I stumbled across this fantastic frame of a state of mind which resonated with me and thought to share it with... you..
Point of View
While his memories pace back and forth like expectant
Fathers, he tries on the loneliness like a loose-fitting shirt.
Somewhere in the room there is the ticking of a palmetto bug.
It reminds him of the planes on the way to Kosovo,
The fading crackle of wireless ground-to-air talk.
He'd like to take an eraser to that life, leaving
Just a few ghosted lines separating one nothing
From another nothing. Outside his window there is a
Darkness except for one balcony where a woman is sitting.
The smoke from her cigarette disappears into the stories
Reflected in the windows above her. She is probably reading
One of those romance novels where the characters speak
In the extinct language of a love she once knew.
Okay, let's drop the fiction. You know who you are.
Despite searching for yourself under stone, in trash bins,
Behind boarded doors of houses about to collapse.
The old loves pile up like skeleton sculptures in a Capuchin
monastery. What do they know about how we come back?
The things you want to say are as light as helium.
Now it's 12:14 A.M. In this world, two parallels meet,
The circle never closes. Maybe you have cried out
In your sleep. It's so hot the leaves are burning off
The trees. By Fall we'll be able to see right through
The forest into the future. By then you'll know this is
about me. The palmetto bug is just keeping time.
What's at stake here is how we define ourselves.
You are me when you are not you. I am you
When I am not me. The branch above us wonders if
It is time to fall. Our lives line the post office
And supermarket walls like runaway children.
Sometimes we just want to appear in our own mirrors.
I've double-locked the doors. It's so hot the blackout
Won't end for a few more days. In Lebanon
The light spreads out like shards of a mortar
Round. One family trying to escape is hit by
A random bomb. This is really about us, isn't it?
Are bombs random? These lines? Who was it
That I began with? As a kind of defense? There's a barge
Stuck where the river changed course. Day and night
Take turns trying to escape our field of vision.
Hope spreads its tentacles but we know better.
When I started, this was supposed to be about love.
But look, we can't even control what we think about
The moon, the train's distant whistle which is sad
Or promising, the existence of centaurs, peacekeepers,
Runaways, skeletons. I can't stick to one subject
For more than a line. In no time at all I will find
A real self. I don't know how many bugs have come in
Through this open window, a kind of lung these lives
Pass in and out of. You, me, him, I understand, I do,
Your hesitation. The branch, too, is about to fall. You,
It, have no idea how much of me this love has become.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
More Old Poetry
Call them psyche; the Greeks did,
thinking they were ancestral souls,
returning like breath.
I think of them as here to show
how beauty is a whimsy.
Some say the butterfly is so named
for sorceresses, stutter-searching for sustenance,
that they are witches in disguise,
hunting for milk or butter,
left out in a pan.
The butterflies begin in his belly;
tickling with their papery wing-weight
against a stomach's satiny lining,
in the exact shape of,
symmetrical to,
her voice.
Next I see him, inches from the screen,
face grayly aglow from texting her,
barraging with words I know he's
said before-- I've said before.
The butterflies stack
against his esophageal opening,
peristalsis reversed, churning from him
the morass of every
undigested word.
I want to tell him -- metamorphose!
and make a verb out of the noun...
and make the change volitional.
I want to tell him, metamorphosis is
the eventuality of larvae.
But age is too much like an endgame,
and we become stricken with self-
consumption, like Auroboros,
consuming ourselves, tail first,
with whom or what has preceded.
Each abortive attempt at flight
unravels the pupal clothing, revealing
a sheen of worn and wispy threads;
the veneer which wants to grow,
wants to weave strands of time around us,
proving that adage of healing all wounds.
While the shrill wings of her words
stir within his organs, he is once again free
to tear and to be torn.
Poor caterpillar! Hung so naked from a tree.
Butterflies strung from a mobile
diagram our fettered hearts;
marionetted with the also-entwined.
The mobile we never outgrew from infancy
--still chained to the ceiling.
A blue butterfly skitters towards
the room's boundary.
Swooping in tight circles,
he evinces equilibrium.
A slight puff of air undoes his position,
inertia sloughed off by the slow, unceasing drag
of bodies, unattached yet bound.
thinking they were ancestral souls,
returning like breath.
I think of them as here to show
how beauty is a whimsy.
Some say the butterfly is so named
for sorceresses, stutter-searching for sustenance,
that they are witches in disguise,
hunting for milk or butter,
left out in a pan.
The butterflies begin in his belly;
tickling with their papery wing-weight
against a stomach's satiny lining,
in the exact shape of,
symmetrical to,
her voice.
Next I see him, inches from the screen,
face grayly aglow from texting her,
barraging with words I know he's
said before-- I've said before.
The butterflies stack
against his esophageal opening,
peristalsis reversed, churning from him
the morass of every
undigested word.
I want to tell him -- metamorphose!
and make a verb out of the noun...
and make the change volitional.
I want to tell him, metamorphosis is
the eventuality of larvae.
But age is too much like an endgame,
and we become stricken with self-
consumption, like Auroboros,
consuming ourselves, tail first,
with whom or what has preceded.
Each abortive attempt at flight
unravels the pupal clothing, revealing
a sheen of worn and wispy threads;
the veneer which wants to grow,
wants to weave strands of time around us,
proving that adage of healing all wounds.
While the shrill wings of her words
stir within his organs, he is once again free
to tear and to be torn.
Poor caterpillar! Hung so naked from a tree.
Butterflies strung from a mobile
diagram our fettered hearts;
marionetted with the also-entwined.
The mobile we never outgrew from infancy
--still chained to the ceiling.
A blue butterfly skitters towards
the room's boundary.
Swooping in tight circles,
he evinces equilibrium.
A slight puff of air undoes his position,
inertia sloughed off by the slow, unceasing drag
of bodies, unattached yet bound.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
The Goddess named Regret
You could have seen it coming,
had you not been surrounded
by endless azure,
that blue mirror,
the echoing sky.
When she told you she was
leaving-- she was clear that
the evacuation
wasn't only of your island,
but the whole
male archipelago.
You told her that she'd prefer to drown,
than live on a raft. That she'd only
be airlifted to another
crumbling spit of sand.
Then there are your brothers' shipwrecks;
frozen as they wade ashore, islands
malformed of broken-bits.
Ships listing in the silt, ground down
to shoreline by the absent
lapping away at the foots of their beds.
You could have noticed the warning signs:
Time scraped on, a pale beggar
hobbling down a wide strand,
as buildings shot from the shoreline
meeting the sky halfway.
You could have seen her eyes water,
and not believed her bit
about the sour sea air.
You could have decided
not to call her that name, the one
derived from an Indian goddess,
but meaning surly bitch.
You could have stopped
pounding into her
all those reminders
of being shipwrecked...
had you not been surrounded
by endless azure,
that blue mirror,
the echoing sky.
When she told you she was
leaving-- she was clear that
the evacuation
wasn't only of your island,
but the whole
male archipelago.
You told her that she'd prefer to drown,
than live on a raft. That she'd only
be airlifted to another
crumbling spit of sand.
Then there are your brothers' shipwrecks;
frozen as they wade ashore, islands
malformed of broken-bits.
Ships listing in the silt, ground down
to shoreline by the absent
lapping away at the foots of their beds.
You could have noticed the warning signs:
Time scraped on, a pale beggar
hobbling down a wide strand,
as buildings shot from the shoreline
meeting the sky halfway.
You could have seen her eyes water,
and not believed her bit
about the sour sea air.
You could have decided
not to call her that name, the one
derived from an Indian goddess,
but meaning surly bitch.
You could have stopped
pounding into her
all those reminders
of being shipwrecked...
Ancient Chinese Guy visits rehab
So much individual work that we require in this culture of ours. In my Eastern Philosophizing, I have come to imagine how alien this modern America would seem to an ancient Chinese guy. He'd show up to a reality show celebrity rehab all like, what the hell, why is nobody tending the fields they're dry as a bone and completely furrowless where is the plough and the ox and why are we spending our days sitting in a circle of chairs talking about our childhoods which by the way shouldn't have been that complicated since they were spent in blind filial obedience to our parents because after all would we even exist without them?
And then we'd all turn to him and laugh and go, silly old man there're no fields to plow anymore plus we have machines for that. Besides, tilling the fields at this altitude, in this kind of climate-- you kidding? You'd be spending your evenings plucking off precancerous moles. Meanwhile the Chinese guy would actually be picking some invisible creatures from his scalp while we're telling him this, causing one blonde lady with crows feet to remark, my god do you really have things growing on you why haven't you had that checked out at some point and should we all really be sitting this close to him right now when clearly he needs medical treatment?
These are all questions for the Chinese guy but seeing as how he can't actually respond it's a wonder why we even bother asking them, except to hear ourselves affirm that yes he's clearly nutso and who let him in here to our sacred space just to dump all over our whole process?
And then we'd all turn to him and laugh and go, silly old man there're no fields to plow anymore plus we have machines for that. Besides, tilling the fields at this altitude, in this kind of climate-- you kidding? You'd be spending your evenings plucking off precancerous moles. Meanwhile the Chinese guy would actually be picking some invisible creatures from his scalp while we're telling him this, causing one blonde lady with crows feet to remark, my god do you really have things growing on you why haven't you had that checked out at some point and should we all really be sitting this close to him right now when clearly he needs medical treatment?
These are all questions for the Chinese guy but seeing as how he can't actually respond it's a wonder why we even bother asking them, except to hear ourselves affirm that yes he's clearly nutso and who let him in here to our sacred space just to dump all over our whole process?
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Tales are Innumerable of Love
Late in life, William S. Burroughs
remarked that
Love is nature's most
powerful pain-killer.
And this from a lifelong junky,
by the way.
*
... that within
the tether of the wedded,
flows an opiate
stronger than heroin;
sweetening the gaze,
numbing the brain.
*
We don't have names for these arrangements,
that arrive like wayward houseguests; unannounced,
that depart like an arrowhead,
straining from your ribcage
at a world it cannot help but injure.
*
Consider ourselves,
the lovers we've shed--
little children hearts carried,
each piece a meal,
in Dad's old cigar boxes;
slivers cold as sushi...
... tripping beside
a pile of rubble, stooping
to spill the contents
into earth, awaiting
some response.
*
Jesus, you're
half her age and
twice as confused.
Here is a woman, hurting
and a man, pleasure-seeking.
The cosmogony of modern romance--
chronicle their trajectory,
like errant planets.
*
The foretaste of disgust, abandonment,
Here in her pursed lips,
her swollen eyes, her dampening
cheeks. Still, you sacrifice
the bones of the departed
to the fires of her thighs.
Soundless, she awaits your
devastation, broken upon
the boulder of your bed.
Arriving eviscerated,
she awaits her grief.
*
Crows perch in her hair,
staring down the fresh kill.
Something tells you to guard her,
jealously. Use her flames
on the sorrows you hold.
Hammer them out,
like sheets of metal.
Batter your
boundless desires,
before more lovers leave them
useless,
screaming in the rain.
Forge your pain into something
completely other.
*
remarked that
Love is nature's most
powerful pain-killer.
And this from a lifelong junky,
by the way.
*
... that within
the tether of the wedded,
flows an opiate
stronger than heroin;
sweetening the gaze,
numbing the brain.
*
We don't have names for these arrangements,
that arrive like wayward houseguests; unannounced,
that depart like an arrowhead,
straining from your ribcage
at a world it cannot help but injure.
*
Consider ourselves,
the lovers we've shed--
little children hearts carried,
each piece a meal,
in Dad's old cigar boxes;
slivers cold as sushi...
... tripping beside
a pile of rubble, stooping
to spill the contents
into earth, awaiting
some response.
*
Jesus, you're
half her age and
twice as confused.
Here is a woman, hurting
and a man, pleasure-seeking.
The cosmogony of modern romance--
chronicle their trajectory,
like errant planets.
*
The foretaste of disgust, abandonment,
Here in her pursed lips,
her swollen eyes, her dampening
cheeks. Still, you sacrifice
the bones of the departed
to the fires of her thighs.
Soundless, she awaits your
devastation, broken upon
the boulder of your bed.
Arriving eviscerated,
she awaits her grief.
*
Crows perch in her hair,
staring down the fresh kill.
Something tells you to guard her,
jealously. Use her flames
on the sorrows you hold.
Hammer them out,
like sheets of metal.
Batter your
boundless desires,
before more lovers leave them
useless,
screaming in the rain.
Forge your pain into something
completely other.
*
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Recounting the First Seminar
This was written on day numero uno at St. John's... but kept as a draft until I just now decided to post it. As frustrating as that first seminar was, on Plato's Meno, wherein Socrates was compared to a "torpedo-fish" in terms of his ability to numb the senses of his opponent, the seminar did provide me some humor, or rather I was able to provide it with some humor.... (What follows was written in a completely sober state, mind you...)
My first seminar and it's on Plato's Meno-- so not only am I forced to choke down the obfuscation of Socrates, I am forced to listen to twenty other people trying to tease out some meaning while channeling their own personal beliefs into the spaces where discussion of a significant point has broken down. I chose the Eastern Classics program in part to get away from the sophistries of Western philosophy-- the specious reasoning that frustrates the hell out of me. I wanted to find a program where I could discuss resonant aspects of Eastern Philosophy that are more practically applicable to my life. But as a primer, we are all supposed to participate in this introductory seminar, on Plato, bringing me back full circle to the Greeks.
Instead I focused on several things. First of all, one of the tutors was devilishly alluring and shares a "Van" in her last name, indicating that she is of Dutch extraction and thus good breeding stock. Sadly, upon further imaginings I must admit that the sharp angularity of our bone-structures would probably lead to horned progeny. Secondly: the other tutor is named Mr. Hand, which we must call him because all persons are to be regarded by the formality of their last names here at St. John's-- to ensure a proper degree of objectivity and respect for one anothers opinions. Mr. Hand, by the way, was the name of the anal-retentive teacher in "Fast Times At Ridgemont High" starring the youthful Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli, the quintessential California stoner. I wanted to quote the movie in my best stoner-voice, but doubted that more than one or two persons would "get" the reference and I would foolishly appear stoned out of the context of that stellar film.
Thirdly, a Latino fellow from New Mexico who I initially judged a jock but who proved to be quite articulate, sounds exactly like Quagmire from the Family Guy. Towards the end of the seminar, I could only wonder what he would do if I asked him to do the voice (aside from punching me in the face).
Finally, someone stocked the counter behind the oval seminar table with brownies, which became an easy reference point for several philosophers in the discussion of the morality behind the age-old question of Why-We-Don't-Just-Up-and-Steal-a-Whole-Damn-Plate-of-Brownies-When-No-One's-Looking. This offended me, being that I am grossly allergic to anything containing wheat flour. Another student brought up alcohol as another Object-of-Vice-We-Can-Choose-To-Be-Virtuous-About, which again I felt compelled to mention-- ahem-- some people have an obsession about and an allergy to. Of course, I just kept my mouth shut and let the serious philosophers do the thinking out loud. The discussion moved on to other, deeper matters, like Why-I-Don't-Just-Up-and-Stab-Somebody (presumably a rival for the plate of brownies). This ethic of No-Stabbing was traced to the fact of the social conditioning of innumerable consequences which we experience or see others experience, particularly the threat of a retaliatory stabbing being a deterrent to stabbing-- granting that the sensation of getting stabbed is of the not-so-pleasant variety. Someone offered that this whole No-Stabbing and Brownie-Stealing paradigm sounded suspiciously Epicurean (for, as we students of Classical Greece all know, Epicurius stressed the pleasures of the senses as the be-all/end-all, while downplaying the initial pleasures of getting stabbed as like "drinking a good cup of Joe only to find it's been laced with NutraSweet")...
I'm not sure if any of this philosophizing actually is a useful form of inquiry, or if it's just born from some insatiable urge to question and pick apart and undermine the ideas of those around you. What did I take away from the discussion? I began drawing a crown to symbolize Plato's philosopher-king, before recalling how I couldn't draw. I would have put the crown on Socrates, who was a rather ugly fellow from all clay and bronze accounts, but then I recalled how Socrates just questioned the hell out of everyone until they just wanted to retire to their pensione by the Aegean and drink some vino solo... That kind of guy could never lead a city. He'd get up to the podium and just throw out a few ideas he'd heard bantied about recently-- "It has come to my attention from an aide of mine that some of you wish to build an aqueduct to supplement our water supply in the event of a drought. Now let me question your best intentions behind this project, and wonder aloud if more water in pipes will not simply bring less rain to our fair city and our fertile fields. For, as the poet Pindar more assuredly and beautifically expressed it, the Earth is a concave dish of clay, made from the potter's wheel of God, in which water collects in various depressions and voids due to God needing that extra clay to make hills, mountains, and breasts. Waste of clay if you ask me, am I right fellas? (har har). There being only a certain limit to the water that can collect in these depressions, the excess is drawn upwards into the colinder that hangs prone over the Earth, lest the rest inundate our lands and drown our crops and goats. That water, if drawn in greater measure into our midst, will deplete the depression and thus prevent the colinder from collecting our excess, to return to our fields each April and bring us flowers each May. What I'm asking you, then, is do you truly wish to despoil our fields of flowers? Especially with Mother's Day fast approaching?"
My first seminar and it's on Plato's Meno-- so not only am I forced to choke down the obfuscation of Socrates, I am forced to listen to twenty other people trying to tease out some meaning while channeling their own personal beliefs into the spaces where discussion of a significant point has broken down. I chose the Eastern Classics program in part to get away from the sophistries of Western philosophy-- the specious reasoning that frustrates the hell out of me. I wanted to find a program where I could discuss resonant aspects of Eastern Philosophy that are more practically applicable to my life. But as a primer, we are all supposed to participate in this introductory seminar, on Plato, bringing me back full circle to the Greeks.
Instead I focused on several things. First of all, one of the tutors was devilishly alluring and shares a "Van" in her last name, indicating that she is of Dutch extraction and thus good breeding stock. Sadly, upon further imaginings I must admit that the sharp angularity of our bone-structures would probably lead to horned progeny. Secondly: the other tutor is named Mr. Hand, which we must call him because all persons are to be regarded by the formality of their last names here at St. John's-- to ensure a proper degree of objectivity and respect for one anothers opinions. Mr. Hand, by the way, was the name of the anal-retentive teacher in "Fast Times At Ridgemont High" starring the youthful Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli, the quintessential California stoner. I wanted to quote the movie in my best stoner-voice, but doubted that more than one or two persons would "get" the reference and I would foolishly appear stoned out of the context of that stellar film.
Thirdly, a Latino fellow from New Mexico who I initially judged a jock but who proved to be quite articulate, sounds exactly like Quagmire from the Family Guy. Towards the end of the seminar, I could only wonder what he would do if I asked him to do the voice (aside from punching me in the face).
Finally, someone stocked the counter behind the oval seminar table with brownies, which became an easy reference point for several philosophers in the discussion of the morality behind the age-old question of Why-We-Don't-Just-Up-and-Steal-a-Whole-Damn-Plate-of-Brownies-When-No-One's-Looking. This offended me, being that I am grossly allergic to anything containing wheat flour. Another student brought up alcohol as another Object-of-Vice-We-Can-Choose-To-Be-Virtuous-About, which again I felt compelled to mention-- ahem-- some people have an obsession about and an allergy to. Of course, I just kept my mouth shut and let the serious philosophers do the thinking out loud. The discussion moved on to other, deeper matters, like Why-I-Don't-Just-Up-and-Stab-Somebody (presumably a rival for the plate of brownies). This ethic of No-Stabbing was traced to the fact of the social conditioning of innumerable consequences which we experience or see others experience, particularly the threat of a retaliatory stabbing being a deterrent to stabbing-- granting that the sensation of getting stabbed is of the not-so-pleasant variety. Someone offered that this whole No-Stabbing and Brownie-Stealing paradigm sounded suspiciously Epicurean (for, as we students of Classical Greece all know, Epicurius stressed the pleasures of the senses as the be-all/end-all, while downplaying the initial pleasures of getting stabbed as like "drinking a good cup of Joe only to find it's been laced with NutraSweet")...
I'm not sure if any of this philosophizing actually is a useful form of inquiry, or if it's just born from some insatiable urge to question and pick apart and undermine the ideas of those around you. What did I take away from the discussion? I began drawing a crown to symbolize Plato's philosopher-king, before recalling how I couldn't draw. I would have put the crown on Socrates, who was a rather ugly fellow from all clay and bronze accounts, but then I recalled how Socrates just questioned the hell out of everyone until they just wanted to retire to their pensione by the Aegean and drink some vino solo... That kind of guy could never lead a city. He'd get up to the podium and just throw out a few ideas he'd heard bantied about recently-- "It has come to my attention from an aide of mine that some of you wish to build an aqueduct to supplement our water supply in the event of a drought. Now let me question your best intentions behind this project, and wonder aloud if more water in pipes will not simply bring less rain to our fair city and our fertile fields. For, as the poet Pindar more assuredly and beautifically expressed it, the Earth is a concave dish of clay, made from the potter's wheel of God, in which water collects in various depressions and voids due to God needing that extra clay to make hills, mountains, and breasts. Waste of clay if you ask me, am I right fellas? (har har). There being only a certain limit to the water that can collect in these depressions, the excess is drawn upwards into the colinder that hangs prone over the Earth, lest the rest inundate our lands and drown our crops and goats. That water, if drawn in greater measure into our midst, will deplete the depression and thus prevent the colinder from collecting our excess, to return to our fields each April and bring us flowers each May. What I'm asking you, then, is do you truly wish to despoil our fields of flowers? Especially with Mother's Day fast approaching?"
Saturday, July 25, 2009
The Longest Blog Ever-- In Which I Wrap Things Up...
So I've officially left my home away from home away from home (that's twice removed... from past and future, D.C. and Santa Fe). It was teary-eyed in the end, though my final hours felt like they were spent warming up and then revving my engine-- to keep pace once I hit the outside world again. Sure enough, once I got on Interstate 5, I was back to feeling aggravated, impatient, with an urge to speed, an urge to get ahead. Only this time it felt tempered, ever-so-slightly, by some inner-space of mindfulness.
My last day on retreat: into the dining hall after practicing, women from retreat surrounding me with questions, while I just want to retreat into my meal. I have come to greatly enjoy eating in silence, learning to savor the food by not clouding it with mindless chatter. The silence silenced, they are finally able to talk. I'm not sure what to say. Normally in such situations, I turn to ask questions. Yet, everything I normally begin a conversation with now seems contrived, formulaic, more of a distraction than a means of connecting. Maybe I just long for stillness, for silence. Once the questions begin, I find myself repeating myself to several women. One older woman, is sitting across from me at the lunchtable, but I've already given her my spiel:
"Yes, I am the yogi who builds trails here." A hearty round of thank-you's-- the appreciations flow like in-breath, and my gratitude, like out-breath, returns to them. By the third woman, I have a rehearsed response I didn't even consciously create. It's terse, designed to silence itself. "I am trail-building yogi. From DC. Moving to Santa Fe to study Eastern Philosophy. This was a waystation for me to build a practice. Thank you for letting me serve."
The night before, during an intimate sharing session, where yogis were instructed to turn to their neighbor and share their Truth, and their Process, I was overcome with the urge to flee the meditation hall. Yes, I will just get up and go. I haven't practiced nearly as much as these yogis, owing to the fact that I am a worker here half the day. I don't have anything to say. I really, really don't want to sit and bullshit some stranger to fill five minutes. I hope there are an even number of yogis to pair up without me. But the woman beside me turns too fast for me to move. She expects me to share with her. She is small, and ever-so-slightly frail, at middle-age. Framing her face is a graying auburn curtain of hair that curls under her chin the way her back and neck, slightly scoliotic, bends toward the floor. Cynthia lights up, telling me how wonderful it has been seeing me around the retreat grounds-- I remind her of her son, with my height, my facial hair, and the way my mouth moves and smirks. I am suddenly at ease-- Cynthia is motherly and genuine. I now see that he has been sitting beside me for some time, waiting to share this warmth with me. In that moment, the thought passes through me, "Why was I so scared-- to be vulnerable?" -- the question containing the answer within it. Cynthia becomes very vulnerable to me, telling me how her newfound career of caregiving has been waning, how her husband is much older, and unable to go on retreats any longer. She informs me how, being alone in the woods on the trails that I built, she feels years lighter--finally feeling totally safe to roam in nature. Cynthia used to spend countless hours in the woods of Rhode Island as a child. For years since, she has developed a fear of going out alone into them. I realize that I heart Cynthia for her openness, especially as she self-consciously backtracks, projecting that I must not care to know so much about her life-story. No, no, no Cynthia-- I want to say-- this is all I care about, in fact. Cynthia's vulnerability encourages me to open up to her... as the words I thought would be bullshit pour out, I realize they are becoming organized around the Dharma, my experience on retreat was being framed by everything we were taught, and this, coupled with intuitions about myself I brought into practice, became a cohesive sense of the process at work in me. I was "owning" my Truth. The ways in which I spin my wheels out on the asphalt of life's day-to-dayness, on the muddy spots that I want to just grind my way out of... Cynthia cares to hear all this, I think, though I too, self-consciously downgrade my reflections as unworthy of the meditation hall. At the end of our sharing session, we are both overflowing the allotted time. We cement our bond to the Dharma by taking the Three Refuges, all the yogis bestowing on one another a red Refuges bracelet. Taking a foot or so of red string, we ceremonially tie three knots, one at a time; each symbolizing the refuges of Dharma (the way), Buddha (the enlightened one), and Sangha (the community of practitioners). I struggle with the fine motor-coordination of tying a tiny piece of string (since I've spent weeks dragging out thick roots and vines, and yanking ferns right out of the ground, my fingers are not nimble enough). I give her a slip-knot followed by a shoelace tie, throw a couple more knots in for good measure. We are supposed to wear the bracelets until they fall off, reminding us of taking Refuge, and, I think, of the impermanence of all things-- even our deepest spiritual aspirations.
The next morning, there is another round of talks and sharing circles to transition us out of retreat. I really want to share, and compare pathbreaking in the woods to the work the yogis have been doing in the mind, clearing a trail that accord with the Dharma, but there are forty yogis, and only an hour to share, so I wait for a space to emerge for me to fill... They conduct the sharing circle Quaker style (speak when the spirit moves you), and many many folks are very very moved to speak. One lady, who I noted early in the retreat as having a rather sour look on her face (which I learned to take less personally and more compassionately, as a result of a great deal of inner-strife), opened up with a great depth of feeling. She turned from the circle to me and said, "And you, you with the red blanket, is it Stephen? The day I spilled the soup and you came over and helped me-- I could feel it, I could feel the compassion. Thank you. Thank you so much." And I instinctively chuckled at first, at "spilled the soup" because it had been such an odd, seemingly trivial experience. But she begins to tear up as she says these words to me... I am stopped with a feeling of chills in my chest, into my spine. Evidently such a simple act had touched her quite deeply. In the moment, several days earlier, I had arrived late to dinner. There was something disorienting in the air, and I heard a thud of a bowl and clatter of utensils, as the woman behind me spilled her soup all over the serving table. I just grabbed a handful of napkins beside me and gave them to her, noticing that she was trying to push it all back into her bowl by hand, probably very embarrassed, because on a retreat where you are supposed to be very still and mindful, it is, on some tragic, paradoxically non-accepting level, doubly shaming to make the mistake of being clumsy. I scooped up some lentils and veggies into a napkin, handed her the rest, and left it at that. This simple, tiny gesture, amid a sea of inaction by all the other yogis, so caught up in their focused states of awareness, touched her so very deeply... and I had absolutely no idea until she singled me out! Goes to show how such little moments of thoughtfulness can affect others, and I reflect on moments when others have shown the same compassionate consideration for me. So very heartening. This brings me to a strange contradiction of retreats-- that while practicing so intently, with the ultimate aim of understanding the Three Marks of Existence: impermanence of all phenomena, unsatisfactoriness of experience, and no-self, we seem to lose sight of the implications of the no-self-- and the attendent openness and compassion it should entail.
Maybe I should rephrase, into less heady language. Retreats practiced very intently seem to push yogis into these intensely self-involved states, often becoming competitive (with self or others). By the end of it, I suppose we're all more opened up to considering others, but during the retreat I note a great deal of self-centeredness (but also I great deal more of compassion, I should state). All of this self-involvedness seems forgivable because of the ultimate aims of Buddhism. In practice, it seems paradoxical-- to go further inward to find a greater outward orientation. And in moments like at dinner, when on another night I would have been too self-involved to break my from my intention or concentration, probably foisting the responsibility on her with a thought like "she's perfectly capable of cleaning that up herself", at such moments I think I see point of practice-- to understand the spiritual reality underlying the outward, material appearance of the act-- both her dropping the soup was a manifestation of an inner-tension that was either trying too hard to focus or becoming distraught with herself for not mantaining proper focus. Suffering distraction or the pressure of being rushed, she spilled the soup, revealing her inner-state (which most yogis are careful about concealing beneath a placid gaze). Once revealed, manifested as an accident, it is up to us to treat with compassion that spiritual hindrance she is suffering. One simple act of giving, and the whole energy of the moment is turned on its head. Her silent suffering, alone on an island, is suddenly jolted back into the wider world of loving-compassion. My act said to her, I value you by paying you attention, not withholding it for myself alone.
I don't mean to engage in too much self-congratulatory back-patting. It was a tiny gesture resulting from a bit of awareness and compassion-- no grand act. But those little acts build momentum, and like ripples in a pond, extend to shore and ripple back toward us. To me, it speaks volumes about how I wish to inhabit this world... and the world I wish to inhabit.
Earlier I wrote about being mindful on the road, which got me thinking. Mind-fullness-- what does that even mean? When the purpose of meditation seems to be mind-emptyness. Emptying of thoughts, emptying of distractions-- just pure awareness, wedded to each moment. (Following that metaphor, the way meditation actually proceeds seems to involve getting divorced by the end of every moment, eloping with some thought or feeling that demands attention. And, with any divorce, the suffering of judgment-- I shouldn't have left, why didn't she stay. And then the generalizing-- why can't I make anything work out; I'm hopeless. But this "failure" to properly meditate (which I defy anyone to come up with what that exactly entails-- even Nirvana is impossible to quantify or articulate. How can one use words and concepts to describe that which is empty of all content?) Finally, we begun to intuit that our failure to stay in the moment has nothing whatever to do with "us"-- it's just in the nature of mind, itself, to leave and pause and scan and fret and plan and ache and suffer the dissatisfaction of clinging and avoiding.
What I eventually began to understand, at first intellectually, was that the only thing we aim at in meditation is awareness, and that the only thing that differentiates different schools of thought on meditation is the object of awareness. For some it is the breath. Others it is a mantra. For Vipassana, the object is awareness itself. We pay attention to what is doing the looking, rather than what is being looked at. When we do this, we build a sense of an awareness being the thoughts and feelings which comprise the "I" It is prior to all sense of an independent ego. How did we function before we were named, at birth? As infants and children, when we didn't yet understand where our body ended and the world began? We existed in a state of limited awareness, simply absorbing sensory input and reacting instinctively.
The difference as we age becomes that overlaid over all of our awareness is a set of assumptions about ourselves and the world. This stands in as a filter to experience. The old instincts are there, for survival, and atop them are instincts with a larger focus-- that include yet transcend the old instincts. They are the sexual instinct and the power instinct. (These correspond to the first three chakras: survival, sexuality, and power. The fourth chakra, the heart, is where we begin to open back up to the world by expanding our ego-boundaries to include the "them" or the "other" Thus where the third chakra sees difference and competition, the fourth chakra sees similarity and cooperation. Where the first and second chakra sees others as objects for self-satiation, the fourth reconsiders those objects as containing an innate subjectivity, manifested as awareness, and thus comes to value their needs as equivalent to one's own.
Running out of caffeinated steam, at a Seattle coffeehaus next to the famous Pike Place Market, smell of freshly gutted fish wafting alongside roasted coffee, which alongside the many sheerly clothed women, revealing backs more than cleavage on this day, to the point of causing wonder in me whether back is the new front-- all this makes the tangy-burnt amber in the air quite confoundingly amorous... (Ok I just made the bit about the smells up but I needed something romantic...) Going to the massive towering steel and glass Central Public Library now. To read a bit. To yearn a bit. Hopefully on to Vancouver tonight, if Matt makes his flight, after having missed two, due to various complications... Bless you all! I think of and miss you daily...
My last day on retreat: into the dining hall after practicing, women from retreat surrounding me with questions, while I just want to retreat into my meal. I have come to greatly enjoy eating in silence, learning to savor the food by not clouding it with mindless chatter. The silence silenced, they are finally able to talk. I'm not sure what to say. Normally in such situations, I turn to ask questions. Yet, everything I normally begin a conversation with now seems contrived, formulaic, more of a distraction than a means of connecting. Maybe I just long for stillness, for silence. Once the questions begin, I find myself repeating myself to several women. One older woman, is sitting across from me at the lunchtable, but I've already given her my spiel:
"Yes, I am the yogi who builds trails here." A hearty round of thank-you's-- the appreciations flow like in-breath, and my gratitude, like out-breath, returns to them. By the third woman, I have a rehearsed response I didn't even consciously create. It's terse, designed to silence itself. "I am trail-building yogi. From DC. Moving to Santa Fe to study Eastern Philosophy. This was a waystation for me to build a practice. Thank you for letting me serve."
The night before, during an intimate sharing session, where yogis were instructed to turn to their neighbor and share their Truth, and their Process, I was overcome with the urge to flee the meditation hall. Yes, I will just get up and go. I haven't practiced nearly as much as these yogis, owing to the fact that I am a worker here half the day. I don't have anything to say. I really, really don't want to sit and bullshit some stranger to fill five minutes. I hope there are an even number of yogis to pair up without me. But the woman beside me turns too fast for me to move. She expects me to share with her. She is small, and ever-so-slightly frail, at middle-age. Framing her face is a graying auburn curtain of hair that curls under her chin the way her back and neck, slightly scoliotic, bends toward the floor. Cynthia lights up, telling me how wonderful it has been seeing me around the retreat grounds-- I remind her of her son, with my height, my facial hair, and the way my mouth moves and smirks. I am suddenly at ease-- Cynthia is motherly and genuine. I now see that he has been sitting beside me for some time, waiting to share this warmth with me. In that moment, the thought passes through me, "Why was I so scared-- to be vulnerable?" -- the question containing the answer within it. Cynthia becomes very vulnerable to me, telling me how her newfound career of caregiving has been waning, how her husband is much older, and unable to go on retreats any longer. She informs me how, being alone in the woods on the trails that I built, she feels years lighter--finally feeling totally safe to roam in nature. Cynthia used to spend countless hours in the woods of Rhode Island as a child. For years since, she has developed a fear of going out alone into them. I realize that I heart Cynthia for her openness, especially as she self-consciously backtracks, projecting that I must not care to know so much about her life-story. No, no, no Cynthia-- I want to say-- this is all I care about, in fact. Cynthia's vulnerability encourages me to open up to her... as the words I thought would be bullshit pour out, I realize they are becoming organized around the Dharma, my experience on retreat was being framed by everything we were taught, and this, coupled with intuitions about myself I brought into practice, became a cohesive sense of the process at work in me. I was "owning" my Truth. The ways in which I spin my wheels out on the asphalt of life's day-to-dayness, on the muddy spots that I want to just grind my way out of... Cynthia cares to hear all this, I think, though I too, self-consciously downgrade my reflections as unworthy of the meditation hall. At the end of our sharing session, we are both overflowing the allotted time. We cement our bond to the Dharma by taking the Three Refuges, all the yogis bestowing on one another a red Refuges bracelet. Taking a foot or so of red string, we ceremonially tie three knots, one at a time; each symbolizing the refuges of Dharma (the way), Buddha (the enlightened one), and Sangha (the community of practitioners). I struggle with the fine motor-coordination of tying a tiny piece of string (since I've spent weeks dragging out thick roots and vines, and yanking ferns right out of the ground, my fingers are not nimble enough). I give her a slip-knot followed by a shoelace tie, throw a couple more knots in for good measure. We are supposed to wear the bracelets until they fall off, reminding us of taking Refuge, and, I think, of the impermanence of all things-- even our deepest spiritual aspirations.
The next morning, there is another round of talks and sharing circles to transition us out of retreat. I really want to share, and compare pathbreaking in the woods to the work the yogis have been doing in the mind, clearing a trail that accord with the Dharma, but there are forty yogis, and only an hour to share, so I wait for a space to emerge for me to fill... They conduct the sharing circle Quaker style (speak when the spirit moves you), and many many folks are very very moved to speak. One lady, who I noted early in the retreat as having a rather sour look on her face (which I learned to take less personally and more compassionately, as a result of a great deal of inner-strife), opened up with a great depth of feeling. She turned from the circle to me and said, "And you, you with the red blanket, is it Stephen? The day I spilled the soup and you came over and helped me-- I could feel it, I could feel the compassion. Thank you. Thank you so much." And I instinctively chuckled at first, at "spilled the soup" because it had been such an odd, seemingly trivial experience. But she begins to tear up as she says these words to me... I am stopped with a feeling of chills in my chest, into my spine. Evidently such a simple act had touched her quite deeply. In the moment, several days earlier, I had arrived late to dinner. There was something disorienting in the air, and I heard a thud of a bowl and clatter of utensils, as the woman behind me spilled her soup all over the serving table. I just grabbed a handful of napkins beside me and gave them to her, noticing that she was trying to push it all back into her bowl by hand, probably very embarrassed, because on a retreat where you are supposed to be very still and mindful, it is, on some tragic, paradoxically non-accepting level, doubly shaming to make the mistake of being clumsy. I scooped up some lentils and veggies into a napkin, handed her the rest, and left it at that. This simple, tiny gesture, amid a sea of inaction by all the other yogis, so caught up in their focused states of awareness, touched her so very deeply... and I had absolutely no idea until she singled me out! Goes to show how such little moments of thoughtfulness can affect others, and I reflect on moments when others have shown the same compassionate consideration for me. So very heartening. This brings me to a strange contradiction of retreats-- that while practicing so intently, with the ultimate aim of understanding the Three Marks of Existence: impermanence of all phenomena, unsatisfactoriness of experience, and no-self, we seem to lose sight of the implications of the no-self-- and the attendent openness and compassion it should entail.
Maybe I should rephrase, into less heady language. Retreats practiced very intently seem to push yogis into these intensely self-involved states, often becoming competitive (with self or others). By the end of it, I suppose we're all more opened up to considering others, but during the retreat I note a great deal of self-centeredness (but also I great deal more of compassion, I should state). All of this self-involvedness seems forgivable because of the ultimate aims of Buddhism. In practice, it seems paradoxical-- to go further inward to find a greater outward orientation. And in moments like at dinner, when on another night I would have been too self-involved to break my from my intention or concentration, probably foisting the responsibility on her with a thought like "she's perfectly capable of cleaning that up herself", at such moments I think I see point of practice-- to understand the spiritual reality underlying the outward, material appearance of the act-- both her dropping the soup was a manifestation of an inner-tension that was either trying too hard to focus or becoming distraught with herself for not mantaining proper focus. Suffering distraction or the pressure of being rushed, she spilled the soup, revealing her inner-state (which most yogis are careful about concealing beneath a placid gaze). Once revealed, manifested as an accident, it is up to us to treat with compassion that spiritual hindrance she is suffering. One simple act of giving, and the whole energy of the moment is turned on its head. Her silent suffering, alone on an island, is suddenly jolted back into the wider world of loving-compassion. My act said to her, I value you by paying you attention, not withholding it for myself alone.
I don't mean to engage in too much self-congratulatory back-patting. It was a tiny gesture resulting from a bit of awareness and compassion-- no grand act. But those little acts build momentum, and like ripples in a pond, extend to shore and ripple back toward us. To me, it speaks volumes about how I wish to inhabit this world... and the world I wish to inhabit.
Earlier I wrote about being mindful on the road, which got me thinking. Mind-fullness-- what does that even mean? When the purpose of meditation seems to be mind-emptyness. Emptying of thoughts, emptying of distractions-- just pure awareness, wedded to each moment. (Following that metaphor, the way meditation actually proceeds seems to involve getting divorced by the end of every moment, eloping with some thought or feeling that demands attention. And, with any divorce, the suffering of judgment-- I shouldn't have left, why didn't she stay. And then the generalizing-- why can't I make anything work out; I'm hopeless. But this "failure" to properly meditate (which I defy anyone to come up with what that exactly entails-- even Nirvana is impossible to quantify or articulate. How can one use words and concepts to describe that which is empty of all content?) Finally, we begun to intuit that our failure to stay in the moment has nothing whatever to do with "us"-- it's just in the nature of mind, itself, to leave and pause and scan and fret and plan and ache and suffer the dissatisfaction of clinging and avoiding.
What I eventually began to understand, at first intellectually, was that the only thing we aim at in meditation is awareness, and that the only thing that differentiates different schools of thought on meditation is the object of awareness. For some it is the breath. Others it is a mantra. For Vipassana, the object is awareness itself. We pay attention to what is doing the looking, rather than what is being looked at. When we do this, we build a sense of an awareness being the thoughts and feelings which comprise the "I" It is prior to all sense of an independent ego. How did we function before we were named, at birth? As infants and children, when we didn't yet understand where our body ended and the world began? We existed in a state of limited awareness, simply absorbing sensory input and reacting instinctively.
The difference as we age becomes that overlaid over all of our awareness is a set of assumptions about ourselves and the world. This stands in as a filter to experience. The old instincts are there, for survival, and atop them are instincts with a larger focus-- that include yet transcend the old instincts. They are the sexual instinct and the power instinct. (These correspond to the first three chakras: survival, sexuality, and power. The fourth chakra, the heart, is where we begin to open back up to the world by expanding our ego-boundaries to include the "them" or the "other" Thus where the third chakra sees difference and competition, the fourth chakra sees similarity and cooperation. Where the first and second chakra sees others as objects for self-satiation, the fourth reconsiders those objects as containing an innate subjectivity, manifested as awareness, and thus comes to value their needs as equivalent to one's own.
Running out of caffeinated steam, at a Seattle coffeehaus next to the famous Pike Place Market, smell of freshly gutted fish wafting alongside roasted coffee, which alongside the many sheerly clothed women, revealing backs more than cleavage on this day, to the point of causing wonder in me whether back is the new front-- all this makes the tangy-burnt amber in the air quite confoundingly amorous... (Ok I just made the bit about the smells up but I needed something romantic...) Going to the massive towering steel and glass Central Public Library now. To read a bit. To yearn a bit. Hopefully on to Vancouver tonight, if Matt makes his flight, after having missed two, due to various complications... Bless you all! I think of and miss you daily...
Monday, June 8, 2009
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