When midnight hit, I was reading about the blue bird. Then the first six hours (or so) of this year were spent in deep sleep, with a sudden awakening when it was still dark. This is probably a good sign of the coming year: quiet renewal, awakening, and the search for contentment.
kindness
When you are being kind to yourself, how does that kindness manifest?
return of the light
Winter solstice is come and gone, and yesterday was a minute longer than the day before. Not a moment too soon. Events conspired to make this the sucker-punch winter, and lack of light hasn’t been helping any. –.– I love Boston for its seasons, not least because it reminds me that everything has a limit. The night is on its way out; it too will pass. Things I want to spend most of my time on – home, work, food and other arts, my Buddhist studies, hopefully further research on Roland – will settle, become more defined. Upheaval will give way to silent blue and yellow sunrise again and again. Rain droplets on my window don’t occlude the life-giving star, about the only thing I worship steadfastly these days. –.– It’s so quiet in the early morning. Just the rain falling. Or maybe the rain’s in my head.
Shall I compare thee to a sperm whale, sperm?
I must be the last kid on the block to find Holy Tango of Literature by Francis Heaney, available in its entirety at the linked site. Brilliantly executed, authors’ names anagrammed and used as titles for pieces parodying original works. (For example, the title of this post is a line from “Is a Sperm Like a Whale?” by William Shakespeare.)
Not only is this good reading, it’s a good metaphor for my days, which of late have been spent rearranging the insides of my head and heart for a healthier, happier result. It’s mostly working, all things considered. But (and?) it’s a process far from finished.
bang on de drum
Friday afternoon I left town just a bit too late, too close to Friday traffic going out of the city along the Pike. That and the slush coming down from the sky made the trip to Inspirit Common in Hadley a two-and-a-half-hour one; good thing that just before leaving I had downloaded some talks by Ajahn Brahm (thanks for the suggestion, Rob, what I’ve heard so far is good).
Together with Emily and Bucky (the friends who own and run the above-linked mind-body-spirit center) and their six-month-old son Kadin, I went to a drum-and-dance event. And for the first time ever I played a djembe in a drum circle, for half an hour or so. It’s a rush! I came in with this tightness in the middle of my chest, which almost worked itself out in the course of trancy dancing to the drums, but it was still there afterwards. Sat down to make rhythms, next thing I know there’s a lightness where the bad used to be. Later on in the evening Bucky said, “It opens up the heart, doesn’t it?” That’s exactly what drumming did for me. I will buy a djembe before I buy an iPhone, and that’s saying a lot.
Driving home late at night, I took the long way along Route 9. On and on and on through endless trees and industrial towns and mist. The road looked like it belonged in Neil Gaiman’s stories.
Ask the internets: blank wooden pieces?
I’d like to purchase a few dozen blank wooden pieces. Ideally, they’d be rectangular pieces with rounded edges, maybe an inch on the long side and .5-.75 inch on the short side.
There are plenty of places to get wooden nickels, but I don’t want them round. A local crafts-supplies store has sticks that can be cut into pieces, but I’d rather not to that myself.
Anyone reading this have any idea where I might find what I’m looking for?
Death’s role in awakening
By way of Bitch, PhD I came across this essay by Ken McLeod titled “Awake.” He talks about the Buddhist conception of death as something completely, utterly inseparable from life – and not its opposite but its end. And about how we [Westerners, US culture specifically] just don’t get it until some accident or disaster jolts us into awareness of death’s ubiquitous presence. That awareness is essential to creativity, and to living fully. The perils of ignoring death on a visceral level, not feeling it, are dire:
[T]o ignore or deny death results in an incomplete and unbalanced relationship with life. You cannot know life fully. Instead, you take what is transitory—money, fame, power, relationship— to be real and base your life on achieving what cannot last—happiness, gain, fame, and respect. When you base life on things that can be taken away from you, you give power over your life to anyone who can take those things away. You become dependent on others and on society for a sense of well-being. You give your life away to others and what others deem to be important.
But what of those others whom I deem to be important? Family, colleagues, friends? From the exercises McLeod presents in his paper, ones designed to make you starkly face death in all its alone-ness and re-arranging of priorities and inevitability for each of us personally, it would seem that other people ultimately shouldn’t be given any agency in one’s (my) happiness.
This is a difficult lesson to learn. I’m a social animal, and furthermore, my personal insecurities have for most of my life been fed pretty explicitly by others’ reactions to me. In particular, praise or approval by people whose opinions I value feel so good that they’re addictive, and produce withdrawal when they’re, well, withdrawn (or even when I perceive them to be withdrawn). This is a lesson I am learning repeatedly these days, what with the way the ground keeps getting knocked out from beneath my feet (yes, still – and this isn’t an entirely negative thing, although unpleasant). Striking a balance between being open and loving with people and not depending on them for anything at all is… tricky. Yet it seems that this is where I’m headed, both by forced choice and by feeling that this is the right direction.
Two categories of interaction have fed my energy lately: with young children, and with my cats. Things are so much simpler with them: their needs are well-defined and relatively few, they interact without much ambiguity, and they find contentment in the moment in a way few adults do. Add McLeod’s death-facing exercises to the daily mix, and maybe letting go – over and over and over again – will become easier. There’s a lot to be said for having a beginner’s mind, which concept seems to include having no preconceptions about other people’s actions and how they may or may not reflect on me.
Anyway, McLeod’s entire essay is well worth reading. But if nothing else, since you’re already here, have one of the exercises – the one Dr. Bitch liked too when she saw it printed in a magazine:
Wherever you are when you read this, stop reading right now. Look around you. Note everything that you see, hear or touch. Imagine that you are going to die in the next minute. You have no time to make any phone calls or to say anything to anyone. This is it. You are going to die. […]
Death casts a different light on life. The more fully you relate to death, the more fully you relate to life. You are clearer about what is and isn’t important, what can and cannot be done, what is and isn’t meaningful. Increasingly, you look below the surface of things and see what really matters. Social prescriptions and promises of success and security ring hollow. Conventional definitions of success and failure—happiness and unhappiness, gain and loss, fame and obscurity, respect and disdain—lose their hold. You stop following convention for convention’s sake or tradition for tradition’s sake. In the end, you may do many of the same things, but you do them for different, more personal, reasons. Each action, each meeting, each word you say comes not from what you’ve been told to believe or do, but from a personal connection to life.
Incidentally, this train of thought is having an unexpectedly helpful effect on dealing with the seasonal depression that is very much here again. For the first time since… 2002, I think, I feel a paradoxical agency in letting go. Not that I’m always successful at it, but practice, right?
So, do I have a feed?
My RSS feeds have been (it seems from here) nonfunctional. Just did something that might fix that, so am posting to see whether it’s fixed.
Had an important, difficult, overwhelming weekend. As a result I feel even more groundless than before, but am seeking out more groundlessness. I’ve been afraid of throwing myself headlong into changing my life’s structure; for the most part that fear is no longer entirely paralyzing. It’s difficult but it’s also time to be awake and present.
Buddhists (at least Tibetan Buddhists) seem to believe that it’s precisely groundlessness, not counting on anything in particular and accepting extreme uncertainty, that is the most potentially fertile time in a life. Using various tools (books, lots of thinking, sitting in something approximating meditation) I’ve begun experiencing this fully for, I think, the first time in my life. It’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. It’s also liberating.
The thing I’m finding most difficult at the moment is committing to a path that involves other people, but committing to it alone. It happens to be a path that is, for the most part, uncharted waters: there are no social structures in place for it, few precedents, and if it doesn’t work, the consequences are… well, that’s the thing: I don’t know how the worst possible consequences of this path would be different from the worst consequences of a more traditional path. Mostly I don’t think they’d be different at all, and ultimately I’d rather try than not try and wonder whether I could’ve done it. So bring on the fear.
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Edited to add: My newsreader’s feed for Words’ End still isn’t working. Never mind. Ethan to the rescue again. There it is, the feed. Halleluiah.
Cheesemas, and directional
Today was cheesemas. Cheeses were bought and brought – drunken goat, mozzarella, robiola, explorateur (?! – hokey name, but most excellent cheese), some other alcohol- (port-)laced semisoft cheese, Valdeon (a Spanish blue), raclette and half a dozen others. Someone even brought raclette ice cream which, really, was much milder than it had any right to be. Add to that fruit, bread, fig-and-vidalia jam, wine, beer, sprakly non-alc cider, fifteen folk or more and two mostly happy and social toddlers, and it’s cheesemas in the neighborhood. My undying gratitude and love to my cheesemas-elf conspirator.
Unrelatedly, I thought some this evening, and wrote down the following:
north is triangular, steady, monument-al
east is rounded, exotic, otherworldly
south is light, scintillating, hot
west is radio, diagonal, big
the center is small, sensitive, reactive
Turnabout.
Once again I keep getting these flashes of “should really blog that!” and then immediately “but there’s so much unsaid over there.” So, in short:
I defended and graduated.* To paraphrase my landlady, I’m Vika Zafrin, Ph.uckin’ D. That paraphrase involved changing fewer letters than you might imagine. For the first time in my adult life I am not a student pursuing a degree full-time at an institution. Mostly there’s a giant feeling of relief, but I already miss research. Although that balances out, because I sure don’t miss the constant insecurity, the “not good enough”ness, the 24/7 feeling like I have to be working.
OK, I still mostly feel like I should be working. But it’s getting easier to compartmentalize, and you know what? There’s a whole big life out there, with books and spiritual practice and cooking and friends and friends’ children and visits with mom, who lives in driving distance for the first time in thirteen years. Who knew?
Ethan and I have moved up to Boston. Best move we could’ve made. Wanderlust is tugging at my pants leg already, but I could be happy living in Boston for a long while. Given that wanderlust is my muse and near-constant companion, that’s a hefty statement to make.
The house we live in has seven human residents, five cats, a dog and (temporarily) a bird. Gods bless the marvel that is modern allergy medicine. Our two cats have established relationships with the three who have lived here for long. Nochka the tiny black cat has a hissy fit any time DJ Spooky, the black boycat thrice her size, comes into our bedroom seeking food. And there’s the impossibly beautiful lynx-y Winter, who is afraid of almost everyone. Other than that, feline people are chill. Humans are also mostly chill, and really, how bad can it get when you live with geeks and musicians (and a funny man who inexplicably deals with insurance all day)? A circus band occasionally practices in my living room. Beat that with a stick.
The past three months have been spent largely acclimating to the new house, the new life rhythms, the big questions like where to go from here and how to plan out the long term. I’m working outside of academe now, but who knows how long I’ll be able to stay away?
So much is changing. Mostly I like it. Some of it is hard growth, but on the whole I feel like I’m stretching after a long sleep.
*Oh, and my work? Here, in its entirety. Get yourself Firefox and enjoy. It’ll take half a minute or so to load, but is thereafter very fast.
