Sunday, May 25, 2008 :::
 

Stoney Moss

Portlanders Who Make Me Happy, I

First of all, there's Stoney Moss, a blog that has firmly rejected the pernicious advice that a blog should be all about one thing. Stoney Moss is about pretty much everything. It's one of the rare tandem blogs that works (Feathers of Hope being another outstanding example: is it accident that both dip into birding from time to time? I don't think so.)

Both Deb and WD (Whirling Dervish) write poetry sometimes, and both write prose sometimes. They write about whatever they damn well please. It might be a riveting narrative of being lost on a mountain ("please god, if you get me off this mountain, I will stop what I've been doing and I will grow up. I will make it worth it."), or a Mother's Day prose poem ("I draw better than Mother and my eyes are hard; dark circles with icy-blue shadow,") or a triolet love-poem ("when I run a soft hand over your warm walls / I feel history echo in my palms") addressed to a house, or a devastating poem about broken glass ("Broken plates thrown in a rage. / White crumbs on my tongue / when I lick the floor in remorse.") Then again it might be a list of topics for sociology research papers or an Audubon alert about the Portland urban growth boundary. You have no idea. It's Christmas morning with funny relatives in town: God knows what will be under the tree. It might be personal or political, poetic or prosaic. Almost always there's a laugh somewhere in the midst of it: neither Deb nor WD ever takes herself seriously for long.

(Strictly speaking WD is not a Portlander -- she's earning a doctorate back east -- but she has been one, and please God will be again.)

In any case, Stoney Moss has become one of my favorite stops on the information highway, one of the handful of blogs I visit before they pop up in Google Reader, because I'll probably want to read the last post again.

Labels: Portland

posted by Dale at 7:34 AM
Link




Friday, May 23, 2008 :::
 

As If It Mattered

songs after the wedding

Voices rose in the kitchen, arguing
Poetics, or politics, passionately.
Tom Montag looked at me,
That stolid Midwestern face
Unmoving, but the eyes, as always, vivid.
"As if it mattered," he said.
"As if it mattered."

---

What matters
Is leaving the door open
And a place laid
So that gods and ghosts,
Skywalkers and wandering players,
Have a place at the table.

---

Easier said than done:
In the nature of things
You plan for the expected guests.

---

This is
The year the tanagers came
And the year of my first colonoscopy;
I must say that our rites of passage
Are every bit as odd as anything I read
In books of anthropology.

---

The trouble with God
Is that she doesn't want to be courted,
Cajoled, coerced, publicized,
Or understood. She only wants
Our stiff necks to bow.

---

Give me your hand
We'll walk behind the waterfall
As shy as the water-ousels.

---

The spray would be blown into your hair
And if I brushed it out of your face
My hand would be wet
And my thumb, when it touched your lips
Would taste of the waterfall.

---

Sometimes I wish
They had never made all the songs.

---

But here, the small rain
Down can rain
The waitresses
Are beautiful
And the tall, bearded cook
Looks like he sprang
From the deck of a trireme.

---

Listen
Don't waste time.

Labels: Poems

posted by Dale at 10:03 AM
Link




Wednesday, May 21, 2008 :::
 

Opening the Heartspace

A stain of light moved up into the sky. We were still, but it moved anyway, and gathered itself. The birds began singing. Daylight.

---

Dream and waking. My hands are heavy: they never like the change of the weather. Last night I worked with the breath, the abdominals, the pecs, and when I came to her scalenes -- usually like taut steel cables beside the cervical vertebrae -- they were soft. I couldn't believe it. Was it the breath work? I don't know. I wish I'd checked on the scalenes before. I've been working to soften those scalenes for months, and now they were opening like flowers.

The scalenes are breathing muscles, above all; they lift the first and second ribs. So it's certainly possible that the breathwork did it. I hold two points in the abs and have you breathe into them. The first time I give resistance. At the second breath I simply let the two points ride up. Then I move a couple inches up and do it again. It's not a technique I learned: I just made it up, experimenting on myself.

And then tapotement with the fingertips, like a heavy summer rain, over the pecs. I used to waste so much time on the upper back, where everyone always thinks the trouble is, where they always want you to work. The upper back's where you feel it, of course, when you're working with your shoulders hunched forward; they're both overstretched and overworked, stabilizing the scaps and holding up the head. But you can work the upper back muscles forever without doing much good. The root of the matter is the pecs and the ribs, closing over the heart, pulling the shoulders and the head forward. All of the attention out there, two feet out in space: the scaps dragged inevitably further and further apart. On some people the shoulder blades, which really ought to rest maybe a handsbreadth apart, are a foot, even a foot and a half, away from each other, perched at the corners of the shoulders. There's no way to fix that from the back. It's the pecs that are doing it, hauling the shoulders relentlessly forward and closing the heartspace. It's the pecs and the serratus anterior that have to be released, before the rhomboids and traps can begin to bring the scaps back together, and give the upper back some relief.

Labels: Massage

posted by Dale at 11:24 AM
Link




Tuesday, May 20, 2008 :::
 

Defector

While I was sick I started rereading Tony Hillerman's mysteries, the ones set in the Navajo country of New Mexico. In a couple of them, someone who's Navajo by blood, but who's grown up with no contact with Navajos, shows up on the Reservation, and puts the protagonists -- Navajo Tribal Police -- out of all reckoning, because they keep expecting him to act like a Navajo and he doesn't.

I thought of that yesterday, as I was doing one of my rare massages of men. That's how I feel among men. I look like one of them, but somehow I never learned the culture. I can pass as one (and very convenient it is, in a society that's loaded in favor of men), but I don't like to talk to them for long, because sooner or later they'll tip to the fact that I'm not really one of them. I have no idea how a man doing a massage of a man is expected to act, so I just have to fake it. I was telling this to Martha, and she said, "Yes, that's how I feel about women."

It has nothing to do with orientation. My preference for women has been one of the few constants of my life. Nor does it have to do with identity. I have no sense of being wrongly gendered. I don't feel that I am a woman or should be a woman. It's just that women make sense to me. I understand what they do, I understand how they talk. It's no accident that, having found finally a work situation in which I thrive and am happy, it's in an office consisting of myself and seven women.

This sense of being out of place was strongest in school, and its focal point was cruelty. Boys enjoyed cruelty, or pretended to, in a way that made me sick and frightened. They killed and tortured things. They went out of their way to stomp on bugs, and nothing seemed to rivet their delighted attention like the mangled corpse of a possum or a bird or a squirrel. I knew they shared at least some of my horror and revulsion, but it seemed to have no admixture of pity in them; and it modulated, somehow, into a giddy pleasure that I didn't understand, and didn't want to. I knew from that time that I was a defector; that I couldn't and wouldn't be one of them. What I didn't know was that there would be room in the world for me anyway. A suburban American schoolyard is not a good point of vantage for observing the variety of the world's cultures and its multiplicity of subcultures. I simply thought that I would be alone, now and forever.

Unless: unless I could defect. Somehow cross into the world of girls. There were not all that many girls that made sense to me either; they had a tendency to find bugs icky and to place inordinate attention upon clothes; but at least some of them made sense. I wanted to stow away among girls.

Well. There's a way to do that, a way that opens up when adolescence comes along. You become a ladies' man. You simply go permanently into courtship mode. You smile at girls, you chat with them, you simply pay attention to them. And some of them like it. It means that you have a lot of ambiguous relationships: most of your friendships carry some erotic charge, and some carry a lot. This brings its own predictable consequences. But at least you have friendships.

Fast-forward thirty years, and here I am. I was driving home the other night from having done two massages -- a woman and her female friend from out-of-state. They had hung out and chatted happily with me, in their pajamas, while I folded my table and packed up. As I drove, I marvelled that I was so happy. Happy-relieved. What was that?

I finally did it, I decided. I finally crashed the girls' slumber party. It's what I always wanted to do, and now I've done it.

posted by Dale at 11:15 AM
Link




Monday, May 19, 2008 :::
 

Welter

Awash in dirty dishes, dirty laundry, paper that may or may not need to be dealt with. We don't keep up well at the best of times, and since one member of the family after another has been methodically struck down by this stomach virus, the confusion has multiplied to a pleasing state of complete clarity: it's too much. It's absurd. It's out of control. Or, to be accurate, we're out of control.

And suddenly everything comes into focus. The vague uneasiness comes to a point, and I remember why, why everything happened in the first place.

So this morning, I stacked up some pillows on the bed and sat and said my prayers, did five minutes of meditation. Woke Alan. Brought him some tea. Threw in another load of diarrhea- and vomit-tinged laundry. Took him to school.

It's not just a matter of being well again, though this turning is one of the blessings of illness, like the blessing of sleeping and waking, the blessing of summer and winter. My mind is clear for the first time in a year. It's with relief that I come back to my business, knowing what I'm doing. Many things that I put in place when I last was clear-minded are still in place. There's a great deal to build on.

But a great deal, a great deal to do. The mosquito people will remind me. They're plentiful this year. Not a single one has bitten me, though I have been nudged and fluttered by them for days. I am usually the darling of the mosquito people, but they're being very formal with me. I'm not quite sure what this means.

Labels: Dharma

posted by Dale at 11:57 AM
Link




Sunday, May 18, 2008 :::
 

Spring

A yearning to bring it down to a few simple things: to stone, water, and light; to eggs and a slice of melon; to the fog snagged in the douglas fir boughs.

The cat trots eagerly into the room, every hunting sense wide open, her eyes green as new grass. We try to keep her inside in the morning, when the young birds seem most foolhardy, but it's like trying to stem the tide. Yesterday she startled us by dropping down onto the bed from the second-floor skylight: she had figured out a way onto the roof and had been chasing the squirrels up there.

The first really hot days of the year. I found myself singing "Paint it Black" under my breath, yesterday.

I see the girls go by dressed in their summer clothes
I have to turn my head until my darkness goes

And I was amused, then, to see May linking to the same song. Spring has come to Italy too.

Fall, on the other hand, has come to the Antipodes. I can never quite wrap my mind around that. As you wrote this, commented Jarrett, I was walking across Sydney, wrapped in New Zealand merino. I could see him vividly, and feel the cold wind following him down the street.

But that was in a far country

It runs like blood under the skin. (We say "under," but there's not a living cell in the body the blood doesn't reach; it really runs more like water in wet sand than like a river running underground.) Love, or God, or what's-it: sweet and cruel and overpowering.

Never does Buddhism seem more inadequate. Never do the religions of my fathers make more sense, with their jealous violent Gods and wars in Heaven and covenants sealed in the blood of innocents.

But if you wait, if you're still for long enough, the blood, though it doesn't drop, reconfigures spontaneously into a wholly different pattern: the night stars burning brilliantly, white and blue, topaz and crimson, far older than the Sun and its summers and winters; the sweep of the Milky Way. The Buddha no more than the Christ is a tame lion.

Labels: Dharma

posted by Dale at 2:16 PM
Link




Saturday, May 17, 2008 :::
 

Come, Seeling Night

I hate it when some imp puts an invisible megaphone to my mouth, and everything I say comes out strident and bullyingly positive.

Time to back oars and wait a bit, drift a bit.

The heat of the day has broken, and cool air is coming into the house. Evening.

I close my eyes, pretend to be dozing, and recite my refuge prayers to myself. Do a three-breath meditation. On the East Coast night fell long ago; midnight now. In Europe it's early morning; still dark. Dawn I suppose in Russia. (Do I know anyone in Russia? Not any more, I think.) Soen Joon in Korea is probably in the thick of her studies: it's the middle of the day there.

Quiet, quiet. Let the night come here. Just here, just now.

posted by Dale at 9:31 PM
Link