Austin Kleon – Page 159

Manifesto of the idle parent

Friday, April 24, 2020

I’m finally reading Tom Hodgkinson’s excellent book, How To Be Idle. We’ve had his parenting manifesto hanging on the fridge for many years.

Here’s an updated version, from his book, The Idle Parent:

We reject the idea that parenting requires hard work.

We pledge to leave our children alone.

We reject the rampant consumerism that invades children’s lives from the moment they are born.

We read them poetry and fantastic stories without morals.

We drink alcohol without guilt.

We reject the inner Puritan.

We don’t waste money on family days out and holidays.

An idle parent is a thrifty parent.

An idle parent is a creative parent.

We lie in bed for as long as possible.

We try not to interfere.

We play in the fields and forests.

We push them into the garden and shut the door so we can clean the house.

We both work as little as possible, particularly when the kids are small.

Time is more important than money.

Happy mess is better than miserable tidiness.

Down with school.

We fill the house with music and merriment.

We reject health and safety guidelines.

We embrace responsibility.

There are many paths.

Filed under: parenting

On praying, whether you believe or not

Thursday, April 23, 2020

“For me writing has always felt like praying…”
—Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Playing is like praying. It’s a sacred act. It shows the ultimate reverence for life.”
—Vince Hannemann (aka The Junk King)

“Why do we pray? We pray because the bell rings.”
—Joan Chittister, Benedictine nun

I realized the other day, after reading Nick Cave’s wonderful thoughts on prayer, that Keep Going contains at least two prayers — the first being The Dunning-Kruger Prayer, the second being the “paper prayer” at the bottom of this post.

I find it annoying how much better Cave is at putting my thoughts into words than I am.

“The act of prayer is by no means exclusive to religious practise because prayer is not dependent on the existence of a subject,” he writes. “You need not pray to anyone. It is just as valuable to pray into your disbelief, as it is to pray into your belief.”

He continues:

A prayer provides us with a moment in time where we can contemplate the things that are important to us, and this watchful application of our attention can manifest these essential needs. The act of prayer asks of us something and by doing so delivers much in return — it asks us to present ourselves to the unknown as we are, devoid of pretence and affectation, and to contemplate exactly what it is we love or cherish. Through this conversation with our inner self we confront the nature of our own existence.

I grew up saying lots of prayers. The creepy ones (“now I lay me down to sleep…”) and the great ones (“forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”) I was often asked, at family dinners, to deliver the blessing. (I have always liked to talk and spin words and show off my ability to do so.) Of the things I keep in my life from my church-going days, prayer is top of the list.

When I pray, it’s because my world is so beautiful and I want to express my gratitude, or because there is a great disconnect between how my world is and how I’d like it to be. (Almost always both.)

It’s for these exact same reasons that I make art. I see something so beautiful that I want to amplify it, or I see something so broken that I want to repair it.

One of the great disconnects between me and my evangelical dad is that he wants so badly for me to believe, and if there’s one thing I believe, it’s that belief is overrated.

What I believe in is the practice, the rituals, the things to do. I know my dad fears for me and my salvation, but here I am, doing the things I learned from his example and our religion: loving my family and my neighbors as best as I can, working, saying thanks, devoting myself daily to connecting to something larger than myself, etc.

I am no theologian, but what difference does it make what I call it?

This spills over, of course, into my beliefs about art: There are those who say, “You must call yourself an artist first, and you’ll be one.” This does not work for me at all. For me, it’s best to forget the noun completely, and do the verbs.

Because my other belief is that it is through practice that we best come around to belief.

The best proselytizing I ever heard was Mary Karr: “Why don’t you pray for 30 days and see if your life gets better?”

Someone asked me recently if I could boil down my books into one piece of advice. I thought for a minute and said, “Try sitting in the same place at the same time for the same length of time every day for a month and see if something happens.”

A daily devotional.

A prayer.

Newspaper Blackout is ten years old

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

This weird little book turned 10 years old this month. Kind of hard to believe. I made most of the poems on the bus to work and on my lunch break at my office job. Years ago I thought for sure it would probably be remaindered and go out-of-print. And yet, it’s still around after a decade. (Perhaps even more amazingly, I get a modest check for it once in a while…)

A few years ago I wrote about what I’ve learned from a decade of publishing. Not much to add to that, except:

1) Make sure when you publish a book you think you can live with it for a while.

2) Try to write books you want to read, yes, but also, if you can, ones only you can write.

3) Have a little fun with it, if you can.

There really is nothing like that first book…

To wonder rather than know

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Mary Ruefle, in a wonderful conversation with David Naimon:

I would rather wonder than know. It makes it more and more difficult to be alive on earth in these times, when your inclination is to wonder rather than to know.

I suppose the example that comes to mind is: it used to be if you were having dinner with people and someone said, “Who’s the fastest animal on earth?” An amazing conversation would ensue. And now someone pops their phone out and looks up the answer. And it breaks my heart….

I really, really don’t like it when people look things up on their iPhones…. I mean, sometimes, of course, I’m no idiot. The encyclopedic nature of the information that’s available is fantastic, but I would still rather wonder than know.

I think wondering is a way of inhabiting and lingering. There seems to be more dwelling. To dwell, inhabit, and linger. I’m interested in those things. And you can do that when you don’t know.

We tend to, as human beings, our impulse is, once we know, once we have the answer, we move on. So we’re constantly moving from one thing to the other. I would rather inhabit the question, or dwell. For me, that is the place I want to live in.

I have an encyclopedia at home. It never occurred to me there was ever anything wrong with it until my friend pointed out it was an Encyclopedia Brittanica from 1910 and it might be a little outdated. I still look things up in it! […]

My oldest son used to ask me questions and when I said I didn’t know the answer, he’d say, “Look it up on the Goggle!” It takes discipline, now, not to look things up immediately, but to sit and wonder…

Then again, when you do look things up, you find more things to wonder about.