One of my informal mindfulness practices is I look up the etymologies of words, every day, often. For decades. It’s the meditative version of all-you-can-eat BBQ Lay’s potato chips. I love BBQ potato chips, but at some point I have to say, One bowl is enough. Or one and a half. I can’t eat as many as I want every time I have some. Which by the way is daily with lunch.
But looking up etymologies? I can have another and another and yet another and then one more, and then again, another one. They form fractals of meaning in my awareness.
Every time I look up a word’s etymology, my mind expands in ways that joggle it loose from the larger binary system and into a spacious place of this and that and the other too, rather than this or that. Etymologies take me into the world of story, images, comparison, and yet another detail that complexifies my vision. This-that-and-the-other-too is one of my favorite places to be.
Sometimes I’m almost glad for having grown up with undiagnosed dyslexia. Out of decades of painful school days and feelings of shame, staring at the page with little sense-making, blurry cryptic dark marks moving so my mind could not decipher them, over time I became a lover of etymologies because knowing a word’s story and history gives it ballast. Letters slow, settle the paper, swap places more rarely. Not being able to read well also made me super grateful for kind teachers. Today when a d and b or c and s or now becomes know or know now or sense since or since sense, and etc., it is the uncommon not the every moment.
My dyslexia-cultivated this-that-and-the-other-too mindset taught me much about inclusivity. How truth always seems to have room for one more story, image, comparison, detail. For one more unique person.
I’m meditating on my love of etymology because this weekend I found myself reading truly for fun. First time in a long time. Because I finally finished a major project. I’m up for my 6 Year Excellence Review at UC Berkeley. That’s good fortune in itself, just to be up for it. But doing it has felt worse than stressful. Even though I am fortunate and have kind colleagues who are supportive, and great students, yet articulating what means most to me, teaching, and for public consumption, is my worst nightmare come alive, 24/7, and for months. A part of me always wants to hide, and not be seen, and truly that would not help me apply for a Continuing Lecturer position in College Writing Programs. So I did what I had to do and tried as I went through the process to center students’ voices, be self-compassionate, stay open of spirit, express my teaching philosophy and document my work, and express the gratitude I feel for this community.
Now it’s done. I uploaded it to the folder where it goes. I sent it on its way with a brave orison of well wishes. And celebrated this weekend in high fashion. I walked in the marsh without the burden of creating a self-statement and evidence file for my review. I bought some raspberry Danish rounds from Raley’s. I started reading Abigail Thomas’s What Comes Next and How to Like It: A Memoir. All good choices.
Thomas writes in a collage style I love. It’s like poetry and the best prose, all in one. Lyrical. Also grounded. She makes scenes we can enter. She’s real and kind. And genre-defying works have always been my jam. They resist the binary too.
I won’t spoil your experience of this memoir with any plot reveals. I’ll only say it’s a beautiful and moving work. At one point Thomas meditates on failure, speaking my language:
I am trying to convince myself that failure is interesting. I look the word up in the American Heritage Dictionary to find its earliest incarnation, but it has always been just ‘failure.’ There’s no Indo-European root meaning originally ‘to dare’ or ‘mercy’ or ‘hummingbird’ to make of the whole mess a mysterious poem. I can find no other fossilized remains in the word. Humility comes along on its own dime. (35)
Thomas sent me searching for failure.
It first turns up in the English language in the 1640s. Ironically in “a fayler of Justice in the highest Court of Justice.” This seems prescient. Failure there means “something not-occurring, an omitting to perform something due or required.” I wish we had confined failure to a legal term. An indicator that human rights have not been upheld. Because once it entered the binary slipstream of the English vernacular, it seems to have lost its compass for nuance.
In English, failure early on had different meanings too: “a lapse, a slight fault; weakness,” “the fact of becoming exhausted, breaking down in health, declining in strength,” and what it means mostly today: “not effecting one’s purpose; lack of success.”
That last definition, “not effecting one’s purpose,” seems to have become increasingly separated from a context of growing and recalibrating when we misstep or lapse or need to deepen our approach. Failure seems mostly narrowed today to mean “LOSER.” Against that, a whole industry of self-help books has arisen, like Megan McArdle’s The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success. Which I bought recently when a student recommended it. Even its title leans into the binary of up and down, failure and success.
But what about the roots of failure?
To find these, we go back a few centuries, almost a millennium even. In Old French, in faillir. From the early 12th century on, faillir had abundant meanings: from “lacking, missing, absent, short of, losing [something]” to “destroying,” “breaking an agreement,” “letting down,” “being unsuccessful,” “collapsing,” “missing a target,” “diminishing,” “being unprofitable,” “weakening,” “ceasing,” “malfunctioning,” “not thriving,” “deceiving,” even “not living a good life” (see an Anglo-Norman Dictionary here).
You find something similar in the seventeenth-century in France. In my much-loved A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues compiled by Randle Cotgrave, faillir means:
To faile; slip, slide; erre, misse; mistake, misunderstand; offend, goe astray, doe amisse; also, to omit; lacke, wante; also, to quaile, decay, fade; faint, or tire; also, to deceive, or disappoint; also, to surcease, leave, end.
If we dig further, we find that our failure comes not only from the Old French faillir, but that faillir is from the Vulgar Latin *faillire, from Latin fallere, “trip, make fall,” and figuratively, “deceive, trick, cheat; be lacking or deficient.”
So, at heart, failure has a pratfall. I like to think of it as we’re doing our best and still stumble. We were aiming for the bullseye but hit the barn instead.
Even “lapse,” one of failure‘s early meanings, has roots in lapsus for “a slipping and falling.” Of course this reminds me of my friend Nicolas Herman. Brother Lawrence says to a friend of his who is discouraged, a nun, in letter 7 of my recent translation Practice of the Presence that we all “stumble,” get distracted and discouraged:
You are telling me nothing new in your letter. You’re not the only one who has distracting thoughts. The mind is extremely likely to wander, but the will is the mistress of all our powers, and must draw the mind back and carry it to God as to its final end.
When the mind has not been taught early on how to return, to be led back to itself, it can develop some unhealthy habits of becoming distracted and scattered. These are difficult to overcome. These tendencies ordinarily drag us off to earthly things, in spite of ourselves.
I think that a solution for this is to admit our stumbles and humble ourselves before God. During set times of silent prayer, I advise you not to use many words. Long discourses often create distractions. Hold still before God in prayer like someone who is poor, who is unable to speak or walk, and who is waiting at the gate of a wealthy person. Do your best to keep your mind in God’s presence. If it wanders or pulls away sometimes, don’t be discouraged. Distress tends to distract the mind rather than to focus it. We must use the will gently to bring it back. If you persevere in this way, God will have mercy on you.
An easy way of bringing your mind back during the set time of prayer and holding it there more at rest, is not to let it wander much during the day. Hold it attentively in God’s presence. As you get used to thinking of God from time to time, it will become easy to remain calm during times of prayer, or at least to bring the mind back when it wanders.
In my other letters I’ve already spoken at length with you about the benefits gained from this practice of the presence of God. Let’s devote ourselves to it seriously and pray for each other.
With his signature gentleness and calmness in mind, and with many talks coming up, recently I have been considering how much I need to feed myself good writing, good words, good reminders of what it means to be human. I think it’s a universal thing. Not just me. People of all faiths, wisdom traditions, and philosophies find such reminders in their various writings, scriptures, images, sculptures, tapestries, and more. Also, there is what some call secular poetry, literature of all kinds, and words of wisdom found here and there in unexpected places, fresh as dew. Some of us find food in all of these.
Lectio divina or “sacred reading” is how monks and nuns ate nourishing words in the communities that grew up around the teachings of Jesus, whose pedagogy was Love. Bede names us “animal ruminando,” or “ruminating creature,” meaning “ones who need nourishing soul food to chew on,” as I like to define it.
Since I have dyslexia still, sometimes it’s still hard for me to remember things, so I make mnemonics. Here’s one I made for lectio divina, which merely means “steeping in nourishing words that you like a lot.”
Although lectio divina is organic and not at all linear, we humans like to intellectualize it, flatten it, make it straight, aka, give it “steps.” Trying to tame the wild. One, two, three, four. Like that. It’s been going on since time out of mind. Looking at you, Guy.
Guigo 2, or Guy, was a French Carthusian monk of the 12th century. He wrote Scala Claustralium: Epistola de vita contemplativa or Ladder of Monks: Letter on the Contemplative Life. It breaks down contemplation into stages, seen below:
Lectio Read
Meditatio Meditate
Oratio Pray
Contemplatio Contemplate
My mind takes that and sees LMOC and RMPC and comes up with, after steeping in it a while:
Recognize Love
My My
Peaceful Other
Center Companions
These are more like clothespins to hold my thoughts on the line in the breeze, to flutter and dry, absorb the fresh smell of sun and wind.
And my dyslexic mind chews on their etymologies:
Lectio has in it legere, “collect, gather up, pick out.” That reminds me reading is an active process. & Read is cognate with reason and riddle. If instead of “Can you read this?” we said, “Can you riddle this?” that to me is reading, riddling.
Meditatio / Meditate is cognate with medicine, from med-, “to take appropriate measures,” and that etymology reminds me that being mindful is good medicine.
Oratio is cognate with orator, oral, and comes from *os- “mouth.” Orare meant “speak before a court or assembly, plead,” also “speak, pray to.” & Pray is cognate with precarious and has roots in “ask earnestly, beg (someone).”
Contemplatio / Contemplation has roots in either *tem- for “cut” or *ten- for “stretch.” A temple is “a place dedicated to the service of a deity or deities, ground that is consecrated or set apart for the taking of auspices and the worship of a god,” as one dictionary reminds. In other words, it’s “a place reserved or cut out (*tem-)” from its surroundings and dedicated to such, or “a place where string has been stretched (*ten-) to mark off the consecrated ground.” Think also of your temple, the flattened area on either side of your forehead, and we see temple’s roots here in *temp- from *ten- for “stretch,” meaning “stretched skin.”
“Reach My Peaceful Center, Love My Other Companions” / Read-Meditate-Pray-Contemplate & Lectio-Meditatio-Oratio-Contemplatio also mean to me self-compassion and recognizing (or remembering) that I (my True Self, or Love) am my own first companion and friend and that all others are made in the image of Love and are my companions. Where etymologically I’m reminded that companion means one or those with whom I break bread (com– “with” and pan “bread”).
Often, we seem to feel a “failure” in contemplation perhaps because our definition of failure needs a reboot and also perhaps because we haven’t fed our minds something nourishing first. Yes, you can do contemplation with a Mary Oliver poem, as one example of many. Whatever you find gives your life meaning. Whether that is scripture, literature of all sorts, or a gem you found in a friend’s story.
Also, whenever scriptures are concerned, it seems that “steeping” in them would also involve at some point reading them through all the way, several times, to get one’s own “gist” of what they are about, and to do so, studying them with diverse commentaries that dig into history, linguistics, and culture. In the same way, reading all of Mary Oliver (prose and poetry) really helps a person more appreciate just one poem of hers that you might be meditating on repeatedly.
It also seems that if such a study of whatever material I have picked out for the steeping that is lectio divina doesn’t have its core meaning as “Love,” then I should really move on to some other passage or work that does, for meaningful, active, nourishing engagement.
The experience of all deep reading or listening, meditation or reflecting on it, oratio or opening of the heart there, and contemplation or entering the silence, makes us like our creature friends the cows, where juicy green words about the Mystery of Love are chewed until they become our very own milk that feeds the marrow of our own days, growing our self-compassion and active love for others, too.
It’s not hard. We just need an intention to. Hunger. A few good words. And to chew. Learn to rest. Let go.