Appreciation Practice

Reading an interview with His Holiness The Twelve Gyalwang Drukpa I find myself thinking, “I knew that. I know that. That’s not hard. Well, duh. No problemo. I can do that.” Thoughts like that. When asked about meditation His Holiness says, “the natural state is the main thing: awareness itself…Of course, we try to meditate daily” he says, “sitting, chanting praying. But I would say that not doing too much is the important thing…Consider nondoing, nonaction...My goal is not doing anything, ultimately. Just being. That’s it.”

Just being. To be… it’s not a question, Hamlet. It’s the answer. The Drukpa continues, “The essence of dharma is not to harm anybody…Realization is unconditional happiness…. You have to … appreciate [the harmful parts of our life and the world] anyway, as it is in reality… Maybe [‘the great gurus”] don’t especially…approve [of those parts], but…Acceptance and understanding [are] there at some level…For now you can walk, and think, and see. So— appreciate, appreciate, appreciate! There is no real reason you cannot be happy.”

If that’s true why does it seem so hard sometimes? Why, as Lama Surya Das points out in his questions, are we so often seduced by unskillful thoughts and emotions? His Holiness answers, “You need time in practice. You change your habits and change your mind and become more aware. You need to remember and to tell yourself again and again that this is the liberating teaching and to reflect upon it, and recall how and what to appreciate, to keep developing heartfelt appreciation and diligence.”

The practice is like watching your breath in meditation. You watch your breath and when you realize you’ve become distracted and forgotten your breath, you simply, gently bring your attention back to the breath. In everyday awareness you attend the miraculous gift of existence. The warmth of your clothing, the soft whir of this ingenious machine, your computer, sounds from outside reaching your ears, pulse, respiration, sensations, physics, light, shadow. We watch the miracle like we watch the breath and when we become sad and distracted by the confusion and violence of men, we reflect, understand, see how it’s all of a piece…a time bound process. The waves strike the rocks. There is backlash, counter forces, the deeper patterns emerge, the folly of attachment and fragmented perspective reveal themselves, we learn, clashing waves cancel each other out, and we gently bring our minds back to the miracle. Through this practice the world is liberated.

We are most effective and most happy doing nothing but being awareness, by going into the world and being awareness and letting action flow from choiceless awareness. No one’s doing it. The interplay of a greater intelligence in this life seems to flow from a centerless great perfection, where clarity abides. The most facile efficiency wells naturally from a serene knowing that transcends concepts. Sometimes there is the smooth equanimity of concentration and sometimes there is the cognitive dissonance of forgetfulness but the practice remains.

Bring the mind back to attention, witness dispassionately the mechanics of sorrow, notice how effortlessly shifting one’s energy to attention begins to deflate the most overblown fits of anxiety. We don’t need reasons to be happy. We mostly need to shift our psychic energy away from angst and toward attention. When you notice your fingers on the keyboard, dancing out the intricate steps of reflection, language, and passion, you’re back, beholding the miracle again, following the breathing of the You-niverse. Happy, enveloped in the arms of the Eternal Beloved… always conspiring to do you good. Back. Appreciating, appreciating, appreciating. But…you knew that.

An Infinity of Miracles

As I've written before, scientific inquiry can be a spiritual practice. After all, the two contain the common elements of inspiration, attention, and questioning.



Likewise, spiritual inquiry can be approached scientifically.

In The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion, Ken Wilber suggests that we should approach the issue of spirit like we do any scientific inquiry, by applying “the three strands of valid knowledge” to the primary sphere of spiritual insight— the domain of contemplation and meditation. The three strands are (1) Injunction: Do the prescribed practice; engage in the appropriate experiment to elicit the knowledge; (2) Apprehension: Have the direct experience and collect the relevant data; and (3) Confirmation: Check the results with others who have also completed the first two strands.

But, of course, most people think they don’t have the time or the inclination to have a direct experience. Like the clerics that refused to look through Galileo’s telescope for fear of seeing something that might prove inconvenient, such people only have time to select the vestments of their beliefs off the racks of the second hand idea stores of the world. Fundamentalists flat out refuse to do the three strands of valid knowledge. That would be heresy. An open mind is a dangerous thing.

Wilbur suggests in his book that to have a direct experience of spirit one might execute the injunction of living in a Zen Buddhist ashram for six years. But if the seeker of the spiritual is like a fish looking for water at the bottom of the ocean, as the ancients say, direct experience must be closer at hand than a monastery in Kyoto.

In fact, the prescribed practice may be largely a matter of changing one’s perspective (granted often easier said than done). When asked “What is spirit?” my reply would be “What isn’t?” Sadly, sometimes it seems it would take a miracle to get many of my friends and family members to open to the idea of something beyond space/time. Walt Whitman wrote, “Miracles. Who makes much of a miracle? As for me, I know of nothing but miracles.” If they could truly sense the miracles that make up everything around them and inside them, they wouldn’t even have to ask about spirit. It would be self-evident.

But we are the victims of a societal campaign to negate real meaning— one in which the Navy blithely labels the whales it has killed “bionics;” where chemical-laden dairy cows are called “production units;” and where slaughtered civilians come under the amorphous heading of "collateral damage.” How could you get someone to work 60 hours a week if you didn’t dumb down his sense of the miracle of spending time with his kid? How else could you get that man to send his kids to die in a war? If we really sensed that we live in a world of miraculous beauty and wonder, we would be so filled with spirit that we would never doubt its existence again.

My injunction? Pray for wonder. Allow the smallest, most ordinary occurrence to fill you with wonder, the way the angle of the sunlight can change the entire emotional context of an experience. Contemplate the miracle of the millions of functions your body accomplishes as you walk along seeing the sights, whistling a tune, jingling your keys in your pocket as you digest lunch. Millions of electrochemical messages networking the body simulaniously leaving the speed of light in the dust of physical space. How does it all happen? Science is working on it and, halleluia, each answer they find reveals ten more questions and a thousand more wonders.

You are what you open up to, so open up to wonder. Open wide. Let the miracles come pouring in. When you look at that rose, allow the experience to engulf you, obliterating the distracting reactive mechanism of thought, even the notion that you are looking at a rose. Let the observer/observed thought habit fall away with the rest of your mind sets.

We can be liberated by a focused experience of a rose, a smile, or the sound of the ocean if we practice openness, allowing those experiences to wash over us as if nothing else mattered for the moment. Because for the most part, nothing does. The domain of the spirit is right here, right now — in the moment. In the realm of wonders overlooked.

As Annie Philpott wrote, “The world is a miraculous garden waiting patiently for us to awaken to its splendors.” Stroll the garden. Relax into wonder. Empty your cup of stale notions so it might be refilled with an infinity of miracles.

Deprogramming from the Cult of Scientism

I have often counted my lucky stars that I was not born into a family of old-tyme religious literalists. Then I would be struggling with the same debilitating emotional issues that so many of my friends must deal with. I would contantly be wrestling with absurd questions like: If I eat the wrong food on the wrong day, will I burn in hell for eternity? If I rack up a little overtime on the Sabbath will I burn in hell for eternity? If I don't hate the designated spawns of Satan... you get the idea.

Then there's the notion that even if I don't sin, there's always original sin. Adam and Eve blew it for everyone. With the dogma of original sin it's basically "Damned if you do and damned if you don't." There's no getting around it, like Lou Costello said long ago, "I'm a baaaaaad boy..." All self-esteem is tainted with the sin of pride and no good deed goes unpunished.

As it happens, I was raised by a bunch of scientific materialists, so the painful process of rejecting such irrational programming every waking hour is not my fate. Or is it? One of the tenets of scientific materialism is that science has pretty much figured out that nothing, certainly not consciousness, exists beyond the physical universe. So, once your physical body ceases to be, then, no matter what you do, it's oblivion forever (Damned if you do and damned if you don't). So this is the question I wrestle with all the time, "Has science really determined that nothing exists beyond the physical universe?" Is that really true or just a dogmatic assertion of the cult I'm trying to deprogram myself from? I've been looking into it and here's what I've come up with.

Scientific materialists are stuck in a 17th-century idea that the cosmos is a dead machine where nothing exists beyond the mechanics of the physical universe. They believe, any sense that we exist independent of the processes of this organism we call a body is merely a quirky byproduct of said organism. They claim that since the soul can’t be verified through repeatable experiments it probably doesn’t exist. But, like all fundamentalist precepts, their suppositions are based on glaring assumptions.

The existence of electromagnetic force couldn’t be verified in the laboratories of the Middle Ages but surely it must have existed nonetheless or the universe would be so much cosmic dust drifting in clouds around the galaxy. Radioactivity no doubt existed before the Curie’s experiments and so, clearly, does spirit, though, to a scientific materialist, it has yet to be distilled into anything more substantive than alchoholic beverages. Reality soldiers on somehow, irrespective of our ability to grasp it.

We are indebted to scientists like Einstein who believed that “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. If he hadn’t, the whole idea of Quantum Mechanics might have been dismissed as so much intellectual claptrap and I’d be writing with a ball point instead of an iBook. Scientism claims that our inability to reproduce spirit in the lab is evidence of its nonexistence. I believe it is proof of a lack of imagination (and courage). But rest assured, not all researchers are content to ask the wrong questions or draw a paycheck lobbying for authoritative mind sets. Much intriguing data is being amassed.

Anyone who claims that we even know much about the physical universe needs to be better read. It is currently estimated that seventy percent of the mass of the universe is made of dark matter, and twenty percent is dark energy. Bottom line: by all scientific accounts, we’re pretty much in the dark. Here’s what we know. We’ve observed about five percent of the universe. The rest is simply highly contested theory. In order to account for the existence of pulsars and other dichotomies between quantum theory and the general theory of relativity, physicists have invented String Theory which postulates eight additional dimensions to the three we can detect with our five senses. Can you imagine? Me neither. Who knows?

One thing is certain. We’re groping in the fog. But that’s a good thing. To know enough to realize how much of a fog we’re in is an important step. And, of course, groping is always good, since the greatest treasure found will always be the search itself. To be curious, alive, engaged. Like Joshua Heschel says, we should always pray for wonder.

This is one reason I like to think of science as a spiritual practice, because it stimulates wonder. For every byte of information confirmed, ten more big questions emerge— questions like: Why is the outer fringes of the big bang accelerating out into space and not slowing down? Why is it that the early Big Bang expanded with the exacting perfection required to produce intelligent life in the universe? Prompting Stephan Hawking to comment, “The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications.” Who says there’s only seven wonders? Wonder is all there is.

When an SM (scientific materialist) says “You can’t prove there’s a soul.” My response is, “You can’t prove there isn’t a soul.” One thing’s for sure. We don’t just die and then disappear forever. How do I know? Because we’re here right now. We have just as much chance of existing in one form or another after we die as we did before we were born, And given an infinity of chances between now and the Big Crunch, the odds strongly suggest we will exist again.

To deny this probability is to invent a cosmic force (God?) which is charged with the duty of making sure no soul ever gets any “do-overs”. So by attesting that death is the void forever, the materialists are unwittingly advocating a post life entity that can be kept in a metaphysical coma so to speak, in stasis ad infinitum, A post physical entity, by the way, that pretty much fits the definition of a soul (albeit unconscious forever). Not to mention they are strongly inferring an invisible intelligence determined to keep this soul unconscious forever— as ludicrous a notion as any crackpot theology I’ve ever heard.

More likely the soul is similar to “the real world,” the physical universe sketched out by Quantum Physics. Like subatomic particles we are probably popping in and out of physical existence all the time. Where do we go when we’re not here? If we are like the physicists’ depiction of the subatomic particle “in stasis” — we dwell everywhere. Like the mystic said to the hot dog vendor, "Make me one with everything." Of course, we already are— except these second-hand minds we've got to work with are too small to see it. Too small to see that there is no death, only change. (More later... the image, by the way, is William Blake's depiction of Newton.)

Suchness II

“The real thing” doesn’t come out of a pop bottle. It’s everywhere and it’s ours for the taking. The Great Tao is manifesting before your very eyes as we speak. You don’t need to watch some cheap digital magic trick on a Harry Potter movie, the most stunning transformations are happening all around us all the time. Water pressure at the Hetch Hetchy reservoir is being converted into electrical current that heats a filament in a vacuum globe above your head that explodes into a shower of photons that reflect off the surfaces of the room into your irises where it stimulates your neural apparatus to create forms and colors that represent a particular place and a particular time. And what’s happening in the sub atomic world or in the neuropeptide cellular universe to knock your socks off? Plenty. Don’t get me started. Believe me, reality TV’s got nothing on reality.

But we’re always missing the real show because we’re always watching bad remakes of the same old movie: Held Over for the 10,000th week in a row at the Cranium Theater… “Me, the movie. The Story of my Endless Quest for Survival, Respect and a Few Good Laughs in a Hostile World”. Like Roger Ebert says, “Save me the aisle seat.” I may have to walk out in the middle of this one.

It’s like Whitman and his poem “When I Heard the learn’d astronomer” The awesome facts and figures about astronomy are all very impressive but for the awake and aware, nothing will replace the experience of simply walking beneath the stars.

The same is certainly true of your little story. And mine. Isn’t it just so full of drama and pathos? And doesn’t it pale in comparison to the glorious culmination of all our stories plus the be-all end-all saga of all time, Being itself, ever-changing, everlasting, wondrous, the quiet witnessing of everything going down before us… forever?

No? You’re not sure? Never thought about it? Nothing like a good Cuban cigar you say? Maybe we need to acquire a taste for subtler kicks before we kick off entirely. We need to learn to savor the subdued delights of the swaying of the leaves on the trees. But no, that couldn’t be soothing or healing or a worthwhile expenditure of our time… to watch the boughs of the trees do their little live action hula dance? What are we? A bunch of stoned-out hippies? Why, it hasn’t been sanctioned. What major company has earmarked a million dollar ad campaign to promote that? Therefore what could it be worth? Where are there any anthems or hymns dedicated to it?

Why do the powers-that-be have to give their seal of approval to something before we can see the beauty in it? Are we that programmed? Are we that exiled from our simple, happy duckling selves bobbing on the waves of wonder.
Buckminster Fuller invented a concept he called ephemeralization. It referred to a healthy trend in technological development in which more and more is produced by less and less until eventually we can produce "everything from nothing". That’s ephemiralization.

We need to practice a kind of ephemeralization of our attitudes. We need to get more and more well being from less and less arbitrary stimuli until we can become supremely happy for no particular reason at all. Until we can draw great satisfaction from one breath of clean fresh air, we’ll be fouling the air all around in our desperate, ill-conceived attempt to smoke or four-wheel or industrially pollute our way to happiness. Ephemiralize the pursuit of happiness. Or make everybody miserable.

Part of this process will be to deprogram yourself from the pursuit of conventional happiness. You know, the big house, two cars, the trophy spouse and a couple of kids along with a prestigious and well-paying job? And, of course, with the conventional pursuit of happiness you’re going to need 100s of 1000s of dollars worth of education, loans, cosmetics, work and school cloths (not to mention years of psychotherapy) to accomplish all this. But at least this particular high maintenance approach to happiness just happens to be great for the GNP… I mean, as long as we’re at it, right? Amazing coincidence. Who came up with this strategy anyway? See that guy in the Armani with the Cartier watch?

There is a Hindu fable about an ancient king who decided that in order to save wear and tear on the feet of all his subjects he would have all the cattle in the kingdom slaughtered so he could pave the roads with leather. Fortunately his advisors convinced him that it would be more efficient and less bloody to simply strap a small piece of leather onto every foot in the kingdom, We need to stop the mass slaughter based on half-baked ideas. We need to fashion some spiritual sandals we can slip on whenever we venture forth on our great journey through life.

Get it? See awesomeness in the eyes of a friend and you won’t need to build the Tower of Babel to construct a sense of deep meaning. Ephemeralize the pursuit of happiness. But you’ve got to get your sensibilities in shape. Discard the training wheels of name brands, shiny motorboats, plastic surgery and single malt scotches (Spirits have always been a weak substitute for spirit.). Drop the crutches and walk to Papa. You can do it.

Delight in the play of shadow and light. Revel in the colors and aromas of vegetables sautéing in the pan. Soak in the vibes of the cat purring in your lap. Slow down and open up and you won’t need the incessant noise of a Play Station 2 to feel engaged.

See the miraculous in the seemingly ordinary. See the original beauty in every little thing! Has there ever been such a snowflake? Will there ever be such a snowflake again? This is the Zen idea of suchness. Appreciating the unique worth of every little thing. It’s not just a rock. It’s such a rock! Quintessential! Suffused with Buddha nature! As Lao Tsu said, “The sage does not measure one thing against another/ And the stone and jewel are honored as equals. ”This is suchness. The fact that even the smallest thing is a unique expression of the cosmos. As William Blake put it,

To see the world in a grain of sand
And Heaven in a wild flower
Is to hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

It’s been estimated that each person in the United States consumes 11,000 pounds of resources a year to maintain his/her lifestyle. If our high maintenance approach to happiness were really working we’d have to be the happiest people that ever existed judging from our dust alone. But the horrific reality is, we have an alarmingly high rate of murder, rape and child abuse compared to other nations. We’ve been led down a primrose path made of leather. And, personally, I'm not into leather.

There's a Japanese saying that goes, "He who knows not when he has enough is poor." If you don’t appreciate what you have already, what’s the use of accumulating more? Even with the best sports equipment money can buy, “you can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd” as Rodger Miller reminds. But, as Miller’s song continues, “you can be happy if you’ve a mind to”— if you’ve a mind that can see the world in a grain of sand or heaven in a wild flower. Getting such a mind might take a little gumption, but not nearly as many payments as the more highly endorsed, saturation advertized, conventional pursuits of happiness.

No Muchness like Suchness

“What I want, I haven’t got. What I need is all around me.”
Dave Mathews from his song “Warehouse”

When we were children our delight was ignited by the simplest things. Joy was our natural state. We were empathetic. If others were happy we laughed out loud. If others suffered it saddened us. We didn’t repress our emotions, nor did we cling to them. We were simple, vulnerable and beautiful. Rows of ducklings bobbing on the waves of wonder. We were It. No worries, No agendas. No identity crises. We were aliveness and that was enough.

But we were also born into a world of hucksterism. into an economy based on hype, a world where promoters of every stripe sing their jingles and puff their slogans, where gurus chant their chants, and televangelists perform their prayers and sell their prayer cloths, and politicos make their reluctant but resolute declarations of war in hopes of drumming up a few more guilders for their corporate sponsors.

And if business interests exaggerate the importance of their product, and make the patsies lose their shirts or their lives, well, get a grip, that’s just life in the big city. You gotta crack a few eggs if you want to make an omelet. An’, sure, perhaps a few more of your eggs got cracked than mine, but, hey, look, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles And granted I may have gotten to eat almost all the omelet myself (Here, I saved you some toast.), but still, it’s nobody’s fault. Hey, Ken Lay didn’t know, alright? It’s all about market forces anyway. Darwin did it.

In other words we live in a world in which the dominant inhabitants have an extraordinary capacity to justify anything to others and to themselves. This makes them capable of anything. (Because their amazing ability to swallow their own guff renders them incapable of knowing just what the hell they wrought at any given time.)

And so, sadly, those sweet little ducklings we spoke of earlier, the children of the world, are the first and freshest game in their crosshairs because the very young are among the easiest to twist into the desired shape, like little pipe cleaners. Hey, it is not insidious. It’s business. American as apple pie. Just remember, as the makers of Barbie accessories and the tobacco companies have always said, “Program ‘em early and you got ‘em for life.”

Show them cartoons full of action (read; violence) in a way that confuses where the program ends and the ad for the action figure begins. Depict peer-aged children having ecstatic fun with the amazing robot that flies and knocks down walls on the show. Maybe the toy can do that too. Hey, Mommy, I want that! And, as easy as shootin' fish in a barrel, the “the nag factor” has been “installed”.

Twenty years later when the grown kid’s watching a TV program that’s still little more than a half-hour ad— home makeover, car makeover, face makeover— it's no longer enough to simply be “aliveness” any more. Aliveness has long ago become unbearable without a latest animated movie hero figurine from the local Mac Donald’s, or the $100 Nike’s or liposuction as seen on “The Swan”. Unconditional happiness is robbed from us by the hucksters of the world so they can sell it back to us wrapped in crinkly cellophane. Only their scale model replica of happiness is far from unconditional. Read the limited warranty.

If I were the devil and I didn’t have the personal power to destroy God’s little masterpiece, the Earth, what would my Plan B be? I’d get mankind to destroy the accursed little planet for me. But how would I get man to destroy himself along with his world, all for my amusement? I’d make him stupid and needy knowing how volatile that combination of neuroses can be.

If I were the devil, I’d have power hungry men directing billions of dollars and man-hours toward the purpose of fogging men’s minds. Suppressing any news or perceptions that might counter the ad blitz for Moore & Moore and More! International. Fogging men’s minds would be essential because as Richard Heinberg, the author of The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Society said, “Reality is bad for business.” I’d teach that neediness makes the world go round.

I’d disguise stupidity as virtue, thoughtfulness as cowardly, and might as self-evidence of righteousness. I’d get control of the airwaves and beam, Paris Hilton, Jerry Springer, Bill O’Reilly and Entertainment Tonight out there 24/7, wall-to-wall, coast-to-coast, sun up to midnight to prove my point.

Fog their minds so they think the pursuit of bling-bling is the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness as opposed to its antithesis— slavery through induced obsession disorder. Get them to think that worth is measured not by the things you create but by what you consume. Get nations to think that if they want prosperity they have to breed greed round the world. Advocate global rule by market forces. Inflate half-truths to the preponderance of natural laws. Like that monstrous unwritten law that says that real Americans are supposed to live as large as possible.

Creature comforts (as opposed to the comfort of creatures) has become our prime directive as was expressed so forcefully by President George H. W. Bush when he told the ’92 Earth Summit in Brazil flat out, “The American way of life is not up for negotiation.” Ah, the American Lifestyle. Hallowed be thy name. As our magnificent traffic jam of Cadillac Escalades heads like a serpentine pageant into the orange haze of all the tomorrows to come, we sing a tear-streaked anthem to lies, libertines, and the pursuit of sappiness.

So how do we come off it? Stop letting our destiny be defined by a few big shots with weak ideas and wizened hearts? First we need to pursue our happiness someplace besides the aisles of Abercrombie and Fitch. Want possessions? How about trying to take possession of the most priceless commodities of all— our senses. Once we do that, we’ll be able to take stock of what we really have. We have to take possession of the gift of sight, sound, touch, taste, smell and then we can have a chance at the universe those capacities can get us in touch with— and when you have the Cosmos, you don’t need Beanie Babies. Stop trading treasure for trinkets. The world is already your oyster. Slurp up those Omega 3s and spit out the pearl (before you choke on it)! (Next time— "Suchness II")

Two Word Nerds

I'm being forced to play scrabble against my will. My wife and I came to our favorite pub to do some cafe writing. When we settle in at our table she informs me she really doesn't have anything to write and she didn't bring a book, so she asks, "Wanna play Scrabble?" "No." I blurt. "I need to write. I have a blog to feed."

Then she plays the birthday card. "Not even for my birthday?" she mews. She's been milking this birthday thing all week. I've been trumped. "Do I have to get into the game 100%?" I waffle. "Are you going to try to write while you play?" she replies.

I barely hear her. I'm listening to this telephone lineman vegan obsessive sitting next to us. He's on a quest to find adequate canvas climbing boots to replace his steel-reinforced leather ones, I guess so he can assure anyone who asks, "no animals were harmed in the making of this call." He says he buys dozens of documentaries that expose the dark and slimy underbellies of the government and multi-national corporations (Super-Size Me, The Corporation, The End of Suburbia, Outfoxed) and donates them to small libraries in red counties. Cool idea.

Then there's the irritating English-prof-wannabe who surrounds himself with stacks of thick books. Young women (from the city college poetry lab he runs, I guess) sit down with him to be tutored in arcane poetry 101. He commences to read in a jolly, over-sonorous tone that is clearly meant for all to hear. He thinks he's sounding so erudite and tweedy while actually coming off as a bad Monty Python character. His officious reading of Milton and Spencer could turn the coziest pub into a paradise lost.

This place is a rich vein for people watchers and writers.

"Can I at least make notes>" I say to my wife. "Sure," she smiles.

But when she starts telling me what she's learned about Scrabble from this book she's been reading (Word Freak) -- that two letter words like "U-G" and "X-I" are legal and there are Q words that don't need a U -- I get a sinking feeling, like the proverbial teenage girl who's hoping against hope that she's only somewhat pregnant. I'm not going to get any writing done here. But I shut up and draw my letters.

She's such a word nerd. She writes her poetry and her cookbooks and edits other people's writing all day, and just when you'd think she's had it with words, she plays a game or two of Literati on the Internet with complete strangers.

I must admit I have some word wiggy-ness in my own nature. My fetish is song lyrics. I write them and have been known to obsess over some of the lyrics to my own songs for decades before I'm satisfied. I once interviewed Al Jarreau, the jazz singer, for an alternative weekly, and when I told him how important lyrics were to me, he called me a dinosaur, because no one cares about lyrics anymore. He was right. Pretty much all the songwriters I think are great -- Bob Dylan, Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Tim Rice, Joni Mitchell (is she still writing lyrics?) -- are all over 50.

I guess it was words that brought my wife and me together. She found me in a restaurant bar singing my lyrics. We've been pretty much constantly together since. She proofread my novel, I contribute in my small ways to the preparation of some of her books, and I've written for various publications she's edited over the years. And we read to each other -- poems, articles, chapters from books.

The good news is that our common interest in putting things into words has helped us communicate well with one another. When we "have words" the outcome is almost always positive, unlike the outcome for many couples. We know that, depending on one's skills and intentions, language can be either a bomb or a balm. The only time we get combative with words, is on the Scrabble board.