, we know that “reading aloud stimulates the imagination and lets children explore people, places, times, and events beyond their own experience. It builds motivation and curiosity. When you read to kids, you are conditioning them to associate print with pleasure, whetting their appetite for reading, and fostering a lifelong love of books. Reading aloud also increases kids’ attending and listening skills.” They also learn what good writing sounds like and that will influence them as writers.

It really helps grow children’s vocabularies. H states that the average number of words in a picture book for children is around a thousand, so in a typical school year (around 185 days), if you read one book a day to your class, by the end of the school year they will have heard 185,000 words.

Reading aloud well requires “the voice of an actor, the timing of a playwright, the expressions of a mime, and the rhythm of a musician.” We don’t all have those talents, but we can all read with a better expression than some AI device (sorry Siri and Alexa and my GPS).

The best part of reading 1:1 is when the little ones start to ask questions about the story. Those interruptions probably aren’t a good thing in classrooms but when the audience is on your lap, it’s great. It shows they are paying attention and that their imagination is at work. I love hearing my son read to his daughter and ask questions like “Can you find the apple? How many ducks are there in the pond?” I did the same thing when I taught Dickens or Shakespeare just at a higher comprehension level.

There should be reactions from your audience – just like at any performance. Laughs, giggles, maybe a gasp, or an “oooh” when the llama finds its mama. No tears in the early years, but I saw those in my classroom sometimes. (I always read Johnny’s letter to Pony in The Outsiders aloud to get that emotional reaction.)

I used to have my “sophisticated” middle school students bring in a children’s book they loved as a kid that they thought had a “message” for grownups too. They had to read it aloud to the class – dramatically – and discuss the “theme” with their classmates. It was a good and not too threatening front-of-the-class experience. I was pleased that a number of students would connect their children’s books with something we had read in class. “I think that The Sneetches (Dr. Seuss) is a lot like what happens in Romeo and Juliet with the two families.”

I remember a girl who brought in another Dr, Seuss book, Oh, The Places You’ll Go! She said, “My mom got this for me at the end of fifth grade when I graduated elementary school, but I think it applies to middle school or high school too.” Yes, yes, and for college grads, and people changing jobs, and someone starting retirement. No matter where you are in your life, there is still much to see and do. The possibilities are still pretty endless.

Now, get your mat from your cubby, and let’s all take a little nap and dream about all those things.