Wow, I guess I'm falling short of my blogging goals.
Life is busy, full and rich (when I allow myself to notice that it is.)

Just want to say this, short and sweet. The secret to your Arete, is so simple-- follow your delights.
They are yours and yours alone. The more you notice them, honor them, focus on them, expand them-- the closer and closer you move to living the life that is truly yours and no one else's. Just for today, carry a piece of paper and jot down everything, big, little, stupid, profound-- EVERYTHING that delights you.
Look at your list before you go to sleep, and maybe even again in the morning.
Do it again tomorrow and you're two days into the 21 that it takes to form a habit. A habit of being delighted, and noticing that you are. How wonderful is that?
Maybe collect the pages inot a folder of delights, or... the options are endless!
Love you,
-R

Walking last night in the light rain, such a treat in southern California, looking at houses and noticing what I said to Tomas. "I like this, I don't like that, that's nice, ooh look at that, that's cool, that needs work..." a steady stream of my opinions, as if they mattered.
I wonder about it, this constant judging...
It seems the truly Zen approach would be to take everything as it is, accept it, embrace it. Someone wise once said that "peace is the absence of against-ness" which seems somehow to include the absence of judgment, and I do agree...
but only up to a point.
We are human, supposedly made in God's image, and if so, what is the god-like thing about us except to create? To imagine something that is not there, or imagine something is different, and then make it so.
To build, improve, create-- any or all of it requires noticing what you do and don't like, what you exactly and precisely prefer. Without that noticing, choosing, judging, there is no need built up to create or do anything.
No pressure to express the self, except through the choices, the judgments we make about what we do like or don't.
It is the only way to know what we truly want to cause to be, isn't it?

So the difference between blogging, and sitting alone in my room, writing privately, is that I can get feedback. I like it!
I got a comment from Shelby, an amazing artist, who I am priveleged to also call a friend. It made me sad, but more determined to get straight to the meat of what I am after here, with all this Arete. She thinks the authentic self is damaged, and there is fear in searching for it. She says it boils down to how well you like yourself.

My authentic self is what is beneath all the damage. Damage is done by parents, schools, society, random bad (or good) luck, but most of all by ourselves. Damage is done by interpreting an event or comment to mean that who we are is bad, wrong, or simply not good enough, and therefore should be hidden away. We create an "ideal self" based on all the input we receive, and then spend our lives trying to measure up to it. It was fake to start with. We made it up out of judgement. Or at least that's what I have done.

But the authentic self, the unblemished self is there first. I believe my only real job in my short time on this planet is to be exactly myself. What else is there? Out of being exactly myself, I can give so much. Out of being my ideal self, my should-be self, I can only give an imitation of perfection, and that is not Arete. I can work very hard at becoming excellent at this task, or that sport, or this painting style, but it will never be as good as someone who does that work because it is his or her Arete. If i am doing it for any other reason than the joy of bringiing my true self into the world, it will fall short. it will be hard work, and never enough reward, however much the world may pay me for it.

But at 45, or any age past about 3, it becomes very hard to tell which is which. At school you are rewarded for this or that, and punished for the opposite. Is this wrong? no, it is what we must do to have a society that functions. I am the absolute last person to be advocating the kind of teaching or parenting in which children are encouraged to run wild, or rewarded for everything they do. (My friend Trevor talks about his generation who got a prize just for showing up. I am not from that generation.) This is the"self-esteem" so popular in the 70s and 80s, possibly the "how well you like yourself" that Shelby mentioned. I think it is a poor stand-in for Arete. It was a nice try, maybe an antidote to the success-driven mores from an early time, but it went too far, and I think it has back-fired. It seems to me fragile indeed--based on air, on unconditional approval by grown-ups who were following a script. The new age books tell us to achieve it by affirmations and positive thinking, still so fragile. (But this is probably a rant which should save for another time and place.)
No, the one thing I wanted to get out, to give to Shelby, and anyone else who has any fear at all about Arete, is the access to it. The thing I've looked and looked for, and the one thing it keeps coming back to. I am not the only one who has come to this, but I keep finding it to be true. The clues are in the realm of delight.
Yes, delight. Others have called it bliss, joy, and so forth. I like delight. (de-light: gives light)
Your Arete is talking to you through your senses, and especially through your sense of delight. So in a way, your only purpose on this planet is to delight yourself. (take that as you will...)
But think about it.
You have preferences. You like purple and not brown, or pink, or orange, or chartreuse. And you like them in certain combinations. And even though you might become "educated" about the color wheel, there are certain shades that make you smile, and others which wrinkle your nose. and I have them, and mine may be different than yours. People damage themselves by trying to force themselves to like what they don't, or appreciate art which they hate... Certainly you can grow, and of course your tastes change, but there will always be that color, or that smell or that view, or that phrase of music which makes you smile before you even know why. Those things are yours. They are the very beginning of the access to your innate excellence. They are worth noticing. No one gave them to you, and no one can take them away.

But we get too busy to notice. Or we get depressed from trying so hard to be our ideal selves, that our brains can't register delight any more. I am recovering from a major depression, and I know this. Maybe I will write about it later. But for now, spend the rest of the day, the week, noticing what you respond to. And not judging it. It is your specific, authentic self saying "feed me this" "I need this." It is yours alone.
Feed it. It is the way in to Arete. To the excellence that is only, exclusively, and delightfully yours.

So, what does it mean, anyway? Self-referential excellence? What a lot of words. I have to watch that...

It means my real job on this planet is to be exactly myself. To be the most whole and fully expressed self I can be. Simple, right? Maybe not so much. It takes quite a lot of digging to separate my self from my idea of myself. It's like the difference between "tree" -the word, the symbol, the idea- and that one specific California live oak whose acorns crash onto the table in my back yard.

My idea of myself, has been influenced by thousands of events, memories, off-hand remarks, choices, images... And to make it worse, it's a moving target. My self at 45 is not exactly the same as my self at 15, though there are constants. Teasing it apart, in order to own myself, is the discovery work of Arete. Once discovered, finding the courage and compassion to express my self in the world is the muscle-building of Arete. Integrating the various parts of my self, is the maturing of Arete.

I took a workshop with a Japanese potter last weekend, Shuji Ikeda. The workshop was a hands-on, how-to of making a particular kind of clay "basket he makes. when mine is finished drying, firing, glazing, I will post a photo for you. It was a wonderful experience, and I love my basket. But I was thinking about what he really wanted to teach, and it was not the technique. Shuji wanted to share with us a reverence for the clay, a relationship between self and material. And I resonated deeply with that lesson, and the man who wanted to teach it.

I began thinking what I would truly want to teach, what I have always wanted to share when I have taught, and it is never the subject at hand. The subject is just a medium for what I really want to share: this idea of Arete, of putting one's self into every element of life, of work, of art. To me, copying Shuji's beautiful basket, is not the point. It is finding and making my own basket... Taking his basket, and discovering mine inside. Learning his basket is important. Learning it exactly the way it is, the how and the why his basket is built the way it is-- is crucial. Mastering the basket at hand is one of the ways to discover my own basket... But I more wanted to learn his deeper teaching, to see where it resonates with my own. To deepen my relationship with the clay, with my body as it relates to the clay, so that my self can be transmitted into the clay and come forth into the world in form. That is the true lesson, that is what Shuji truly gave me, another avenue to my own Arete.

This blog is to keep me focused on this deeper lesson, this deepening of my relationship to self, and the journey of bringing self into the world, in clay, in cooking, in my business. I'm blogging as a way to test it, to see if the ideas I have stand up to scrutiny, to refine and build the muscles of my own Arete. Thanks for the opportunity.

Arete, Personal Excellence

The Army wants you to "be all you can be." But how on earth would you do that except by first becoming all that you are? Aristotle and the Greeks were concerned with defining the ideal man, I am concerned with discovering, defining, and enriching the ideal, individual self. Your self, my self.

It seems an impossible ideal, but I believe a world made up of people more concerned with exploring and expressing their particular and very specific selves would be far more interesting, and less dangerous than a world concerned with, say, the latest episode of 90210, or how to master war profiteering.

I have loved the concept of Arete (there should be an accent mark over the final "e" pronounced: are-eh-tay) since I was first introduced to it in some philosophy class at the university of Washington. I wish I could remember the teacher, or the details of the course, but I was never good at those details. Thank you, professor whoever-you-are. And of course, since details tend to elude me in search of larger concepts, I am sure I have mangled Aristotle's original concept. I like to think I have adapted it, brought it forward into this time, integrated it into my modern world-view. Everything is changing, and we can keep the best of what the Greeks were up to, and drop some of those things that no longer fit. Vomitoriums, for example. (although I have been at some parties which... well, enough said.)

The way I understand and use Arete is as a self-referring excellence. The excellence of the thing itself in its function as itself. For example, the excellence (or perfection) of a chair is different than the excellence of an apple. And the excellence of a Gravenstein is different than the excellence of a Red Delicious. Apples to apples, is insufficient, you see, for there are many kinds of apples. And even within varieties, there are differences in what would be the ideal apple, each growing on a different branch, or to be used for a different purpose. And if there is so much variety in apples, which seem to me to have no active choice in the matter of their lives, as it were, then how much more variety in the excellence of a man or woman, boy or girl?

I think the only gauge of excellence which matter at all is how well the thing expresses its own unique perfection. and that is the quest I have put myself on, the highest I hope for my child. At the end of my life, the question I want to answer affirmatively, is this: how well did I live my own life? How fully did I become myself?

Anyway, I have never blogged before. I've only been texting for a month or so. But I'm game to try it, and start putting down my thoughts on this concept which is so important to the way I see the world. I offer it in hope that it can enrich the quality of your particular life, and I write it to keep myself on the path, in a world so overwhelmingly distracting as this.