Engagement in Reading

Birte Thissen, with colleagues Winfried Menninghaus (Director of the Department of Language and Literature at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, in Frankfurt, Germany), and Wolff Schlotz, have recently published an article which brings together Mihaly Csikszentmihali’s concept of flow and the activity of reading fiction. 

 

Flow is full engagement in what one is doing. Csikszentmihalyi illustrated this by depicting Rico Medelin who worked in a factory that made movie projectors. His job was on an assembly line and, as each part-made projector came along, the operation he had to do was supposed to take 43 seconds. He had to do this 600 times a day, and he’d been in this job for five years. Many of us would not have been able to do this for so long, but Rico had analyzed the task, and thought about it; worked out how to use his tools and perform his task better and more quickly so that, in his best average over a day, he had completed each task for each unit in two thirds of the time required. "It is better than anything else," said Rico. "It's better than watching TV” (p. 39-40). Another person who was interviewed was a 62 year old woman who enjoyed tending her cows and orchard. "I find a special satisfaction in caring for the plants," she said. "I like to see them grow each day" (p. 55). A mother said about reading with her young daughter: "She reads to me, and I read to her, and that's a time when I sort of lose touch with the rest of the world. I'm totally absorbed in what I'm doing" (p. 53).

 

In this state of flow, which Csikszentmihalyi also calls "optimal experience," a person has a sense of purpose and creativity, so that the self and the activity merge. It’s not a matter of waiting for something pleasant to come along, but of setting yourself goals, analyzing and solving problems, creating an activity that is meaningful. 

 

In their study, Thissen, Menninghaus and Schlotz asked whether this idea applied to the reading of fiction. They had 373 people, between 18 and 81 years of age, recruited from an online survey in two large bookstores, read a German translation of Homer’s “Scylla and Charybdis,” Chapter 12 of Odysseus. They found that the experience of flow, as measured by a newly created 27-item scale, was a significant predictor of a feeling of presence in the story world, of identification with the protagonist, of enjoyment of reading, and of comprehension of the story. Here’s how the authors end the abstract of their paper.

 

Although, to date, the concept of flow has played only a minor role in research on fiction reading, our results suggest that it deserves being integrated into future theoretical frameworks and empirical investigations of positive reading experiences.

 

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper Collins.

 

Homer (762 BCE). The Odyssey. Harmondsworth: Penguin (current edition 1946).

 

Thissen, B. A. K., Menninghaus, W., & Schlotz, W. (2020). The pleasures of reading fiction explained by flow, presence, identification, suspense, and cognitive involvement. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Advanced online publication, November doi:10.1037/aca0000367

Writing and Inspiration

Do writers who feel themselves to be inspired enable their readers to feel the same way? This is the question that Todd Thrash and his colleagues asked in a recent paper (Thrash et al., 2016). The authors quote Maurice Bowra (1951) who wrote “inspired words create life in us because they are themselves alive” (p. 36).

Thrash and his colleagues gave 195 students half an hour to write a poem on “the human condition,” and then to rate how inspired they felt when writing their poem. All the poems were scored on a series of measures by independent raters. The most important independent rating was of Insightfulness: “The degree to which the poem transcends the obvious or superficial and discerns the hidden nature of things.” All the poems were also read by 220 student readers, who rated how inspired they felt on reading each poem.

The main results of the study were that poems by writers who felt more inspired when writing elicited more inspiration from their average readers, and that the effect was moderated by the independent ratings of the poems’ Insightfulness.

What is inspiration? For the researchers the answer is indicated by the scale of nine items, which they gave their student writers. The items included, “I felt inspired while expressing my ideas,” and ‘I was inspired to revise this poem.” It may be, therefore, that what the researchers call “inspiration” is of writers having the sense that they have had a good idea to write about, with the additional sense that its wording catches something that is worthwhile, and is of a kind that can be offered to readers. It may be interesting to wonder what other ways there may be of thinking about this kind of mental state when one is writing.

Bowra, M. (1951). Inspiration and poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Thrash, M. T., Maruskin, L., Moldovan, E. G., Olevnick, V., & Belzac, W. C. (2016). Writer-reader contagion of inspiration and related states: Conditional process analyses within a cross-classified writer x reader framework. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, advance online publication.

 

Literary Reading

What distinguishes novels and short stories that are literary from those that are not? The issue has come into focus in the psychology of fiction with David Kidd and Emanuele Castano’s (2013) finding that reading stories that were literary was more likely to prompt an improvement of empathy and theory-of-mind than reading stories that achieved high popularity on Amazon.

In his book on literariness, David Miall (2006) proposed that one factor is that literary writers use styles such as foregrounding, which attract attention and prompt reflection. In S/Z Roland Barthes (1975) distinguished writerly reading from readerly reading. In writerly reading a person takes on a role like that of a writer, in creating the story that he or she experiences. In contrast, he says, readerly reading is a “kind of idleness” (p. 4). Another possibility is that literary works enable people to think and reflect on characters. This view was put by Frank Hakemulder (2000) in The moral laboratory. He said that: "The complexity of literary characters helps readers to have more sophisticated ideas about others’ emotions and motives than stereotyped characters in popular fiction” (p. 15).

Although it has often been thought that literature has a function to instruct, with Shelley’s (1819) idea that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” being an example, this may not be right. It is possible that the central quality of the literary is that it enables readers to feel and think for themselves (Djikic & Oatley, 2014).

Emy Koopman (2016) compared three different versions of a chapter from Anna Enquist’s literary novel, Counterpoint, about loss of a child. The original version contained a high level of semantic, phonetic, and grammatical foregrounding. In a second version, foregrounding that depended on imagery was removed: a version without imagery. In a third version all foregrounding was removed: a version without foregrounding. People assigned to read the original version scored higher on self-reported empathy than those who read the version without foregrounding. Koopman also found that people who read the original text experienced more ambivalent emotions such as “a sad beauty” or a “grey joy,” than those who read the version without foregrounding. Might this have indicated that as well as having their own feelings of empathy for others, readers of the original story were feeling for themselves in a writerly way? Readers of the original version were not however found to be more reflective than those who read other versions. What might be done, one may wonder, to see how literary stories may invite us not just to feel empathetically and ambivalently, but also to think reflectively, for ourselves?

Barthes, R. (1975). S / Z (R. Miller, Trans.). London: Cape.
Djikic, M., & Oatley, K. (2014). The art in fiction: From indirect communication to changes of the self. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 8, 498-505.
Hakemulder, F. (2000). The moral laboratory: Experiments examining the effects of reading literature on social perception and moral self-concept. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342, 377-380.
Koopman, E. M. E. (2016). Effects of "literariness" on emotions and on empathy and reflection after reading. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 10, 82-98.
Miall, D. S. (2006). Literary reading: Empirical and theoretical studies. New York: Peter Lang.
Shelley, P. B. (1819). A defence of poetry. In C. Norman (Ed.), Poets on poetry (pp. 180-211). New York: Free Press.

Stories of the Earth: Prince reminds us how much care it takes to live with each other

The week of Earth Day was intense in Minneapolis this year. Earth Day eve, already a time of pensive introspection given the reminder of climate change this year has been (the pile of street snow that usually would not be melted at the end of my driveway for another month has been gone for over two months already!) and ongoing struggles with dire racial inequalities, also brought the news of Prince's death. As my hometown's most notable hero, Prince has inspired not only the overnight purplization of the city (everyone I encountered on Earth Day was wearing purple, and murals like the one pictured went up immediately), but also an Earth Day sung in and out with all night mourning dance parties. 

I will remain brief and encourage readers to go back to watching amazing Prince music videos and sharing their stories with friends, but will also share a quick reflection of my own. Listening to and watching the outpouring of remembrance and appreciation amongst all my friends (most of whom grew up here, in the inspiring and liberating purple shadow -- and who are giving bookish tributes, #princerevelry, and more), a significant part of what I am hearing echoed is the caring work that makes it possible to live with each other. Van Jones emotional remembrance perhaps has made this most visible for people, opening up the view to Prince's humanitarianism, if they hadn't been paying attention to visible work such as Planet Earth or his more subtle involvement building and funding Green for All and #YesWeCode. Watching those music videos (such as this one with Beyonce) in this light reveals ways of listening and responding that seem important to learn from (this moment, this move!) -- they make Prince so sexy and so loved partly because they show graceful and creative ways of acting on paying attention and caring. 

Caring enough to continue living here seems like one important way to practice our celebration of Earth and its communities, and trying to pay attention, then figuring out what to DO about what we've noticed, like Prince, seems a good tribute.

Re-labeling a fierce wind: Listening more to internal dialogue

I commuted this morning for the first time to my new office against a head wind that was strong enough to beg for an additional adjective. The wind was whipping off the hills to the north and pouring into the valley with such strength that it stopped my bike on downhill slopes, and it took herculean pedaling to get to work in just under twice the amount of time I had estimated it would take. My route takes me around the bay end of Otago harbor, and especially as I got down to the south side of the water, the wind was not only trying to push me off my bicycle, it was also throwing fistfuls of water my way, and snapping branches down into my path. Passing through the lee of my favorite pohutukawa trees almost knocked me off my bike in the other direction, the contrast was so sharp when sheltered.

In this kind of retrospect, it is easier to deconstruct the various parts of my experience of the wind, and analyze their relationship to my emotional state in relation to it. At the time, however, my main reaction was terse. I kept finding myself exclaiming (to myself) about what a fierce wind this was, or how wicked.

This was clearly a practiced response—the kind of thing one might say to a companion facing into a stiff wind, perhaps to keep spirits up, or to check in to see whether a course correction might be in order, or if the goal is worth the punishment of the wind. It certainly summons a certain attention to the wind: is this the kind of wind that is bringing a change in the weather I need to pay attention to?

My immediate response was surprisingly normative: I found myself chastising my inner wind labeller. True, the wind is from the north northwest, and my northern hemisphere self braces against the Alberta Clipper-eque cold that often signals at the time of year. But here in Dunedin in summer, what if this is a warm equatorial burst? Pedal harder. And I would no sooner concentrate on pedaling again when I would hear the first voice start up again about what a fierce wind that was.

In the weeks that have followed since I wrote the first lines above on my first commute, this conversation with myself has stuck with me, and has made me notice some things about internal dialogue. First was its pre-formedness. I was not so much searching for descriptions for what I was experiencing as I was discovering what I was experiencing by the way my internal voice was narrating it to me. This was accentuated by the dramatic nature of the effortful windy bike ride, and my consequently narrowed mental bandwidth. When I wondered, somewhat involuntarily, “why is this so hard?” a preformed answer was already there with an explanation about the ferocity of the wind.

This was, secondly, not just a descriptive note, but a preformed normative analysis that constructed the wind as a character! By assigning qualities like fierce and wicked to the wind, my internal weather monitor was personifying what I was “up against,” and providing me a set of similarly preformed schemata for responding: fight, struggle, perhaps retreat. It was only through the second part of the internal dialogue that I could access a perhaps more interesting schema like explore—or even reconsider those hasty judgments that come from experience in a very different place.

Although fairly mundane, these observations about the qualities of internal dialogue made me start to pay considerably new attention to how much I was relying on presets to interpret and orient in new situations. And especially since I was already bringing the frame of reorienting myphenological expectations in a hemispherically reversed seasonal transition, I had yet a new tool for noticing when and how that second part of the conversation could be encouraged, figuring out what patterns I am observing, and how those work.

Adjusting Phenological Expectations

The leaves on the trees along the Mississippi River where it runs through my neighborhood are just starting to turn. This has prompted a dissonance of expectation that is unprecedented in my experience: I will be spending the northern hemisphere winter in the southern hemisphere this year, so I have the chance to experience the seasonal transition into autumn without the bracing involved in facing cold weather. This has started me down a fascinating path of adjusting all of the expectations that collect around the phenological transitions we notice with the changing of seasons in a particular place, like when the leaves bud and leaf and color and fall.

I have discovered that I appreciate existential preparation for things like seasonal change. Unlike my mother, for example, who (as a schoolteacher by profession) covered her eyes whenever she saw a schoolbus before Labor Day and tried to hold off on acknowledging the coming change of season, I find seasonal changes less jarring if I play with them at least a little bit before they happen. Even welcome changes, like the emergence of leaves, suddenly taking up so much of the experiential space of the sky in the spring, can come with challenging feelings, for example of those leaves pressing in on me in an unaccustomed manner. This transition can be much more interesting and less dissonant if I have anticipated them adequately. This year, for example, with spring so late, I willed the leaves to come out, staring them into sprouting in the side yard with so much effort that when they appeared, it was more as if they were filling a void than taking up space I had been enjoying. I also travelled to places a bit further ahead of us where leaves were concerned, refamiliarizing myself with the feeling of leaves and the changed spatial relationship with trees.

The inverse moment, when the leaves come off again, has a more glorious compensation, but for a much more woeful change: a reduction in aerial spaciousness is a trivial price to pay for the transition out of the six months of freeze; the colorful riot has to be awfully amazing to store up equanimity for return to the cold half of the year. But this year, I am gleeful about the ability to experience some distance between the dying of the summer and the anticipation of cold. But what will this be like? I anticipate that I will learn not only about the many ways I may unconsciously brace for the worst* (and hopefully unlearn some), but also about the way that foreshadowing works in the experience of narrative. This hemispheric transition will also give me a chance to re-explore the relationship between the warm and cold seasons, something that has been creeping up in my priority list, as my recent hip reconstruction has suddenly relocated me, socially, into the set of people who feel seasons in their bones, and as my scholarly work brings me more often into the problem spaces created by less predictable climate regimes.

I have often wanted to stockpile some of the warm experiences of the green land of summer—the space one can move through in bare skin and relaxed limbs—to sustain me in the snowed-in dark months, and I have a picnic project opening tomorrow that is designed, in part, to do just that: to collect and catalogue moments of un-seasonally-encumbered exploration for unpacking in the inside months. Perhaps narrating my way through these picnics will also help me approach this season of preparation in ways that let the seasons talk to each other more in my experience, and that let the reading of phenology always have compensating comforts.

 

Narrative and understanding

Although it was published some time ago, a paper by Terre Satterfield, Scott Slovic and Robin Gregory (2000) is still very much up-to-date in thinking about the value of narrative. It’s about the possible benefits of narrative for understanding not just interpersonal matters, but matters about which one needs to think carefully about complex policy issues, and to make political decisions.

Satterfield and her colleagues were concerned about how to offer people information about the environment so that they could think about it productively to evaluate planned changes, and to take part in meaningful dialogue about policy decisions. How, for instance, do ordinary people understand what kinds of information are important and of good quality, and how can they come to know enough to make informed political choices? The researchers hypothesized that offering people information in a narrative form would increase comprehension of the main ideas of a problem, enable them to become emotionally engaged, and enable them to develop active imagery about an issue.

There were 239 participants in the study. They were from the University of Oregon community, and 52% were female. Each participant read either a utilitarian text or a narrative text and was asked to evaluate a policy that would reduce power produced by a Pacific Northwest hydroelectric system by letting more water through the system’s spillways to improve salmons’ ability to return from the ocean to their spawning grounds, to reproduce, and to let more young salmon make their way back to the ocean. A change to double the number of salmon returning to the river would increase the cost of household power by $60 annually, and a change to increase the number of returning salmon by ten times to would increase the cost by $360 annually. 

The utilitarian text included this:

Key policy decisions involve concerns such as the timing of power production (e.g. letting more water through dams on a regular basis would decrease the amount of power produced but also increase spawning habitat and food availability for young salmon) …  The expectation is that increased water flow will raise the number of returning salmon on the river by at least 2-fold (8000 salmon instead of the current 4000) …

The narrative text included this:

My neighbor, an engineer, has taught me a thing or two about how dams and their hydroelectric technology can be managed in ways that kill fewer young salmon. She says that increasing water flow around the dams would help. Right now only about 4000 salmon are making it back per year but if more water is released through the dam, salmon habitat and food availability will improve ...

In both formats, the information was exactly the same. Among the outcome measures was the importance of a set of values related to the decision: cost, salmon population, spirituality, and significance of salmon to the community.

The results were that receiving the information in a narrative format did not determine the relative importance of each of the values to the participants. People who received the information in a narrative format were, however, more aware of the issues of value in relation to the decision and made better use of the value dimensions provided.

One interpretation of this result is that narratives may be useful in enabling people to make better mental models of the world, with which they can think about complex issues, perhaps also to think for themselves, and to think more effectively than they might otherwise about political decisions.

Satterfield, T., Slovik, S., & Gregory, R. (2000). Narrative valuation in a policy judgment context. Ecological Economics, 34, 315-331.
 

Yeast ethics and social space (Stretch beers for Valentine)

(Canada Day Eve)

After a month’s worth of conferences about food and land and society (a year of not traveling led to some overenthusiastic planning of meeting sessions), I am developing an appreciation for yeast.

Scholarly meetings give you many chances to think closely about mass-culture baked goods. Breakfasts, the one meal served at the CanadianAssociation for Food Studies meeting at Brock, had a lot of white bread, and bicycling around Sweden for the Relational Landscapes meeting (during a rail strike), I encountered many store-bakery versions of a cardamom bread I grew up making. And at the joint meetings of the Agriculture, Food, and Human ValuesSociety and the Association for the Study of Food and Society in Burlington, the Co-op had a fascinating spatial divide between extraordinarily artisanal breads and the plebian buns of the masses. (I allayed the anxieties of a bread-seeker agonizing over the ingredients of the hot dog buns I was looking for by pointing him toward the good bread section.)

All of these breads are enough to make one appreciate yeasts, and I made sure to feed my current resident starter as soon as I returned home. I am indebted to my Montreal colleague David Szanto for my current cultivation of this yeast community: it was the starter of his recently deceased dear friend Gigi, a starter for unpretentious and very flavorful bread. And it is promiscuously bubbling with my kitchen yeasts now, growing out in a warm metal bowl not long after midsummer, becoming part of the ecology of my home, and making me think about the disparity between the crucial function of yeasts and the prevalence with which we rely for functional metaphors on the extraordinarily available everyday functions that underpin bread and beer!

Conversation on Loving Love's Death

Maja: I saw a movie – ‘Griefwalker’ – it reminded me how when we love, we have to love love’s death too – because it’s a part of the whole cycle of love.
Valentine: Loving love's death seems important.  I'm almost tempted by this to take a break from my food epistemologies mapping to investigate this... it's like a return to the pre-blog days when these missives were conversations emailed between the authors.
Maja: Give in to your temptation - I'd love to see what you would write on loving love's death.

Valentine: So it seems like there are three common themes when one starts to pay close attention to the way people grapple with the idea of the death of love, and each has different implications for the way we can see love functioning, perhaps. Perhaps most trivially -- but not uncommonly -- people are unwilling to let go of attachment to love, and when love dies, either the love itself, or the object of the love (or perhaps the infatuation stage of love -- the challenge presented when uncertain love threatens to be supplanted by a fantasy version of what love ought to be), they replace it with a proxy. (I'm currently watching the French film The Son, which deals with this very starkly, both in terms of its costs, but also what can be gained by remaining openly attentive to the inexplicable needs and forces of dealing with grief in love.)

A second theme seems to have to do with the way that a death of love is often narrated to justify the strength of a new infatuation: the old love must have died, and this effect of strong novelty must be what live love feels like. This seems like one of the most corrosive features of infidelity, as it contributes to an assertion of death for what is more likely a transient contrast effect -- and is exacerbated by the self-deception and cognitive dissonance reduction likely to along with it.

Third is something slightly different related to an awareness of contingency in general, as when, for example, lovers are of significantly different ages to not be able to ignore the possibilities of death itself (and the recognition of its omnipresent possibility, not just there as something we age into) or of the challenges of love in aging differently. It strikes me that there is a healthy tonic to the other two themes above, which both involve some degree of self-deception, in this openness to difficult experience, and I suspect that it is easier for people who are less disgust sensitive -- but also that it helps people develop more comfort with the challenges presented by uncertainty and disgust; it brings the unknown more actively into the experience of love, and in embracing death's presence there, makes it less corrosive. 

It would be interesting to know how these three themes factor into the gracefulness of transitions in relationships. One trope that seems worth noting, partly because it seems like such a common attractor state in the conceptualizing of love transitions is a kind of catastrophizing that paints painful experience of love changing state in a tint of noble suffering. The feeling of needing to give up love for some sort of character development seems likely to be unhealthily influenced by normative social ideals -- and yet also to offer a tantalizing sense of control in a relational domain so characterized by uncertainty. In contrast, the willingness to observe more openly what love becomes over time -- as it may decompose and reconstitute in various ways -- seems more likely to nourish romantic love in all its threatening realness.

Write what you don't know

The saying, “Write what you know,” has become a maxim of creative writing. It seems to imply that if you want to write and have grown up in a family that runs a dry-cleaning business in a small town in Iowa, you had better write about dry cleaning in the Mid-West, and not even think about anything else. But this cannot be right. One can imagine an editor saying to a writer about a passage that lacks verisimilitude: “Write what you know.” But here—as with the best feedback in teaching or psychotherapy—what is said must be exactly the most helpful thing to say at exactly the right moment. When broadened to a principle, the saying becomes empty. George Eliot wrote, in Middlemarch, about Dr Tertius Lydgate without herself being a doctor, without even being a man. Stephen Crane, in The red badge of courage, wrote an engaging story of a private on the Union side in the American Civil War without having fought in that war and without having been in combat of any kind.

We do need principles. One might be: “Write about what fascinates you.” The fascination needs to be enough to sustain you as you explore your subject. Your writing will be your coming to know it.

The best book I know on principles of writing is R. G. Collingwood’s The principles of art.  I have written about it here before (click here), but the book deserves to be revisited. Collingwood argues that all art derives from an emotion that affects us deeply, that has an urgency about it, and that is not understood. So, says Collingwood, imagine this man:

At first he is conscious of having an emotion, but not conscious of what this emotion is. All he is conscious of is a perturbation or excitement, which he feels going on within him, but of whose nature he is ignorant. While in this state, all he can say about his emotion is: “I feel . . . I don’t know how I feel.” From this helpless and oppressed condition he extricates himself by doing something which we call expressing himself. This is an activity which has something to do with the thing we call language: he expresses himself by speaking. It also has something to with consciousness: the emotion expressed is the emotion of whose nature the person who feels it is no longer unconscious (pp. 109-110).

A work of art is the expression of such a not-yet-understood emotion in a language. The language might be of the words of a novel, or of the colours and layout of a painting, or of the notes a piece of music.

Collingwood says that we might make something such as a chair and know what to do, as well as what the result will be. Art is different. If we know the result before we start, what we do may be craft but it’s not art.

An exploration in a language of art is apt to take a long time and, for Collingwood, the emotion is both the object of the exploration, and the almost obsessional urge that drives us. I think Collingwood’s principle here needs modification. The urge must be emotional. It’s what keeps an artist going, perhaps for years on a single work, but the subject matter need not be an emotion itself. (A lovely film on this question is Tim’s Vermeer. It’s about the language of visual art. Its subject matter was not an emotion but the question: “How did Vermeer manage to paint such wonderful pictures.” The film is a documentary about Tim Jenison’s exploration of the question. The project took him more than five years, and doing the painting of an actual Vermeer, The music lesson, took him 130 days.)

Artistic writers write what they don’t know. They write what they deeply desire to know, and come to know it better in the exploration that is their writing.

Collingwood, R. G. (1938). The principles of art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Teller (2013). Tim’s Vermeer. Film. USA.

Warm Land Lunch: Sharing Stories for Eating

Domestic Confections, credit (c): Molly Balcom Raleigh

I am lucky enough to study food and food stories for a living—and on top of that, I get to work with a number of artists who play with food for their living (as with Molly Balcom Raleigh’s mouse nest confections project pictured here and to the left). Involving the construction of edible mouse nests representing what a mouse might be able to make from the various detritus of common domestic spaces, this project encouraged participants in the opening festivities to make themselves mouse nest sundaes, and as the artist explained: “Eating the nests at the end of the meal allows us to symbolically re-integrate the self with nature at the sites where it is most relevant to our lives: our homes and our bodies.” 

Despite the thoughtfulness and delight evident in this approach to food, a recent conversation on mindful eating art practice convened by St. Paul Artist in Residence Marcus Young revealed that it turns out that many of us still have trouble eating lunch.

Especially when I am in the midst of researching some particular labor atrocity or unbelievably mundane source of avoidable toxins, it is not surprising that it might be hard to shake off judgmental feelings about potential lunch fixings. So at the end of this extraordinarily long and cold winter, when the idea of a picnic on the warm grass seems like an astonishingly captivating way to reintegrate ourselves with nature, I will briefly share the idea I am thinking of as a "warm land lunch" series, responding to all the subtle but palpable pressures that keep lunch a distinctly third class meal despite its delightful potential as a rejuvenating repast in the center of our days.

Conversation amongst Molly, Marcus, and I along with our colleague Aki Shibata and Clouds in Water leader/teachers Sosan Flynn and Ken Ford made us realize how much we responded to these pressures: lunch seems so hard to prioritize, especially in the midst of busy days. And yet we all agreed on how rewarding it was to step away from the desk, set a space, enjoy the surface, the vessels, the implements, and the food, and to connect with the conviviality and social space of lunch--even, paradoxically, if we were doing so in silence, or only in virtual companionship, knowing, for example, that a companion elsewhere was also stopping to eat lunch.

We may be a world away from more formally convivial lunches, as in Japan, where Aki tells us shared lunch hours are still much more common than most of us have experienced. But the shared space of navigating the meaning and affect of lunch has been a compelling prospect for us, and we are considering what sorts of platforms provide enough scaffolding for a convivial lunch--neither stripping away the actual conviviality (in simulated virtual companionship) nor necessarily burdening the already difficult-to-justify time with additional sociality. While we dream up community picnics on the warm land (once this new layer of snow melts), I am suddenly hearing lunch stories from many colleagues (many unprompted--perhaps lunch romanticism is a feature of this time of stir-crazy fake springtime). Some reminisce about the daily departmental lunches they used to eat together. Others ask why we have stopped walking out (across the icy tundra of sidewalk) for companionable if occasional lunches. On the day after our conversation above, a colleague asked if I had time for lunch with that tone that says "I know you don't," and seemed surprised when I responded that we had to eat, so we might as well make time for it. On the walk to lunch, she told me about quiet eating spaces she had experienced in past jobs, where people brought brown bag lunches to a common room and ate in companionable silence. The promise of the warm land lunch seems just below the surface of this season, and I look forward to sharing how it sprouts.