We are firmly in the new year but I am still trying to parse out meaningful tidbits from a tumultuous 2021. Since this is a newsletter about books, I have been thinking about my reading last year. I made a goal, as I had the year before, to read 50 books and ended up reading something like 82. My intention is not to brag but to have a starting point for reporting on my 2022 goals.
Goals are a bannister, a thing to steady us. They are not the stairs. In 2021, I kept reading books, sometimes I went up and sometimes I went down. Page after page, some ideas went in, some tales touched my heart, some questions led to more questions. My bannister remained no matter what direction I chose. It did its job, remaining steady and at my side.
So what to read this year? A large backlog of books I want to re-read like the one I am starting the first newsletter of 2022 with. As a sophomore at my Catholic high school, I had to write my first research paper for religion class. The topic could be anything we wanted. On January 17, 1993 at the bookstore near the university, I chose a book on Mahayana Buddhism having never met a buddhist, never read a book on buddhism, having, probably only, liked the artwork on the cover. Buddha Mind: An Anthology of Longchen Rabjam’s Writings on Dzogpa Chenpo by Tulku Thondup Rinpoche is not a book I have picked up since that year. I started reading it last week and laughed at my younger self’s precociousness at choosing this interpretation of a 14th Century scholar. Nor is it a book I recommend unless you want a deep dive into dzogpa chenpo. As an adult telling the story, most often in response to the question of I am still Catholic, I found myself getting a little closer to a morsel of truth. The way the book resonated with me, the way I knew I would always meditate, made me suspect that I chose the book because some deeper, unconscious part of me knew these practices, this wisdom and at fourteen years old I was ready to return to them.
Reading this book the first time prompted me to meditate and to believe that the simplest, clearest state of mind was possible in the simple act of sitting still and attending to my breath. Reading it a second time I have nearly thirty years of meditation experience and am living with only a marginally clearer state of mind. The arrival at a state is not the point, any meditator will tell you, but the practice. This book appears to have only had one printing with Snow Lion, a publication which offered a quarterly bi-fold printed newsletter that I subscribed to and received in the mail along with my Green Peace stickers and my Sub Pop samplers. It was the 1990s and I had the sense that answers were out there, I needed only to look. I looked inward amid the chaos of adolescence, and a particularly strict Catholic one at that. Meditating became a bannister. A thing to return to if a book wasn’t available.
So it goes with writing and reading too, fellow readers. We set goals. We show up to the page, practice from time to time, reading books and filling the page ourselves. We live in increments and so do we express ourselves (reading is an expression, too, I’d argue). We meditate in sessions, sits we call them, because there is a cumulative effect that is as real as it is hard to describe. No matter how long we set out to sit, no matter how many pages we aim to read or write, there is power in the act of returning again and again. Of persistence and trying in a new moment, one not yet explored. Goals are the banister so we know our way, how far along we are, how far we want to go. I wish you grace in setting your reading goals and writing goals for this fresh new season. Comments are open if you’d like to share what you are up to.