Ruth Ozeki on Ezra Klein Podcast.
January 25, 2022
What We Gain by Enchanting the Objects in Our Lives
This morning we had popovers… The promise of these popovers, with strawberry jam and butter, is truly more important than their objectivity.
The novelist and Zen Buddhist priest, Ruth Ozeki draws connections between meditation, writing and the art and practice of listening.
This was a fascinating conversation between Ezra Klein and the novelist, Ruth Ozeki. Most of it dealt with her book, “The Book of Form and Emptiness”, that took her eight years to write.
Early on, they talked about meditation. Ozeki feels that meditation starts in the body, it is somatic, not of the mind. Ozeki uses the metaphor of a wave, forming from emptiness and returning to emptiness. “Not knowing is the most intimate.“ On meditation: there is a return to the body a return to breath to quiet the mind from distracting thoughts.
If you imagine the ocean as this vast expanse of emptiness, just this vast still ocean. And then the planets shift, and the tides pull, and the moon waxes and wanes. And suddenly from this emptiness, a wave starts to form. And it starts to poke its little head up from the ocean, and it looks around and it’s sort of like, wow, look at me. I’m a wave. I’m pretty great. I’m really something.
In Beginners Mind possibilities are endless…
In the beginner’s mind, possibilities are endless, and in the expert’s mind, they’re few. And so this idea that in this state of not knowing, curiosity and engagement with the world arises, for lack of a better word. And that engagement, that curiosity is intimate and very, very alive.
It’s also has some similarities to Daniel Kahneman‘s System 1 and System 2 thinking.
Voices are heard by healthy people as well as by the sick. We all of us have internal voices. Ozeki feels there’s a weird dichotomy that we have in the West, the body-mind dichotomy and it has crippled us.
So much of deep knowledge really resides in the body, and it’s prerational. Recently, there’s more and more research to support this, and people are giving it more credence, and it’s more acceptable to speak like that. And I think that’s a good thing because, certainly, the body-mind dichotomy is something that’s really crippled us in the West, I think, for generations.
This certainly applies to how we are well and how we are sick.
There are hearing voices networks in the US and the UK.
Hearing voices movement. This is a powerful model to teach about the spectrum of normal that may be too narrowly conceived.
There are several great organizations. One of them is Intervoice, International Hearing Voices Network, and another one based in the US is Hearing Voices USA. And these are peer support groups, people with lived experience who are reaching out and supporting each other.
Ruth Ozeki discussed how when she was 17, and at a boarding school, she was admitted for a few weeks to a psychiatric ward because of depression and suicidality. Interestingly, another author, Roxane Gay, also was at a boarding school and had overwhelming psychiatric problems.
Ozeki and Klein discussed the work of Marie Kondo. She propounded a Japanese form of meditation. And Ozeki discussed an interesting story of how old used sewing the noodles were treated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Kondo
Marie Kondo started her laudable campaign of world domination, she was telling us to care for our objects, to exercise some sort of recognition and care, and recognize that we have a relationship with our objects, right? That they’re not just things that come into our life and that we throw away. That there’s a real connection there, or that there should be.
In those days when sewing needles were made by hand, , it was a very painstaking thing to make a needle. And so you would take very good care of it. It was a precious object.
And then if in its service to you over its lifetime it breaks, you don’t just throw it away. You save it, and then once a year, you take it to your local shrine. And they have a day specifically set aside for this.
And on the altar there, there’s a large block of tofu. And so you bring your broken pin or your broken needle to the shrine, and you put it in the block of tofu so that it can have a soft resting place. And then at the end of the day, there’s a ceremony performed, kind of a memorial ceremony, where you can express or feel your gratitude towards this thing. And then its karmic life has been closed, right, and it can move on to another existence, or whatever.
Every Thing has a story.
Ozeki read from page 54 of her book. It was about being in Michael’s, the art supply store:
“She wasn’t going to buy anything. Just looking was inspiration enough. The door is opened like magic, and once inside, she inhaled deeply, taking in the sense of floral bouquets of lavender, cinnamon, and pine.
It never failed. The arts and crafts superstar was just another large retail chain, but it worked on her like a fast-acting drug. Her blood quickened, her heart began to race, and a dreamy lassitude came over her, as if her bones were melting. Michael’s didn’t just sell merchandise. It sold promise.”
Ozeki feels that non-sentient beings such as trees, have agency. Every thing has a story. The promise of objects is more important than their objectivity.
“We’re talking about the agency of matter, of things, of nonhuman forces in the life of the planet.”