Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

Perhaps you saw that Rafa Nadal beat Dominic Thiem 6-4 6-1 to win the Barcelona Open this weekend, his tenth title there. This comes on the heels of his win in Monte Carlo, his tenth title there as well. If he wins Roland Garros, it will be his tenth French Open title.

The French is the Fashion Open. Last year, it was Adidas that had the most people talking about their clothes. Remember the zebra stripes that Adidas festooned the bulk of its endorsees with? Remember how Simona Halep looked like she was on her way to the dance club in her little frilled-skirt-and-faux-suspenders number?

So if you’re a designer at Nike, and Rafa has completed two Tens so far this season, and has a chance for the Really Big Ten at Roland Garros, do you dare allude to that in the clothes you’re designing for him for the French? Maybe an X behind the Rafa bull logo on shirts and shoes?

If Nike isn’t doing that yet, well, it’s a genius idea and they should pay me $100,000 to use it.

Ideas of Manifestation

I had the idea earlier this year that I would simply take my desire to take a trip to Europe this spring to cover part of the tennis clay court season–maybe Madrid and Rome–and simply make it happen. I added in the possibility of going to London to see one of the last ever matches at White Hart Lane before Spurs leave for a year at Wembley before moving into their new stadium for the 2018-2019 season. I looked at the calendar. Holy crap. The North London Derby could fit into that trip.

Did I dare? At the time, I was reading books about manifestation and considering just how much I wanted to believe them. I could make a case that I had the money. I could argue that this was a perfect opportunity to act “as if”: I want to write about tennis. To do that, I should attend major tennis tournaments, right?

I decided against it. I put my powers of manifestation into other parts of my life. These parts don’t have the same immediate gratification as “Trip to London to see Spurs play Arsenal at White Hart Lane! Trip to Madrid to see Rafa Nadal at the Madrid Open!” but one hopes what I am working to manifest now will in the future pay even greater dividends.

So I watched the match on TV.

Tottenham Hotspur 2 – Arsenal 0

Spurs have been on a massive upswing since Mauricio Pocchetino took over, but they have had to work to overcome a tendency to capitulate mentally when the going gets tough. Last season, you might recall, they chased Leicester all the way to the last matches of the season. Spurs held a 2-0 lead over Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in the antepenultimate game of the season–Spurs needing a win to keep themselves alive in the title chase–then gave up two second-half goals to draw and give Leicester the title. They followed that up with a loss to Southampton at the Lane and a final-game loss to already-relegated Newcastle at St. James’ to manage to finish third behind goddamn Arsenal. I was so disgusted by the abjectness of their late season performance last year (which I wrote about here) that I’ve only watched desultorily this season.

Which means I have only been partly aware that somewhere along the line, Spurs have become a group that go into most matches believing themselves to be the better team.

When you’ve been a Spurs fan for the period I have been (a bit more than ten years, starting when Prem games began to appear regularly on TV), you have probably come to view the North London Derby with a mixture of excitement and deep trepidation. You want Spurs to win so bad because you hate Arsenal, as is proper, but you know–you have witnessed–that most of the time, Spurs will somehow find a way to fuck it up.

So I won’t claim that I watched yesterday’s match from the position of smug superiority that I imagine Arsenal fans have watched most North London Derbies during the last twenty or so years, knowing both that they have the better squad and that their opposition are furthermore bound to discover a new way to lose. But I did witness a Spurs side that outclassed and outplayed Arsenal pretty much everywhere on the pitch. In the last ever North London Derby held at White Hart Lane, they looked like the better team, they looked determined to win, and they won.

I wasn’t there to see it. But I watched it on TV, and it was still pretty great.

St. Totteringham’s Day 2017 CANCELED

With that win, Tottenham assured themselves, for the first time in 22 years, of finishing above stupid Arsenal in the table. Perhaps unfortunately, this doesn’t feel magical. It doesn’t feel like some major victory. We still lost to Chelsea a week ago in the FA Cup semi-final, and with four matches left to play, we’re still four points behind Chelsea in the table. An FA Cup victory would have made the season special. A Prem trophy would make it amazing. But finishing above Arsenal? I love it. But it feels only like the start of something, not its finish.

After two days of on-snow practice and testing earlier this week, the Professional Ski Instructors of America awarded me my Children’s Specialist Level One certification. I learned about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Piaget’s Stages of Development, Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development, and much else besides. The PSIA claims I now have the tools to be a much better instructor of children than I was a week ago.

I’m skeptical.

Do I really need to be able to rattle off the levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy in order to understand that a child who is cold, hungry or scared is unlikely to learn well? Do I really need to define a four-year-old’s cognitive functioning as “pre-operational” (per Piaget) to know that she’s not capable of understanding complex or abstract instructions?

Let me be clear: I’m not saying I didn’t learn anything useful. I don’t mean to disparage the whole process. Here and there I recognized blind spots in my understanding. I’ll be able to approach certain situations with more clarity and confidence. That can only be helpful.

But consider: This week they told me that the colloquial name for the moral development stage that describes most nine-year-olds is “clever as a fox.” It’s nice that they told me that. But the better teachers of this principle were the nine-year-olds I taught back in January, who kept asking me, “Can we do this? Can we do that?” until I realized that they were testing the limits of my authority. The former I learned from a book and a class. The latter I learned by paying attention and being present. Which version of that principle is going to make the more lasting impression on my future teaching? In my relating to children in general?

In our last couple of pieces, Jerry and I talked about using the word open as a cue to connect with the present moment and feel a certain flow of energy within our bodies during the golf swing. If I were to attach the word open to the kind of technical instructions that most golf teaching relies on, I might come up with something like, “During the swing, the chest remains open as the shoulders rotate. The left arm stays extended at the elbow. The head stays up so that the left shoulder can turn freely under it.” Do you think we’d have been as successful in our practice if we had repeated those sentences to ourselves over and over again?

I can speak for both of us when I say that those kinds of instructions were the furthest things from our minds. Instead, we’ve witnessed the swings of great golfers, done our best to use centering to observe the truth of those swings, and noticed that a pro’s swing appears open. That is, there’s a resonance between the energy impression given by the swing and the energy we feel when we explore the word open.

Words have energy. We’ve said that again and again and again in these writings. I’ve devoted a substantial portion of my life to working with that energy. I don’t take that energy lightly. But I also don’t want to take it too seriously.

The risk of focusing on big, abstract theoretical models as representative of reality is that abstractions tend to focus energy in the head. If you aren’t careful, you might find yourself demanding that reality fit into your model rather than remembering that reality is reality, while your model is just a model. Rigid thinking tends to follow. Everything that fits the model is noticed, while everything that does not gets rejected.

On the other hand, with enough practice, the practice of centering will always reveal the truth of a given situation. Perhaps we’ll turn to words as a means to communicate that truth to other people. But if we’re truly connected to what we’re teaching, we won’t insist on the rightness of what our words communicate. We’ll ask that you come to center and explore their truth yourself.

I passed my certification; PSIA’s level-one certs are generally easy to pass.

I hate the cert process. It’s critical to professional advancement in the industry, but success in the PSIA (and, for snowboarders, its sister organization, AASI) means buying in whole-heartedly to an entire worldview of the “proper” way to teach skiing, the underlying assumptions of which I substantially disagree with.

At the same time, each time I’ve gone through the certification process, I’ve found myself deeply humbled by what I witness from the other instructors participating in the exam. They devote great energy to becoming both better athletes and better teachers. They’ll spend years working on improving their skills and their craft.

The end result? If they work very, very hard and reach the highest certification levels, they can, by working full-time, earn, at best, barely enough to scrape by.

Students pay handsomely for instruction–full-day private lessons at resorts around Colorado routinely cost more than $700. Instructors earn a small fraction of that. Skilled, dedicated labor in a field awash with money deserve better than to struggle to earn a living.

That thing took no more than 45 minutes to write, and maybe another fifteen for revisions. That it was just the extra-credit section of the workbook portion of a PSIA certifying exam meant that it didn’t need to be within shouting distance of perfect. Not even within megaphone distance.

Yet I actually like it quite a lot. And it was, easily, the most fun I’ve had writing something in a long, long time.

Maybe I’ll make my fortune by taking commissions for silly little pieces like that. Anyone need a piece about the reticulated dreamcatcher of the snow-capped mountains of southwestern Borneo, or maybe something about the fearsome but beautiful euphonious zanzibar?

The extra-credit question reads, “These character names are from Dr. Seuss. Pick one and tell a story about where this creature may live and what kind of activities it likes to do.”

• Tufted Mazurka
• Grickily Gractus

It’s interesting that you mention the tufted mazurka. I actually did my doctoral dissertation (“The Semiotics of Nature as Cultural Progenitor: Inspiration and Interpretation Among the Chopé People of Western Polonia,” PhD in Musical Anthropology, Oxford, 1949) on the Chopé people, whose ancestral homeland overlaps almost exactly with the breeding range of the tufted mazurka. Chapters 3, 4, and 8 all include lengthy discussions of the importance to the Chopé people of this wondrous, beautiful, and most unusual bird.

Due to the amazing videography of nature shows like “Planet Earth,” wonders like the tufted mazurka have become much more visible to modern Americans than was the case in the years after World War II, during which I lived among the Chopé and got to see the tufted mazurka in its natural habitat.

At the time I did my primary research, however, popular knowledge of the various three-legged birds of the cloud forest region of Western Polonia (known as “Polonaise” to the Chopé), of which the tufted mazurka is pre-eminent, was scanty, to say the very least. That an otherwise exclusively tree-dwelling animal would take to the earth, putting it directly among its primary predators (the lesser grickily gractus probably the most well known among these) to engage in such marvelous songs and dances (their fascinating rhythms otherwise unseen in the animal kingdom) as part of its mating behaviors may no longer shock an observer, now used to seeing the world’s miracles every week without leaving the comfort of their TV-room couches, but at the time, I verily marveled, eyes wide and ears wider, as I came to understand that substantial elements of the Chopé’s melodious language and dexterous gestural expressioning clearly arose directly from the influence of observation of the tufted mazurka’s most remarkable qualities.

But I do prattle on so. The mere mention of the tufted mazurka always brings me back to those years, among the happiest of my life. As reflects the inspiration of the mazurka itself, the Chopé busy themselves with music and dancing (though they reverse the mazurka’s patterns, leaving the ground to take to the trees to do their art), and as an anthropologist living among them I felt obliged to lessen the distance between us by participating, as much as I was able, in the cultural acts that made the Chopé such a fascinating, heart-warming people to live among.

I’ll share one last story. One time I sat on a limb in a tree, listening to the strange, romantic harmonies of the Chopé. I was in something of a reverie, when to my shock a mazurka, its eponymous plumage bio-fluorescing in the dim under-canopy light, alighted upon my knee, looked quizzically up at my face, and vocalized its primary call, which I transcribe thus: “Yoman. Wazzup wazzup wazzup. Chillin?”

Last week, I made the following assertions:

• Djokovic and Murray are playing well off their best, which
• Leaves Nadal poised to win several of the European clay court tournaments as well as Roland Garros.

Let’s review what happened after I wrote that.

• Murray lost in the round of 16 against Albert Ramos-Vinolas.
• Djokovic lost in the quarterfinals against the Roadrunner, David Goffin.
• After his kind of shaky, three-set victory against Kyle Edmund, Rafa
  • demolished Sasha Zverev, 1 and 1, in the round of 16–the same Sasha Zverev who pushed him to five very tough sets at the Australian.
  • handled Diego Schwartzman, 4 and 4, in the quarters.
  • ended the Roadrunner’s run, 3 and 1, in the semis.
  • dispatched Ramos-Vinolas, 1 and 3, to take the championship, his tenth at Monte Carlo.

Consider this: no man in the Open era had ever won ten titles at a single tournament before. Furthermore, this title gave Rafa the 50th clay court title of his career, lifting him out of a tie with Guillermo Vilas for most in the Open era.

A victory at Roland Garros would be Rafa’s tenth title there as well. Anyone want to bet against him?

Jerry and I practiced hitting golf balls the other day. The core of our practice was to try to feel the swing as open. My practice was saying the word to myself before hitting, to get a kind of proprioceptive feel for the word, and then trying to allow that feeling to continue throughout the swing. I can report that it worked for both of us. We both hit some beautiful shots.

After we were done practicing, I noticed, and Jerry agreed, that there was something almost incantatory about the use of the word–that somehow, in using it and repeating it, we brought about within the body the feeling of the word.

That led me to wonder, what if we explored the incantatory powers of other words in this same context? And what if we considered what the implication of word-as-incantation was in regards to other words that sometimes get used around the golf swing. What might that reveal?

Here’s a list of ten words I have heard or can imagine being used to describe the swing. I’m going to list them without any context or connotative judgment, and some of them could have multiple meanings in terms of describing the swing. As you read each one, see what it evokes for you.

• hard
• powerful
• soft
• easy
• smooth
• fast
• slow
• full
• flowing
• rhythmic

I wonder what would happen, for good or bad, if we were to evoke each of those words during our practice sessions.

Because our focus this year has been less about sports and more about the energy of what’s happening in our society and in our political realm, this got me thinking about the broader social implications of the energy of words.

I and other writers have used some powerful words to describe our political situation:

• partisan
• gridlocked
• dysfunctional
• corrupt
• collapsing

I found myself wondering, what if people tried to explore the energetic evocations of some other words in our dealings with each other? What if we started using different words to describe our thinking about our government, our political system, our political situation, and the dynamic forces in our society out of which our political world arises? What would happen if we explored some words with a less sharp connotation? Understand that I’m just playing with an idea here; I haven’t come to any particular conclusion.

Here’s some words from the list above:

• open
• flowing
• easy
• smooth
• full
• powerful
• flexible

Let me repeat that I’m just playing here. I don’t have a conclusion. I just noticed that as I was thinking about this idea, a question arose: how certain am I that the words I use to describe our political situation (which are, let’s face it, mostly negative in connotation) describe, and how much are they, in some way or another, evoking?

It’s not uncommon in Buddhist literature to read something along the lines of, “When the mind is still, the essential perfection of each moment reveals itself.”

Two days ago, I shared a brief story about my recent Perfect Day. But lest I inadvertently suggest that I have attained some lasting equanimity about all things as they arise and pass away, let me share this little tidbit: We’re in the final days of ski season, a season in which I got to put boards to snow on something like 65 days between December and now, yet I feel pretty cranky about it ending. It still feels much too soon.

Yes, that’s right: I am arguing with spring about its not being winter.

I watched the third set of Rafa’s victory over Kyle Edmund today. Rafa wasn’t brilliant, just good enough to win. It was his first match on clay this season, so maybe it’s premature to expect brilliant. Overall this year, he’s been the clear number two behind Federer, who isn’t playing again until Roland Garros, while his other top competitors, Murray and Djokovic, have been been well below their best all season. Now we’ve got two months of tournaments on Rafa’s best and favorite surface. It’s not crazy to think that he’s capable of winning a couple of the clay-season Masters 1000s (Monte Carlo, Madrid, and Rome), as well as the French. Given what Federer has accomplished so far, and with Wimbledon and the summer hard courts still to come; and given the possibility of a big year for Rafa on the clay, it’s not impossible to imagine that Roger, turning 36 in August, and Rafa, 31 in June, could finish the season as the two top-rated players in the world. How would that be for a storyline about resurgent seasons?