Week 6

Marc Chagall  (1887-1985)

Good afternoon, class.  Hope you are doing good and being well!  Today I will be looking for essay work (2 and 3) in response to the health topics and links posted thus far.  I will have a "homework" in class practice on some related material to practice directly the business of addressing through summary and quotation source material.  Last week we did not get to the group meditation with Tara Brach, but we may today. I hope to give time to think and write about the direction you want to take with the short research paper (#4).  Thus far we've looked some at how the cultivation of certain habits, including mindful awareness and gratitude and awe and community, can help to lessen the stress of ruminative and compulsive negative thinking. As a class we can brainstorm health issues, review topics at the AspenIdeas pages, and Youtube presentations.  In the coming weeks I'll post more material on how art and design serves to bring us joy and insight and a sense of purpose and meaning, all of which are keys to well being, too.

The following link leads to a PBS documentary on stress informed by the work of Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford primatologist and neurobiologist whose work we looked at in the lecture on depression and whose book Behave (2017) recounts some of the fascinating insights he has gained over the course of his research into the mind/body connection and how stress affects us. Stress is a complicating factor in it seems every illness as it can adversely impact our immune systems and overwhelm cognitive function.  In your research, you might want to look at how the modern world stresses us and how we can effectively respond in ways that bring greater health and vitality to us and everyone around us.  Alain de Botton's short take on the subject here may offer a spur to your thinking.  One emphasis is on how secular Western culture hails individual achievement and creates an unwarranted meritocracy that unfairly marginalizes and depresses the so-called "ordinary" or average person.  People of low socio-economic status may suffer in such a culture if they have not learned to value and care for themselves by other measures and means.

I want to address the links to Michael Pollan's work, too, about our food culture.  What and how we eat has important health consequences long term.  Those interested in the subject of fat:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vinqph-g5QI

POETRY__________________

Ginsberg's free verse calls attention to the pleasure of working in a garden, watering ad trimming, straightening up things, and eating fruit picked directly from a tree!

A Strange New Cottage In Berkeley   by Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

All afternoon cutting bramble blackberries off a tottering
brown fence
under a low branch with its rotten old apricots miscellaneous
under the leaves,
fixing the drip in the intricate gut machinery of a new toilet;
found a good coffee pot in the vines by the porch, rolled a
big tire out of the scarlet bushes, hid my marijuana;
wet the flowers, playing the sunlit water each to each,
returning for godly extra drops for the stringbeans and daisies;
three times walked round the grass and sighed absently:
my reward, when the garden fed me its plums from the
form of a small tree in the corner,
an angel thoughtful of my stomach, and my dry and love-
lorn tongue.

Of Rain and Air   Wayne Dodd (1930-2017)

All day I have been closed up
inside rooms, speaking of trivial
matters. Now at last I have come out
into the night, myself a center

of darkness.
Beneath the clouds the low sky glows
with scattered lights. I can hardly think
this is happening. Here in this bright absence

of day, I feel myself opening out
with contentment.
All around me the soft rain is whispering
of thousands of feet of air

invisible above us.