Conscious Choice: Books

June 2008 | Art & Soul

Books

Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death
by Joan Halifax
(Shambhala Publications)

A book about the big sleep will strike some as a tad too gloomy to include on their list of summer must-reads, but don’t rush to judgment. In the hands of Zen priest Joan Halifax, founder of the Project on Being with Dying, the topic is not only palatable, but an inspiring call to cultivate mindfulness in our lives.

In her introduction, Halifax proposes Western culture fears death in ways that lead to outright denial or to “drugged-up, tube-entangled, institutionalized” death. She worries we are “woefully unprepared to die,” and sets out to compel us to see that only in embracing death can we live fully.

Each chapter begins with Halifax’s thoughts on a particular aspect of death, bolstered by thirty years’ of first-hand accounts of being near the dying and their families, and ends with a script for a meditation — nineteen in all. Some of these meditations will no doubt be familiar to experienced practitioners, but through the lens of Halifax’s discussion of death, even the most devoted yogis will be able to deepen their experience of presence in everyday life.

— Eric Larson

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
Edited by Bill McKibben, Forward by Al Gore
(Library of America)

My mother read aloud to me when I was a child — but not from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Al Gore’s mother did, though. In his forward to this new collection, Gore recalls how strongly hearing Carson’s story influenced him. Writers affect people and people affect change, which is more valuable than the influence of elected officials, he says.

In American Earth, Bill McKibben (End of Nature and Deep Economy) has compiled an inspiringly eclectic primer of environmental writing, combining Aldo Leopold, John Muir and Rachel Carson with Philip K. Dick, R. Crumb, Joni Mitchell and Marvin Gaye. McKibben proffers that American writing is distinctly concerned with environment, but environmental writing is directly concerned with finding answers to the collision of people and nature. Tracing the genre’s development, he revels how much we have relied on imagery of wild and pure nature — images that, in our increasingly paved over culture, we cannot maintain. With this collection, McKibben hopes to lead the reader to discovery of new and productive metaphors for viewing the interconnectedness of humans and the larger world.

— Kristianne Huntsberger

MUSIC

Soul Science
Justin Adams & Juldeh Camara
(World Village)

The man behind some of the most intriguing international music releases of recent years — including efforts by Tuareg group, Tinariwen and French globetrotters Lo’Jo — guitarist/producer Justin Adams now teams up with Gambian vocalist, ritti player Juldeh Camara. It’s a beautiful marriage. Camara’s one-stringed fiddle creates a massive assemblage of sound to weave inside and out of Adam’s bluesy electric guitar. Joined by percussionist Salah Dawson Miller and bassist Billy Fuller, this album provides the link between Mississippi and Mali (as Corey Harris put it), showing the universality of blues music. Soul Science is a rugged, raw delight, a literal assault on the senses from deep in the gut — this is music to be felt. It’s no surprise — Adams is influenced by old analog Moroccan tapes while Camara’s father is believed to have learned music from Quaranic spirits. Their science is not without mysticism. More importantly, whether deep in the cut or blaring on the edge of intensity, blues records rarely puncture silence with as much depth and gravity as this.

— Derek Beres

Cyro Baptist
Banquet of the Spirits
(Tzadik)

Anyone who has ever seen master percussionist Cyro Baptista’s last project, Beat the Donkey, knows the true language of drumming. Those intensely sweaty and rhythmically magical evenings caused avalanches of sound to emerge from deep inside some primordial collective spirit. With Banquet of the Spirits, the man who has collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, Herbie Hancock and Paul Simon is as interested in theory as performance and adept at the world’s schools of rhythm. Using his native Brazil as a launching pad to explore numerous modalities of percussion-driven free jazz, Baptista explores a ’70s throwback of global journeyers, mixing a montage of the East with patented Americana. The surf guitars on “Macunaima,” the accordion/oud tango on “Bird Boy” and, well, a typewriter amidst bells on “Typin’ on Stars” lets us know that if it can make sound, it’s music, and that Cyro will find a way to bring out the groove that lives inside.

— D. B.

DVD

Dalai Lama Renaissance
81 minutes
Directed by Khashyar Darvish
Narrated by Harrison Ford
dalailamafilm.com

Renaissance follows a group of forty innovative thinkers — physicists, psychiatrists, economists, spiritual leaders, activists — to Dharamsala, India for the expressed purpose of meeting with the Dalai Lama and “solving the world’s problems.” Predictably, the group — which includes luminaries from Agape’s Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith to Fred Alan Wolf and Ami Goswami, star quantum physicists from What The Bleep Do We Know? — doesn’t get far without running into the usual trappings of human gathering: ego and ego and ego.

To suggest that Renaissance is a documentary film about the Dalai Lama, as other reviews have, is to mischaracterize the film and its larger purpose. Sure, the basic facts of the Tibetan spiritual leader’s life are recounted here — the peasant birth, the assumption of political responsibility at fifteen, the fleeing from Tibet in 1959 — but the focus on him ends there. What emerges is a meditation on the human tendency to push aside compassion and deep listening in favor of our very important bullet-point agendas.
— E.L.

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