The Word from Chiapas

This report from La Judia Errante.

In Which I Hit You Up for Money

$1.2 million down, $800,000 to go. We've got a matching gift for $400,000, so every dollar you give counts for two. And we're finally set up to take donations online. And, as a special inducement, you can see pictures of Martha clearing barbed wire (she loathes this picture) and Tori planting trees on the retreat land.

I believe there's no place you could spend your money more wisely to prevent America from further despoiling the environment and lurching into more wars. It's the beginning of a very long term solution, and I'm the first to admit it's a longshot, but it's where I'm placing my bets.

May all things done to benefit sentient beings accomplish the intended end.

May the authentic teachings of this and all genuine spiritual traditions continue to manifest in suitable ways for every single sentient being.

May this world be so filled with the wisdom of accomplished beings in all traditions that even the memory of suffering and negative influences is forgotten.

May we never forget the generosity and kindness of our teachers in this very life, without whom we might have never imagined an alternative to suffering.

Shameless Flowering Temples

This sense of another world being terribly close. This feeling that if I just turned a fraction, or tilted my head, I would see another country -- if I just ran my fingers over the nearest wall I would be able to feel the outline of a door. And even sometimes, in hot oppressive weather, a faint cool draft might come out of somewhere -- just a moment -- and I would think, it's a draft from there.

And then sometimes, of course, you see people from there. Just a glimpse, usually. A moment of recognition. No need to shush, to whisper "pretend not to know me!" because we're both being hustled down the main avenue of life, manhandled by events, by fear, by wanting. But our eyes meet, and we know. Maybe.

Your hands close on my wrists, and hold them very tight. You're trying to bring me somewhere. Where?

I love the faintly salt taste of your lips, the strength of your tongue, the hint of your teeth, as we kiss.

Our bodies open, as they grow older. Become less secretive. Doctors open them up, and pry here and there. The doors and windows of our souls fit more and more loosely. The vulva blossoms, a red-coral-purple flower opening. Our breasts and stomachs and buttocks spread. There's some slack. We don't need to hold the fiction quite so tight, that all our parts fit together. We know they don't. We even lose some of them. Ovaries, gall-bladders, uteruses, appendixes, breasts; here and there a tooth and a toenail. Various tubes get tied and cut. Hair comes out. Scars expand. Veins reveal themselves at the surface. We get used to workarounds for the joints that don't quite work as they're supposed to, and the eyes that don't quite see what they used to.

It's just a body, she said. And that becomes clearer, all the time. It's not a mystery, not a tightly-wrapped bud. It's a blowsy, smelly, gone-to-seed creature, a lumbering mammal, kin to bears and orangatans.

When she was young, Martha says, she wondered how middle-aged people had sex. They couldn't possibly be attracted to each other. So how did they go about it?

Apparently we manage. Not in spite of the spaces opening, but because of them.

I don't really miss the tight-wrapped buds, the smooth-functioning bodies. They always pretended to be doors into other countries, and they seldom were. But these bodies, these shameless flowering temples, they really are doors.

A breath of cool air. Come on.

----------------

The seed of this post was in Brenda's meditation on the middle-aged erotic body

Ghosts of Leaves

In the summer we let the vines -- some kind of clematis, I'm told -- climb up the back porch and over the back door, till now, in high summer, a curtain of green hangs over the doorway, and to go out back I have to part it and duck through. I'm always reminded of the beaded doorways of the ramshackle hippie houses I used to know -- strings of cheap plastic sparkly beads, swaying in stale air that smelled of incense, dope, and candle-wax. This living, fragrant curtain was, maybe, what they were groping towards.

It's not good maintenance, of course; it encourages infestation, and it gives the house an unkempt aspect. But I love surrendering the house to the embrace of summer. In the winter it all dies down and we tear away the brown stems and withered gray leaves, and then the window of the back door frames the bones of the ancient, leaning apple tree. But now the porch is all leaves. Martha trains it over the kitchen window, as well; the morning sun throws moving leaf-shadows on the floor, and the kitchen is full of whispering and dappling.

This year the clematis discovered that it could push a tendril through the ill-fitting top sash of the window of the back bedroom. It's grown up to the ceiling, hoping to find sunlight, but not much sun gets in there, so the vine is not green, but pale yellow. It hovers there like the ghost of summers past.

Across the room is the shrine, where the refuge-tree stands when I do my prostrations. Its leaves are always thick, and restlessly moving and speaking, in counterpoint to the murmur of the pechas. Vajrayogini, glowing blood-red and fierce, anklets and bracelets clashing and ringing, dances there on the lowest branch. I wonder what she sees, when she looks at that ghostly vine. I wonder what she sees when she looks at me.

-----------------

(My description of the prostrations and refuge-tree is here; a picture of Vajrayogini is here)

Monochrome

I've just been reading a blog that horrified me. I had been searching for blogs referring to massage or bodywork, looking for some clues as to how other people have worked with that avocation, and I came across the blog of a man who worked at it full time, doing a heavy schedule of massage, as well as teaching it part time.

There was nothing so awful about it, really. It began two years ago, as he was beginning an affair with a married woman. He carefully recorded that beginning, but rapidly she became background material, and he was noting down the details of other flirtations. Sometimes at the bottom of the page he would score the day, on a scale apparently running from zero to twelve, over a varying number of categories, such as "money," "passion," "hugs" -- he meticulously noted the various hugs women gave him, and analyzed their meaning and nuance, as eskimos supposedly note the meaning and nuance of snow.

Occasional remarks about his clients, and a sort of "Bush delendum est" refrain as the 2004 elections approached, but otherwise it was a relentless monotone -- which pretty women would touch him, how much, with what intent. Nothing else could hold his attention.

Sometimes notes of a woman who flirted outrageously with him, whom he dismissed impatiently -- she was in his vocabulary, "queen-sized," whereas his attention was riveted on small women with "tight buns." Never a flicker of acknowledgement that the queen-sized woman was inhabiting the same hungry-ghost realm as he was; never a gleam of compassion for a fellow-sufferer. But he kept having lunch with her. A flirtation with someone he wasn't interested in was small-change, apparently, but money is money, and he wasn't going to just leave it on the table.

For two years it goes on, this monochrome, obsessive life. For all the detail, the character of these women who fill his field of vision remains a blank. They exist for him only as measures of his own importance and acceptance. Once one has accepted him as a lover, her usefulness as a yardstick is compromised, and he begins to find her attention importunate and annoying.

It was harrowing but fascinating. I felt I was reading the autobiography of my own damnation. I turned away from it with exhausted gratitude that somehow, by the grace of something, my life did not turn out like his. It was close enough, at times.

A Vast Fluttering

So it's a real stretch for me now to find that particular smallest movement that will make the biggest difference -- not just in absenting pain, but for unhinging the gates, at the other end of which the hordes of choice, a vast fluttering.

Maria has taken my breath away again.

That's what bodywork is all about.

The Whiteness, Waiting

The trees above my house are very tall. Just now their leaves stand out still against a still white sky, the serrated serrations of a thousand maple leaves, each turned a slightly different way. Behind them the untidy swoop and knot of power lines. And behind it all the whiteness, waiting.

Three Theories

Depression hit yesterday, silently, murderously. Like being struck by a huge, hot sandbag. When I got home I didn't have the wherewithal to get out of the van. I laid my hands on the steering wheel and my head on my hands, and breathed. Waited. I don't know how long.

Today is better. Almost back to normal.

This last week has been full of resolutions and thinking about how life really ought to be and how a person really can reach for their dreams.

Here are three theories:

Theory One is that thinking a person can reach for their dreams sets me up for a fall, when I find myself, inevitably, failing in all the old, familiar ways -- so I shouldn't think that way, not only because it's not a Buddhist approach to desire, but also because it's just opening the door to depression.

Theory Two is that I have mistaken depression for Dharma, and that -- while the whole structure of craving and expectation does indeed have to be deconstructed -- replacing large, joyful cravings & expectations with small, dreary ones has nothing to do with Buddhist path. It has to do, instead, with brain chemistry.
Theory Three is the new one, which I find most interesting at the moment. It says that being full of resolutions and thinking about how life ought to be, rather than being the cause of a later depressive episode, is actually just an early symptom, an early sign that mood turbulence is setting in. There may be no causal relation between the two at all.

Five things that will happen in the last two Harry Potter books

But enough of trivial stuff. We are in the final run-down to the release of the Half-Blood Prince, and I had better note down my predictions, lest people think I'm just being wise after the event, when I boast about how I knew exactly what Rowling had in mind. Here are some things that have to happen in the last two books:

1) Hagrid has to die. The perpetual innocent always has to be sacrificed, in an epic. Expect to see him go doing something absurdly generous and loving and ill-advised. (I hope this one is wrong because I'm very fond of Hagrid. But he's a character like Coll in the Prydain books -- obviously marked out as a victim.)

2) Snape's history will be revealed, and it will be rather nasty. He will not be rehabilitated, but he may well die heroically, battling death-eaters.

3) Dumbledore has to be gotten off the stage somehow: he'll have to be gone for the last book to resolve, because a new order will have to be established, and if he's still actively onstage there will be no room for the new people.

4) Ron and Hermione have to realize they're in love, so a rival for Hermione's affections has to appear. (Otherwise Ron and Hermione could just go on like this forever.) Look for Viktor Krum to resurface, dashingly. Well, as dashingly as a duck-footed introvert can.

5) This won't happen till the last book, but it's actually Neville, not Harry, who will finally take Voldemort down.

There. Remember, you heard it here first.

Furniture

My mother looked pleased, but puzzled.

"How did you know I was here?" she asked.

I rolled the dinner tray away from her bed, and attempted a cheerful smile. "We brought you here, remember?" I had ridden in the ambulance with her, two days before.

Her face clouded. "No," she said. "No, I don't remember." Troubled, for a moment, but then it was too much effort, and the trouble faded away.

A few moments later, she embarked on a narrative that I could not follow at all. Her eyes all the time on the television bolted to the ceiling, showing a young couple laying a tile patio. They were laying this tile very seriously, and the voice-over spoke in hushed, important tones, as though it was a historical documentary about, say, building the Burma Road. I had tried to turn the television off when I came in, but the only control I could find just switched channels. It was supposed to alter the volume, too, but those buttons seemed not to have any effect. So the television whispered along with all of our conversation. Somebody, she was telling me, had made her do something she had not wanted to do.

"Was that physical therapy?" I asked. She didn't answer for a little bit. Then she resumed: "They tried to tell me I was in a hospital!" she said, and smiled. Was it indignation? Did she know it was a hospital now? Was it a joke about how out of it she had been? Or was she fishing to see where I thought she was? I was at a loss for words. I smiled encouragingly, I hope, though I daresay it was wanly.

Later I understood that she had been made to sit upright for an hour, and that she thought she was in a furniture store. Very tired of it, and she wanted to go home: why did we just keep on hanging around?

Occasionally I struck a theme that interested her, and I could see, almost as a physical transformation, the intelligence return to her face. Something about Tory's shyness. A mention of Alan liking having grown taller than his mother. Anything having to do with psychology or personality. I wished I had thought to bring a quilting book -- color and design were the other things that might have fetched back that brief intelligence. I labored on, but I've never been good at making conversation, and anyway there are very few things we are both interested in. At the lulls of the conversation, which were frequent, she would read aloud the sentences the nurses had written on the whiteboard, or the little signs posted here and there. Was there a response to them that we were supposed to be sharing, or was it entirely automatic? I couldn't tell.

Finally she said, during one of those quick returns of intelligence, "Well, you better be getting home."

"I suppose I had better," I said, feeling relieved, and guilty at feeling relieved. "Can I bring you anything, before I go?"

This question seemed to strike her as very odd -- perhaps we were still in the furniture store -- but she shook her head. I leaned over to give her the odd half-hug that hospital beds grudgingly permit, and went out. I tried half-heartedly to catch the eye of one of the nurses, to ask about my mother's condition, but none of them looked my way. And I was too tired. Martha was better at that sort of thing, anyway.

As I shuffled down the long corridor to the elevators, I thought of how hateful, and how familiar, the smell of hospitals has become to me. It was hard for me to imagine thinking it was someplace as pleasant as a furniture store.

English Faces

I don't usually think fondly of nations. I think nationalism is a curse, a virus of irrational bigotry that incubated in German universities in 19th Century, and then spread rapidly all over the world to make the 20th Century the worst of all human centuries. The idea that every people with their own language, religion, and customs should have their own sovereign government was a disaster, and continues to be a disaster. So nationalistic paeans about the supposed virtues and denunciations of the supposed vices of whole nations have always left me cold, if not hostile. And I've known too many gregarious Englishmen and humble French and easygoing Germans and reserved Italians to find them very convincing.

But this morning I am deeply aware of how much I love England and the English. How much I owe them, collectively and individually. And there is a commonality there, though I doubt it's wise to even try to identify it. I could say the English are headstrong, emotional, sentimental. In some ways, a people -- like the Russians, perhaps -- made for suffering. I could say that they -- especially if you set them beside the Americans -- are intensely aware of pain, decay, and death. Of how things come apart. Of how many things cannot be helped. And how it's precisely because of this, that their bravery is so moving. They are a people who go into every battle expecting to lose.

It was a queer fate that made them for a time the most successful of all imperial nations. It's made them maybe a little more sympathetic to us than nations that haven't been through it. They understand the fey mood that takes a country when it seems that it just can't lose, that fate has dealt it every winning card. The Swedes and the French and the Canadians and the Swiss can believe that they would act differently from us, if they were masters of the world. But the English know all too well that no people can resist the stupidities of imperial success. The rest of the world views us as arrogant, violent, insensitive, and hypocritical by nature. Only the English seem to understand that it's just the cards we were dealt.

But -- this was not at all the post I set out to write. Yes, I am sorry, England, that we involved you in this ill-advised, obscurely-motivated, and spectacularly badly-planned occupation. But I feel strangely distant from that. What is near me now is the leaves of Russel Square, the kindliness of round English faces, and the quick patter of English voices. I am sorry that anyone ever suffers this, but I'm especially sorry that it should be you, the people dearest to me of all peoples.

In which I go Visiting

Looking for
A self-unmade man
Is both easier and harder than you'd think.

I roll up a few shirts and shorts
And a new pen
And walk out of the door, it's a July morning,

And I hitchhike to London,
(The Atlantic being the hard part)
And I make Jean give me a berth on her sofa,

She being kind, and unwise
As the wise often are
When the sun hits the concrete, and the glare spills over.

(And now for a moment
Excuse me
I wonder, could I make her laugh? She has

A wonderful laugh,
I know, though
I can't say how. But I digress.)

And that is my last stop
Because once I reach it,
The North Sea, it's only Heinrich Heine and me,

And Heinrich, you know --
I stickle for details --
Is dead. But I, for reasons that have not been explained to me,

Any more than they were explained
To nTexas,
Am alive. But still self-made. So still travelling.

After the last stop,
(See? Not so fast)
I will catch a freighter into Houston, and look for that tavern

Where all precepts evert,
And where nTexas
Will have left a clue, and I will follow it, till I'm dizzy

And stumbling backwards
Into New Mexico
I will sit down hard, and she will smile at me.

And we will just lean heads together
For an hour
And almost I will be self-unmade, but there is more,

Because, as I said
(I said this, remember)
It's harder than you'd think. So I will leave the waterfall,

And walk in Lekshe's garden,
In the cool of the day,
Hoping vainly that she will show up;

And then from there
Because (as you
Will recall, I also said), it's easier than you think,

I will wander down
To Tosi's
And have breakfast. Self-unmade, and hungry.

I will eat eggs,
And drink coffee,
And murmur the Lord's prayer. Give us this day.

Fat Man

The fat man went walking along the shore, and the sand squirted up between his toes. He was such a pondering weight that the force of his steps fused the sand to glass, and it hung just as it spurted, in frozen splashes of light. Mother-of-pearl fronds.

The fat man squatted there on the beach, and his round head settled into his jowls, like an egg settling into its nest. Chins flowed down to his breasts, and breasts flowed down to his belly, and bellies flowed down to his thighs, all of it quaking and trembling, while the blood flowed through it all. His huge chambered heart pounded.

He reached out with his great puffy fingers and grasped handfuls of the gleaming sand. Waves roared into the holes he left, and broke unnoticed on his bulk.

The fat man was thinking.

I have eaten the crabs and the mussels, he thought. I have eaten the gulls and the sandpipers, the sandfleas and the weedworms. I have eaten the cows and the pigs, the chickens and the turkeys, the buffalo and the oxen. I have eaten the ground wheat and the rolled oats and the milled corn. I have eaten the pale green salads and the sharp green onions. I have drunk the olive oil the spinach swam in, and the wine in wooden bowls, and the sweet licorice-tasting ouzo in shot-glasses. And now I am big.

The fat man raised his fist suddenly and struck the beach. All the shoreline rocked, and huge waves raced away. "I am content!" he bellowed.

And at that the stars began to drop from above, just a few at first, and then a steady drizzle, vanishing into the sea -- and then the sky itself peeled back, daysky and nightsky, all peeled back, and the moon and the sun went rolling away unregarded, like dog-chewed tennis balls. The fat man stood up.

"I have been waiting for you," he said quietly. "I have been waiting a long time."

"I know," she answered. "But now you are finally big enough."

Reserves

So we come to the end. Not a bad run. Let be all the fussing. It could well be worse; it has been worse. Let the hands drop loosely to the sides. We have been outwitted, outgeneraled, at the last. When the French general sent to retrieve Sedan asked after the reserves, he was told there are no reserves. Which was, he said later, when he realized that the war was lost.

-----

Things break sometimes. Sometimes things are irretrievable. Friends and lovers die, and so do enemies; and suddenly all our plans for them are revealed for what they are: sequences of thought, patterns of expectation. Oh yes, they seem real, before you take off the lenses of immortality. Practical people never take them off, of course, so they are helpless in the face of death, and they run from every hint of it. "Take a realistic view," they say, by which they mean "Keep pretending we will all live forever, and resolutely ignore the occasional disappearances!" And they settle the lenses tighter on their noses, and scoff at the dreamers and sentimentalists, who read poems by dead poets and listen to music by dead composers and visit the graves of old friends. And who talk to the dead who cluster at their windows in the early morning.

-----

"But -- haven't you died?" the children ask the apparition of their friend, in Lewis's book, and the friend answers, "Most people have, you know."

-----

Herriot writes of looking at the necrotic paw of a dog slowly, nobly, and patiently recovering from having been caught in a trap. The rotting flesh had sloughed off clear down to the bone, and as Herriot looked at it he suddenly saw the metacarpals and phalanges of a human hand. Not so different, under the flesh.

-----

When I came to pick up Alan, Jonquil's mother appeared from the back, in a skimpy black skirt and tube top, which she couldn't quite carry off, at forty. She refuses to be an adult. Trickles profanity and scorn, flirts with her daughters' friends, and imposes her will by tantrum or trickery, when she can, rather than by authority. And she's quite right that accepting the authority of a mother is the beginning of accepting all kinds of decay. Our culture generally harbors contempt for this particular refusal. But there are dozens of others just as destructive, which we by and large encourage. Never give up on your dreams, we say. Well, Jonquil's mother hasn't. That's what it looks like, not giving up on your dreams.

-----

Jonquil insisted on coming with me to the store. At the checkout line, she methodically turned around the first magazine in each slot, so that the whole rack was a row of back-page ads. She has the adolescents' faith in oddity and inconvenience leading to awareness. She doesn't understand that the real enemy of awareness is not complacency, but exhaustion. "The beginning of revolution, Jonquil," I didn't say, "is a good night's sleep. Don't make anyone's life harder than it has to be."

Little Crater Lake

I can't reconstruct the thoughts of the person who named this pool. It's circular and clear and deep, and that's the extent of the similarity I could see to the real Crater Lake -- the ruins of Mt Mazama that haunt Oregon postcard racks.

A hot blue sky. We'd been driving for a couple hours. Back up through the Warm Springs Reservation, where we saw white wild horses dotting the tumble-home of the mesas, like mountain-goats in the North Cascades; and where stranded cars in various stages of decay seemed to wash up around every homestead. Up into the Mt Hood National Wilderness. All the windows down so that the dry wind could roar through and mitigate the heat; all of us a little cross and sick of road-food. The end of our trip was in sight, when everyone starts looking ahead to what they will be able to do when they can get away from each other.

We turned off at the Timothy Lake road. One of our goals from the start had been to have a look at this "Little Crater Lake," which was on our forest-service map, but which we had never heard of. At this point we were near the balance. One complaint or squabble and we would have gone straight on over Mt Hood's shoulder and back into Portland. But everyone held their grumpy peace. Overhead, a raven soared silently over us, scanning for road-kill, or for interesting litter to come out of those open windows. Ravens don't, apparently, tire of road-food.

An empty campground. This is a jumping-off place for cross-country skiers. Not much of a summer haunt -- no way to get a boat to the lake from here. So no one was in sight as we got out of the van and wandered down a little paved path in a sea of brilliant green meadow-grass, inwoven with purple lupine. Tiny white and orange butterflies tumbled drunkenly by. All quiet, all hot. Into a stand of hemlocks. Over a mysterious style; I couldn't imagine what animals might be being kept out, or in. Riding-horses? Deer?

A clearing opened, and a brimming blue pool appeared. But as we approached, its color became intenser, became an unearthly ice-cave blue, shot with phosophorescent green. The pool, maybe fifty yards across, was deeper than it was wide, and you could see all the way down. The sides were striated rock. Tree-trunks, glowing a paler blue, lay scattered at the bottom. The water was so clear that I couldn't shake the conviction that if you tried to swim here you would fall, not sink, through the water.

It's really a huge artesian well. No signs forbade swimming, but though we were all hot and the the water was cold and inviting, we all felt that to swim in this place would be wrong, even if we weren't slathered with sunscreen. I had never seen a place so obviously sacred. I cupped my hands in the water, feeling even this to be ethically dubious, and pressed them, wet and cool, to my face.

A sacred place, but the key to its meaning and ceremony are lost, and it's saddled now with this inappropriate tourist-mongering name. I wonder what its real name used to be. Names count, at a place such as this.

Shy Girls

Sometimes you have to be quick to get ahead of the preconceptions and the expectations and the apprehensions, quick quick quick to reach past the settling coat, catch hold of that hand (lifted for a brief wave goodbye), and kiss that shy girl before she slips away from the party. It's the shy girls who know how to kiss, though.

First thought, best thought.

The rattle of casual drumsticks, the purr of the cat, the lapping of the morning sun against the porch. I'm sorry for all the things I've left undone, in this ramshackle life, but it will have to do.

A time to cast away stones.

When King Canute waded back to shore, did he change his pants? They must have been soaked.

A time to gather stones together.

I will spend today carefully gathering, but my thoughts will be with you. Vacation tomorrow.

The third, whom I love more the more of blame
Is heaped upon her, maiden most unmeek,
I knew to be my demon poesie.

Silly boy. But what are any of us doing, but trying to lift a hand off the page?

Last Words

My lord Yacatecuhtli,
the vulture is a thing that circles
& never has to land.
Everything he sees is on the way
to its final appointment:
all words to him
are last words.

Bonta, Cibola

Connected by a Line

Charcoal eyes measured the steps to the darkened gym doorway. Glanced, fast, at the runnels of empty malls and coffee spaces that surrounded them: two strangers, connected by a line.

Sarsparilla

Luff

I turned my hands out and cupped them slightly as I walked, feeling the air catch in them, and spill over. As often, nowadays, I found myself on the verge of tears, though not particularly sad or unhappy. A tilt of the light, the tremble of a leaf, can wrench my heart. I'm not sure what psychiatric or physiological condition this betokens. If any. Maybe it's just the travelling habit of the spirit -- it wears tears to go out walking.

I have not turned very well -- or more honestly, my turn has become a skid, leaving me travelling in the same direction, only less in control. "Oh yes," I thought this morning. "That's why I don't make sharp turns. I knew there was a reason."

Nevertheless, I am not stuck. I don't know why not. Even if I dump sugar in my coffee and eat fried potatoes with my breakfast. Even if I find myself ashamed today. This is a temporary setback. In any case, it's okay. My mortality is quite real to me. It's not to be prevented by eating one way or another. I mean to be done with being ashamed, and to ratify what I do. If it was worth it to me this morning, then so be it.

But that turns, itself, into an internal struggle, to which I can attach pride or shame, depending on how it goes. This is a clever noose, and it's not to be undone by thinking and resolving, however shrewd, however stern. Either meditation undoes these knots, or nothing does. I've come to this conclusion dozens of times. So I come to it again. Though without the tremendous surge of hope that it once inspired.

Somebody wanted Martha to write a chapter, in a proposed book, about why she became a Buddhist. She has no intention of writing it.

"Why did I become a Buddhist?" she said to me. "Because I thought it would work faster than it does. Because I didn't think it would be so hard." Then she laughed, that wonderful laugh. Often when I go up to kiss her goodbye, she's meditating. I wait a moment at the door while she murmurs the ending prayers, the prayers that "dedicate the merit."

I look back at my recent narratives, and I see what's missing. What any person who knew me offline would spot immediately. The mystery of how I nerved myself to get my first job. Of how I came to have a career, those things that I presented as inexplicable accidents: they're all due to Martha. Her encouragement, her thinking, her practical working-with-what-is-there.

"What would you do in your ideal job?" she asked me. I grinned crookedly. "Learn the rudiments of a new language every year," I answered. Which, as we mulled it over, we realized is about what you do, if you work in software.

She liked the university. She liked the thought of being a faculty wife, I think, and she would have made a good one; she's always had a gift for teasing academics, and bringing out the best in them. But never an objection to me giving up on an academic career, this career I'd spent five years and thousands of dollars training for. She saw what teaching did to me.

Likewise, when I came home one day last year and admitted to feeling trapped in my job, she picked it up right there. Started figuring out what we would need to do, what the exit-strategy should look like. I wasn't trapped at all. There were ways out if I wanted to take them. This, although I know the prospect of losing this income frightened her considerably.

As I said recently, in another connection, my good fortune sometimes unnerves me.

Uneasy Money, Part III

"There's an almost mythic - hero's quest - quality to this part of your history," commented Mary.

Uh-oh.

That means two things. One is that I'm probably distorting the past, and the other is that I'll have to disappoint people at the end, here.

I don't triumph at the end of the story. It's sort of a draw. I did start "making a living" -- in the phrase which Rana rightly identifies as sinister, in its equation of earning money with life. My two computer science buddies and I got hired as research assistants, writing some code for our apparently-stern-but-absurdly-soft-hearted German Database professor's experimental database. Eventually we all got hired by a company at which said professor had connections. I've been working on database engines ever since. Has it been ten years? Not quite, I think.

It was surreal, again -- my life has had a lot of these surreal reversals -- to walk back into the world with a computer science degree in the mid-nineties. It was only then that I realized how wounding the academic job-market, or rather the lack thereof, had been. Suddenly I was wanted. Interviews were a matter of employers eagerly trying to sell me on working for them. It was very strange to go from saying, "well, I'm working on my dissertation at the top-ranked school in my field, and I've done some teaching..." & being cut off with a brusque "We're only interviewing people dissertation-in-hand." to saying, "well, I have a decent BA from the local state college, and no experience..." & having them say "let us buy you lunch at a fancy restaurant! Are you free tomorrow?"

I was a far better literary scholar than I will ever be a computer programmer. It's a little humiliating how much more my reception affected me than what I knew of my own capabilities. I'm a mediocre computer-guy, a jack-of-all-trades, reliable but decidedly un-brilliant. And now I've just watched another round of lay-offs wash past me, and I'm waiting for the one that will sweep me away; I doubt that I'll get a job as good as this again. But willy-nilly, even knowing as I did that I had just happened to catch an economic wave, being wanted built up my confidence, when the bleak sense of being superfluous had been eroding it. Ordinarily I don't put much stock in trying to make a career by second-guessing economic trends. "Do what you're good at, and never mind the market" I think is generally good advice. But there are some markets that get so flooded that applicants become mere supplicants, and the power differential between employers and employees becomes so huge that everything is distorted by it. Much of the academic market was like that in the eightiess. I suspect it's that way again, now. Power differentials do not often bring out the best in people.

So where am I now? Middle class. Putting my daughter through college is going to take a big chunk out of us, and if my son comes in about the same in the scholarship lottery (why do people bother with Vegas, when they can apply for scholarship money?) we'll come out at about zero. But I'm happier financially than I've ever been. My money troubles are just like other people's now.

I'm still sorting through the fallout of a life of easy money. My work habits still reflect, all too well, my sense that my career is a surreal fake, an odd fluke of fortune. I often don't take it seriously. I blog. I procrastinate badly. But as always, my old skills as a student -- so uncomfortably close to those of the sycophant -- keep me afloat. I listen. I know what people pay attention to and what they care about. Those things, I always make sure I do. But the conviction of unreality persists. I flirt with disaster, I think, in hopes that at some point something will seem real. But disaster never comes, and neither does reality.

This is real life, I tell myself. I tell myself that often, nowadays. Some things have become real to me. My relationships with people (other than at work) mostly seem real to me now. With my children. Mountain, water, stone and tree have always seemed real to me, and seem so still. But this cubicle, and these people I work with, the tasks I do, are never quite in focus. I never quite believe in them.

Alienation of labor? Alienation of spirit? The inattention of a spoiled brat? I don't know. Or maybe this is an existential drama, or a nihilist pit, that owes nothing at all to my history or to anyone else's. Is this real life? I don't know. I begin to feel the question, though, with more urgency. It's a pretty large portion of my life to leave in the dream-box.

Turn

I think that I've learned about all that shame and self-doubt have to teach me, for now, and that it's time to turn and walk in a different way.

Asking for Blessings

I've only ever tangentially approached the question.

Some questions, of course, are best approached tangentially. Some can only be approached tangentially. This isn't one of them, I think.

I skated past asking Sarah that. Left the question out on the coffee-table, where she could pick it up if she liked. That's as close as I ever got to asking it. She left it on the table.

I recognized even then, that there's only thing I ever want to ask a teacher: "Please, give me your blessing!"

I watch the question and answer sessions at KCC with a mixture of impatience and amusement. One in every twelve questions, maybe, is a real question. The rest are all, in one disguise or another, "please, Lama Michael, give me your blessing!" And people are happy or sad at his answers, pleased or angry, according to whether he's answered with what looks to them like a blessing.

I almost never ask questions now. I guess partly because I'm ashamed, and partly because to sit in the room with him already feels like receiving a blessing. Asking for more would be just greedy.

Lekshe would say, I guess, that ordinary standards don't apply here. Here, greedy is good. Here I should be a glutton. But I'm not sure about that.

Or maybe it's just that at the bottom of this murky glass lies the dread that the question, asked directly, would get a direct answer. What if he said "no"?

Really, you know, the whole tiresome business of falling in love is the same thing. "Give me your blessing!" And we do give each other such blessings as we can muster. But like everything in this world, it's never enough. And so we start to doubt. Is this really a person who can dispense blessings? Isn't there maybe someone else who could do it better? Are these real blessings?

As usual, with the obstinacy of our kind, we clutch the wrong end of the stick. Anyone can give blessings. The hard part is learning to be able to receive them.

That's another reason I don't ask, "Lama Michael, can you give me your blessing?"

In my head -- with a kindly, weary smile -- Michael always says, "I don't know, Dale. Can I?"

Morning

The morning sun slid slant through the blinds. On the wall, where it spilled through the space at the side of the window, it made a pattern, the exact pattern of an unfleshed human spine, seen side-on; the dorsal wing of each vertebrae flaring upward.

I haven't seen you for a long time.

When I opened the cupboard door the salt-shaker fell out. It turned a somersault, so that when I caught it, just above the counter, it was perfectly upright in my hand. I swept a few grains of salt off the counter. I sometimes find my luck unnerving.

I couldn't be bothered with making coffee properly. I dumped some grounds and some chocolate into a cup of boiling water. With a teaspoon I skimmed off what skimmed easily, a couple minutes later, of the grounds; but I don't mind chewing on little bits of coffee bean in between sips.

I think of qB and of Sarsparilla, recently in Venice; I think of Dave in Plummer's Hollow, and Kurt in Tennessee. Good morning. (Good evening.)

The crows come down to the back porch. Yesterday I heard them cawing more loudly than usual, indignant, outraged. Went out back and saw that Christmas, our ancient dog, who could no more catch a crow than she could play the violin, was lying on the back porch, just below the rail where the food for the crows was set out. She's so deaf she might not have been able to hear the crows, but I got the impression she was enjoying riling them. The crows, meanwhile, complained bitterly. Yet another thing crows have in common with human beings: a huge sense of entitlement.

Bless you all. Another day. Good luck.

Aside

I woke this morning to silent tears, the tick of another heartbeat, a cloud of warm hair, the weight of grief. And this is one of the good lives.

A friend used to write of how horrible things were, of abused children and lingering deaths, challenging me, maybe, to give her optimistic it's-not-so-bad-after-all-answers -- saying, so how does your Buddhist cheerfulness answer that?

No. You don't understand Buddhism. It's far worse, far worse than that. If it were only despair and cruelty and weakness it could maybe be fixed. And if death was an end it could at least be escaped.

No. Worse than that. This life is saturated with grief. If you look close enough, you can see misery sweating from every pore of it. Worse than you think. If you could see what even the pleasure and satisfaction are made of, you'd recoil in horror.

The unmaking of this grief has nothing to do with stopping wicked people's wicked designs, with feeding the hungry and healing the sick. It's far harder than those (already impossible) things. Don't come to me look for it's-not-so-bads. It's worse.

If the joy were predicated on fixing this world, it would be time, past time, to cash in and go home.

One crow swept up into the gray sky, calling out hoarsely, as I pulled away from the curb. Blue gleam of black beak. An impudent flirt of scruffy feathers. A dry leaf whispered across the windshield, and spun away. A thread of cobweb tickled across the back of my hand.

The grass growing through the cracked sidewalk was so green that it jarred my eyes. The red of the stop sign, a huge glowing splash of blood, stayed in my vision long after my turn. The street rolled under my feet -- brown scattered duff, rough pavement, mossy curbstones. Trash spun by the wind of the passing cars trembled and skittered. I could feel the air pressed and driven by the little car; I could feel the tires shake as they explored every pitch and unevenness of the road.

If not now, never; if not here, nowhere.

No. Go elsewhere for comfort: nothing at this shop but grief, and joy.

Uneasy Money, Part II

The shame and despair evoked by thinking back to those first years in Portland is so thick that I'm finding it difficult to go on. And it's hard to make a story of it, because the essence of that pain was that my life no longer had a story. I went chasing shadows of old stories. I took a few classes at Portland State, German and English literature, and of course, given the amount of literary and linguistic training I had, it would have been strange if I had not done well. But you can only be a golden boy once. I did find English grad students to hang out with, and a German Stammtisch to go to at noon, but people in general were (rightly) suspicious of me. What was I doing there? My story was that I was just keeping up my languages while I finished writing my dissertation, but I don't think it was a convincing story. There was a faint air of fraudulence about me. I think most people sensed it.

I really don't know when I officially gave up on my dissertation. I used to wander off supposedly to work on it. I would end up at strip bars and come home eight hours later, tipsy, occasionally drunk. The strip bars too were a matter of chasing old stories. I wanted again to be the extraordinary man, the one who could cross barriers, the one who used to be the only male friend of lesbians who had entirely given up on his gender, who was one of the only two male members of the VLS reading-group at Yale (it stood -- I forget why; perhaps there was a movie by that name? -- for the Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. Which sounds a great deal more interesting than it was. We got together once a week and drank mint tea and discussed Feminist & Queer theory.) So I sat at the bar, and talked to strippers, and of course they told me I was different -- and they did talk unguardedly to me, and some of them maybe valued their aquaintance with me -- but we weren't friends. I was a customer. I was buying an odd semblance of friendship. It was all fraudulent still. A girl might brighten when I came in, and hop up to hug me, and talk and laugh with me at the bar, but I was tipping and buying her drinks -- of course she was glad to see me.

Money does that. It lays a film of fraudulence over everything. In almost every conceivable relation it casts a shadow, if you're sensitive to such things. Melville's Confidence Man tells a new friend he really has no money, and the man begins to backpeddle and distance himself. "I conjure you back!" the Confidence Man intones, and lays a ring of golden dollars around his friend, who thereupon realizes that it was all a joke. Back comes the bonhomie and enthusiasm.

Anyway. At some point I began taking computer classes, as well, and I ended up -- perhaps it wasn't as haphazard as this, but I remember it as being almost by accident -- getting a second BA in computer science. But another thing had happened along the way. I had gotten a job.

It was a part-time job washing dishes. There was a restaurant just up the street that we liked to go to sometimes -- it was run by a socialist lesbian who actually did something as queer as give her employees health-insurance, and parental leaves. And they had a kids' playroom that Tori liked. A place, in short, frequented by our tribe. One day there was a help-wanted sign in the window, and -- I really have no idea how I rose to doing it, but I filled out an application. I got a call shortly thereafter.

I loved it. I loved virtually everything about it -- the easy comraderie, the accomplishment of keeping up with the tide of dishes through a Friday-evening rush, the gratitude of managers for someone who showed up precisely when he said he would and did exactly what he said he was going to do. I loved the work itself, which -- to my astonishment -- I was quite good at, filling racks of dishes and whirling them into their old-fashioned dishwasher. After a few weeks I graduated to doing pantry-work, mostly preparing and restocking the salad bar. Chopping vegetables. Washing lettuce and mushrooms. I was good at that too.

One day I was training a man about my age, who was pursuing a degree in psychology at Portland State. As I showed him the best way to move things around in the walk-in freezer, and incidentally told him a little of my background, he began to eye me with some perplexity. I could sense his discomfort growing. Eventually he asked, hesitantly but almost compulsively, "Don't you get bored with this?" My enthusiasm, I think, unsettled him.

I didn't get bored with it. If it had paid enough money to support a family, I would happily have stayed there the rest of my life. I suppose I might have gotten bored with it eventually, but the puzzles of how to do the work best and quickest fascinated me as much as any software problem I've ever had to solve as a professional. Any problem in the real world is infinitely complex.

For the first time in my life, I was getting a paycheck that seemed real to me. I had gotten paychecks before, as a TA, or as a piece-editor, and a couple times as a course instructor, but those were all covered with the money-film, one way or another. I had bought my way into Yale, a voice always whispered to me, and all those jobs were just little illusory reflections of the Yale glamour. But I had earned these checks. I worked hard, and I got paid for it because it was valuable to someone. It will probably strike a lot of people as ridiculous, but I was far prouder of those sixty-dollar checks than I ever was of the "honors" grades I got from graduate school. A thirty-year clutch of panic and despair began to untwist itself in my insides.

Uneasy Money, Part I

I had what Dickens once called the worst possible start in life, for a young man: I inherited an ambiguous amount of money. Not so much that I would never have to work -- but enough that I could take my time getting started in life; enough to learn habits of idleness and self-indulgence I would not be able to sustain; enough so that I never felt committed to any particular career path, because I could always train for something else. Enough so that I was well into my thirties before I got a real job.

It fell out strangely. I didn't grow up with money. My father was a highschool teacher. He was (and is), a prudent, shrewd, long-headed man. He took to buying rental properties. He was willing to wait to make his profits; he rented his properties at under the market rate, looking for the good renters, the long-term, conscientious people, and finding them. He wasn't making a lot of money, but over the years the equity accrued. He tended his houses carefully. Property values rose. He was doing well.

Meanwhile, we lived on a highschool teacher's salary, and were well-content -- I was, at any rate. I never expected anything but to have to make my own way. I knew that plenty of kids didn't have three square meals a day and a safe home and a room to share with their brother. I was lucky, and I felt lucky. I took pride in my father's virtually immortal station wagons -- he bought them a couple years old, and drove them so sensibly, and maintained them so well, that they outlived everyone else's. Buying a new car struck us as profligate, a ludicrous waste of money (still does strike me that way, for that matter.)

Then my grandfather, my mother's father, died. Died young, everybody said, which confused me -- I had met him once or twice, and he was a terribly old man -- his hair was quite white. He was sixty-two.

What his death was to mean to me didn't emerge for a a few years. He had been a farmer, and a county-extension agent. He went into business with a partner who was concocting corn hybrids. As a county-extension agent, a farmer travelling from farm to farm on the weekends, he was ideally placed to sell hybrid seed. And they were good hybrids: they nearly doubled the corn yield. The partnership became a prosperous company; the company became a corporation. And then, when I was ten years old, a couple years after my grandfather's death, it went public. And we were millionaires.

My life had changed radically, in the meantime. My parents had divorced, and my mother had remarried. I lived with her and my stepfather. He was a hardworking, hard-drinking engineer. He worked at Weyerhauser paper mill, designing pulp-processing machines, I think. He had bought property on top of a hill at the outskirts of Springfield and built a beautiful house, with his own hands -- designed it all and built it all from the foundations to the roof. Built his own swimming pool. By small-town Oregon standards we were already a wealthy family. Already I was an object of envy, which was ironic, because I was in those years perfectly wretched. But I had spending money, when many of my school-fellows did not. I could buy myself and my acquaintances dr peppers and hershey bars at the corner store. I lived in a big house on the hill, with a swimming pool. I had a treehouse down in an oak grove -- half a mile from the house, but still on my stepfather's property. He built it with characteristic design-sense, structural know-how, and skill. I imagine it's still there, if the grove is still there, resting sturdily on its two-by-sixes.

And now we had money, real money, the kind of money people dream of having. It first presented itself -- suitably enough -- as a worrisome thing, possibly a misfortune. My mother had a talk with me, an uncomfortable talk. We had money. A lot of money. But we shouldn't talk about it. Children of rich families might be kidnapped. People might try to scam us. We had to play our cards close to our chests.

She should have talked to herself: I was secretive and distrustful by nature, and I was already sick of being envied. But my mother had a great capacity for being cheated. She was not a good judge of character. People borrowed money from her and didn't pay it back. She got involved in a big real-estate deal in Costa Rica, and it ate up millions of dollars, but the lucrative resort that was supposed to emerge from the jungle and start raking in money never did emerge. The man she chose to manage her money -- she had an insurmountable aversion to handling it herself -- was a compulsive gambler. I don't think he embezzled any of the money -- he just bet on risky investments and lost, over and over.

This happened over years. In the meantime, we learned to be rich. We went to fancy restaurants. We had a wine-cellar. My mother, who had always wanted to travel, went to Russia, and to China -- she was one of the very first Americans to go to China when it was "opened" by Nixon. She repeatedly redecorated her houses -- she had divorced my stepfather by then -- with exquisite taste. My older brother, who loves fine-quality things, bought beautiful expensive suits, and, when he came into his own money, set about losing it with a single-mindedness that rivalled my mother's.

I, however, wanted nothing to do with any of it. Inherited capital was anathema to me. I wavered between calling myself an anarchist and calling myself a socialist, as a teenager and as a young man, but if there was anything I was sure of, it was that the power over other human beings conferred by having money, particularly unearned money, was monstrous. I cultivated indifference to it. I wore my tattered jeans and t-shirts. The money wasn't just in my family: some was put in my name. But I contemplated giving it away when I came of age.

I came of age, and somehow I never quite got around to giving it away. I was busy going to college, for one thing. We had sobered up enough to change to a trustworthy money manager, by then -- he did all the money stuff. I had only very vague ideas of what forms the money took, whatever I happened to see on papers that I had to sign. I apparently owned two-thirds of a Taco Time. I owned stock in something that was eventually to become Enron. There were mutual funds and bonds involved. It was all completely unreal to me. Art was real. Literature was real. The liberation of Eros was real. Money, on the other hand, was a hallucinatory non-object that had floated into my life out of nowhere. Surreal.

But as time went by, fear hardened in me. I was very timid socially, from the start, and I had been terribly inept at sports in school. (This was mostly because I was a year younger than the other kids in my grade, and had never practiced them; but if I knew that then, I didn't believe it.) The very little physical work I had ever done I had done very badly. I was slow. I had no initiative. Burned into my memory was the only time I ever went strawberry-picking -- this was a common summer job for kids in Oregon, and one day I went with a friend. I still recall vividly the manager coming by that morning, looking in my flat with its handful of berries, and praising me for my swiftness. I was flustered and confused. Was she mocking me? I knew I was going slow, much slower than anyone around me. She was gone before I realized what had happened -- she thought I had already picked a flat, and started on a my second. I was mortified. It was lucky that I didn't have to work because, I thought, I simply wouldn't be able to. Who ever would hire me?

I imagine most young people have similar misgivings. But most young people have to go to work anyway, and so they soon learn that someone who's responsible and steady and has some common sense doesn't have to have great skills or great speed or great initiative to be worth hiring -- that they're not actually so spectacularly incompetent as to be unable to make a living. But I never learned that. I shone in college: I was a brilliant student, really. Graduate schools were anxious to get me. Teachers had always adored me. But I knew I could never make my way in the real world. The money I had despised and ignored gradually, imperceptibly, came to seem absolutely necessary.

But there's one thing you can count on about money -- if you despise and ignore it, it will go away. Grad schools offered me full scholarships and handsome stipends, but I ignored them. I went to my first-choice school, and paid out-of-pocket for it. Well, after all, it was an investment. Everyone said that.

Six years and no finished dissertation later, with a wife and a daughter and a son on the way, the world was looking quite a bit different. I ran the numbers repeatedly -- I was good at numbers -- and no matter how I ran them, they said the same thing. If no money came in, we'd run out of it. Not right away. Not even soon. But we would run out.

It's a bit comical to me, now, to recall how bizarre this fact appeared to me. To most people in the world, this fact makes its appearance quite early and remains part of life's scenery from then on. But it struck me as preposterous. And I had become very skilled at ignoring money, by this time, so I kept on ignoring it. But it was a nightmare behind me, an impending unacknowledged disaster. I had managed to get into my thirties, and I had no resume. I had an M.Phil. from an impressive school, I knew three dead languages and a couple living ones to boot; I could decipher both a medieval Latin manuscript and the Anglo-Saxon jottings in its margins with some confidence, but there was only one job that qualified a person for. Teaching. And I hated teaching. I was terrible at it. I had the skills to be a brilliant student. I was a gifted listener, very good at discerning the drift of a teacher's thought and falling in with it.

But a teacher can't just listen. A teacher has to speak. Develop topics and put them out there, regardless of whether people agree with them or show interest in them. And this, I found, I simply could not do. I froze. I watched fellow graduate-students whom I privately thought far less bright than I was become prize-winning teachers. They had the confidence to do it. I did not. There are few experiences more humiliating than failing, abjectly and unequivocally, in full view, at the front of a classroom. I fled. Back to Oregon. I had to start over, somehow.

Memesis

Pronoia tagged me with a meme! I know I'm supposed to view this with mild nonchalant disdain, but I've never been tagged with a meme before, and it delights me. I was crestfallen -- though I bore it with stoic fortitude -- when nobody tagged me with the Fahrenheit 451 one.

Total Number of Books I Own

No idea. I know that when we moved back to Oregon from New Haven, thirteen years ago, we decided to sort through our books and get rid of all but the ones we positively couldn't do without. After an hour or two of diligent work, I came downstairs with a book.

"I can do without this," I said.

"That's mine!" said Martha, indignantly.

So much for getting rid of books. We mailed 72 cardboard boxes of them -- that's got to add up to a few thousand -- and I probably acquire books at a rate of 2 or 3 per week, so -- it's a lot of books.

The Last Book I Bought

I bought two at the same time: The American Crow and the Common Raven, by Lawrence Kilham. It was recommended to me some time ago by Dave Bonta and I just now sprung for it. It's perhaps the most beautiful paperback book I have ever seen: a jet black cover framing a wonderful black-and-white Audobon-style drawing of crows -- unpretentious but striking. Once I'd held it in my hands, I knew I had to buy it. The book is marvellous. The man just sat and watched crows for many months, and wrote about what he learned. That, to me, is the essence of Science. I love the discipline of experiment, but close observation is an even more fundamental discipline than that, and it is, I think, a rather neglected one.

The other was Tappan's Handbook of Massage. A classic I've been meaning to pick up forever. One of those texts that seems oddly familiar on a first reading, like Hamlet, because everyone quotes it


The Last Book I Read

Harry Potter y la Piedra Filosofal. When I reach the dull middle stage of learning a language -- when I basically have the grammar down, and I just have to learn thousands and thousands of words and idioms -- I like to proceed by reading translations of favorite kids' books. I already know the story, and they're not going to get all fancy and literary on me; and I know that any word or idiom they expect a sixth grader to know is one that I should get down cold. And it's fun. So I finished la Piedra Filosofal last week, and I'm into la Camara Secreta, now.


Five Books that Mean a lot to Me

Two of them, The Lord of the Rings and The Screwtape Letters, I've written about in other posts.

What the Buddha Taught, by Walpola Rahula. This is the book that turned me into a Buddhist.

The Poetry of William Blake. This is my old paperback Blake, which I bought in 1976, my sophomore year in college. It has my scribbled notes in Jerusalem and the Four Zoas, from my first encounter with those wells of madness. (Or founts of sanity. I've never been sure which they are.) Like most large paperbacks, its binding wasn't up to hard use, so it's now completely cocooned in strapping tape -- Urizen looms spectrally through the lines of encelluloided string in a very pleasing fashion. This book disappeared for a few months, and went to live in Tori's room. I lately learned that she read the whole thing, Jerusalem and Zoas and all, when she was sixteen. She probably has more Blake by heart than I do, now.

Why Blake? The transcendent joy, and the overwhelming cruelty of needless suffering, in this life. He experiences both intensely, and he never lets one experience disfigure or obscure the other.

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy. I guess partly because it gave me a much-needed dose of skepticism about political action, and partly because it gave me an also much-needed dose of skepticism about the project of forcibly remaking my character. (I don't know how much of the second lesson Tolstoy actually intended to teach.) And because I love the story.

And now I'm tagging -- PPB, with the injunction that she's not to omit the junk books; Dweezila, because she seems much too real and close to the bone to do memes like this; Tish, because I'm curious, and K, because I worry about his low-syllable count (is it just bad case of Haiku, or might he be coming down with Real Life?)

For Rana

I

Fall, then, miserably, wretchedly, horribly.
Sink to the very bottom, where the ravens
Tear frogs In a dark well. Because the light
Comes up from the bottom of this well,

Not down from the top. Things happen as you fall,
Unseen things crystallize and shift; centers
Of gravity shear to one side or the other;
Voices call in passing, voices you once knew

And can know again. But only from the bottom.
So I would say, sink fast, sink hard, sink angry,
All the way down, because under your feet
A secret light is opening, and stones are blossoming.

II

It isn't enough to love. Not even enough
To be honest. One wants to work, to put hands
On crooked things and make them straight,
On sickly things and make them well,

On obscure things and make them plain.
To steal these tasks from loving hands is to steal
Everything. It is not a crime easily
Forgiven, not now, not in one's prime and pride

Of strength. So now we stop. Under this sky,
We must retrace our steps in silence, waiting
Once again, for our inheritance
To be returned. Again. This sky. And silent.

III

It's little enough that an idle bystander
Can say, at times like this; the awkward hug
Or the glib reassurance. Words richochet, or
Lose themselves. The Radix Malorum

Glints, and has his day, and boasts his card
Trumps all others. But he is lying, though he
Doesn't know it. Far below, the light is rising
Which he will never know, and the stone

Is blossoming, and tasks are rising to the hands
That were made for them. There are truths
I don't know how I know, but I know love,
Which brought all things, is bringing these things too.

Buddhist Tragedy

Paula spoke with God recently, on Prospect Hill. He, living up to his reputation as a tetchy God ("Chatting like this really chafes my numinosity", he complained) concluded by asking, "-- WHAT THE FUCK -- PARDON MY FRENCH -- ARE YOU TRYING TO TRANSCEND ANYWAY ????"

Which, Paula says, is a good question.

I'm sure it is a good question, for her. For me, it's not a very interesting one, because the answer is up-front and obvious. I want to transcend unhappiness.

I never understand why nobody faults Buddhism for its devastating practicality, its drab utilitarian worldliness. People will fault it for all kinds of odd things -- the late Pope chided us for our pessimism, of all things, and a great many people take us to task for being impractical. Which I really can't fathom. What could be more optimistic than thinking that all sentient beings are capable of achieving omniscience and bliss? And what could be more practical than unwinding all the perplexities of the world, and bringing them down simply to -- "Why am I unhappy? And what's to be done about it?"

No, what people ought to complain about is how stubbornly quotidian and self-interested we are. Christians are Warriors of the Light; we are Applied Scientists of Cheerfulness. Well, sure, we want to establish all sentient beings in lasting happiness: but that's just because we've concluded that their happiness and our own happiness is one and the same thing. There's nothing noble about it. Enlightened (as they say) self-interest.

There is no such thing as Buddhist tragedy. It's simply not possible. Without Great Souls, and Death as an End, and Final Judgement, how do you even conceive tragedy? When Claudius and Hamlet get together in their next lives and work out their little differences, and Hamlet's father and mother, brother and sister now, beam at them and bring them hot chocolate. When Macbeth admits it was a horrendous miscalculation, and Duncan tells him not to mention, it -- we all make mistakes -- and Desdemona puts together a powerpoint presentation detailing the exact progress of that dratted handkerchief, so as to clear it all up for Othello, while Iago chimes in and explains how his own suffering moved him to generate more suffering and the idea was that at some point his own suffering would go away, but it just never worked out that way -- well, you get the picture. Hard luck on Shakespeare that the Dharma hadn't shown up in the West yet, but a stroke of good fortune for us.

Oh

I pulled my back, and I've been spending most of the time I'd ordinarly spend online flat on my back. So that's why I haven't been responding to your lovely emails & comments.

But I just discovered that back in March, qB as well as Abdul-Walid, recorded my post about walking in Forest Park, and I listened to it this morning. I'm overwhelmed. Hers is beautiful too.

Since people were asking for sound, here are links to both versions -- I promise you done much better than I could.

qb

Abdul-Walid

Jonquil among the Amish

I frowned. "I'll wait till you're up, anyway. In case you come down."

"Okay," she answered cheerfully, and hopped out of the van into the night.

She had forgotten her key, so she was going to climb the tree up to her second-floor window. She climbed not like a cat, as I had expected, but like a boy, like Tom Sawyer, with vigor but no grace. In the faint night-glow of a distant street-lamp I watched her scramble up. When she was all the way up she waved. I could go now. She was safe.

I feel odd, waiting for her to go in. I have always waited for kids and for women. And lately I've taken to waiting for just everyone, at night, to get safely into their house. But especially a seventeen-year-old girl. With Jonquil, I feel a little silly, knowing how unprotected a life she has led, with her undependable parents, her peripatetic life, her scrounging of meals. What does she make of me, waiting for her to get in, when her father doesn't even check to see if she's gotten home of an evening?

She watched me intently, Martha said, while I read to them. I think our household is a curiosity to her -- an intact household, no big fights, no drinking, no drugs, no television. We do something as quaint as read aloud. We say please and thank you. Martha's nephews refer to us as "Amish."

Jonquil's a survivor. I was impressed with her when I first met her, because she was socially an adult, carefully thanking us for everything, warily monitoring how much impact she was having on the household, watching for signs of irritation. Touching base with both of us. Nice, in a way, after thoughtless kids, but it grieves me. She's been doing this, I bet, since she was ten. Scoping out refuges, maintaining connections, just in case she needs them.

She's a beautiful girl, brown and slim, with wide dark eyes and an engaging smile. It gives me an odd twinge, to be a generation older than she. I remember being intoxicated by girls that age. I still was, when I was in my thirties, sometimes. But not now. It's not just that she's a friend of my son. I've crossed some kind of boundary. I don't live in that country now.

Her friendship with Alan puzzles and pleases me. They aren't lovers -- I don't think so at least -- but I've found them on the couch, Jonquil sleeping with her head on Alan's chest. They're affectionate in a casual and completely unselfconscious way. They play Dungeons & Dragons and computer games. They butt and punch each other like billy-goats. Perhaps she comes here to be a little girl, to be un-grown-up. Most of the world, I imagine, is pressing her very hard to be adult. Here at the Amish household, with a fourteen-year-old boy who is in many ways young for his age -- who still likes Pokemon and has a strict sense of propriety (where did that come from? Not from us) -- she can play.

Past the Midway

This wind moves slowly, hesitantly. Dry grass whispers. Nothing else moving in all this empty country.

When Dante gets to the very bottom of Hell, there is only one way to go on: he has to climb down the body of Satan, who is locked in the ice there. He climbs down and then suddenly he's climbing up. He's gone through. Now he's in Purgatory, at the base of a great mountain. What was down is up, what was up is down.

It's a powerfully imagined moment. Spoiled for me, the first time I read it, by my superimposition of my own civilization's idea of how gravity works. Of course, I thought, at the center of the Earth, supposing there could be a nicely un-pressurized space down there, you'd simply be weightless; all the gravitational forces would balance out. So I completely missed the incredible vertigo of that conception. I don't know whether it's originally Dante's notion, or somebody else's, but the daring of it rivals Newton's. It's actually very similar to Newton's: it's daring to think, "what if 'up' isn't fixed and universal?"

"Midway in my life's journey," begins Dante. Wherever I am in my own, I'm well past that. In the past ten years I've climbed past the Devil's waist. I'm headed for death now. And I'm climbing up, not down.

You can watch the wind, in empty grassland. It's rising now. It swirls and bends the grass in great sweeps and eddies. Roger Ascham wrote about how falling snow makes it possible to see the wind; grass does the same thing.

Hell is behind me, then. This is a different melancholy, one that doesn't occlude joy. The sadness of wasted time, of the huge weight of mistake and confusion that even this one brief life has accumulated. Memory, the Tibetans say, dies with the body. I'm grateful for that. It doesn't reincarnate. However the Buddha knew about his past lives, it wasn't by memory.

Not exactly raining, but the wind carries a wetness in it. A sting across my face.

Hail to the jewel in the grassland. Fare forward, you who think you are travelling. It's enough.

Not Eating Chocolate

My doctor having threatened me with anti-cholesterol medicine again, I'm back to monitoring what I eat. Since being so fussed about work, the past six months, I'd gained back about fifteen pounds. (I'm still fussed about work, but incurring coronary problems won't help matters any.)

My diet consists of eschewing refined sugar and saturated fat,* and going light on "white stuff" generally (white rice, white bread, potatos, pasta). It's simple, and it's worked -- of course, all diets work for me, if I follow them. The advantage to this one is that I seem to be able to stick to it for weeks at a time, and picturing hewing to it for the rest of my days doesn't depress me.

Which brings me to what I intended to post about. I'm experimenting with a new way of responding to cravings. The first thing to do, of course, is to see if I'm hungry, and if I am, to eat something. But that only stops them about half the time. So I've been watching what my mind really does, when I'm craving something, and, as usual, it's not exactly what I thought it did. What really happens -- and why it's so unpleasant -- is that I start battling the desire, trying to fight it down, trying to replace it with the desire to lose weight and be healthy. Pretty soon most of my consciousness gets drawn into the battle. And if I cave in, it's not so much because I want the treat so badly, as that I want my damn mind back, so I can pay attention to other things. I'm just tired of the fight. It doesn't seem worth it.

And actually, I think I'm right. It's not worth it. Having my mind snarled up like that for half of my waking life would lose me more years of life worth living than an early death by heart failure would. There's nothing stupid or weak about capitulating at that point. It's just sense.

But it has occurred to me lately, watching the battle royale escalating, that there's another way to play this game. I don't actually need to stop wanting chocolate. I just need to not eat it. So I've been trying, lately, to respond to a craving by welcoming it. Instead of trying to head myself off from thoughts of chocolate, or minimize how much I want it, I invite myself to dwell on it. Luxuriate in the fantasy of eating it: try to call to mind exactly how it tastes, exactly how my body responds -- the lift of euphoria, the jets of saliva, the way the different flavors (chocolate being such a marvellously complex set of tastes) greet the sides and the back of the tongue. The crunch of nuts between my teeth, the raking of the sweetness against my palate. The whole thing.

It helps to know, as I have learned from sitting Shamatha, that thoughts, including cravings, go away. They only stay because we're holding them in place, somehow (most often, by trying to make them go away.)

(Milarepa came back to his cave one day to find it infested with demons. He tried everything to make them go away -- physical violence, incantations, argument. Nothing worked. Finally he decided that they were just there to stay, and he invited them to sit down and have some tea, and join him in meditation. And at that, so the story goes, the demons vanished.)

So far I've been having good success with this. Of course, if you have much experience with dieting, you'll know that you're always finding solutions like this. They work for awhile and then suddenly they don't anymore. I just hope I'm mindful enough to watch what's really happening, when this stops working.

*Except my morning eggs. If it's a choice between death and my morning eggs, well -- come, seeling death! But actually eggs aren't that bad in the saturated-fat department; they just got a bad name because of the superstition that dietary cholesterol converts directly to blood cholesterol.

And Rain

A dark, dark morning, rain pelting down, thunder grumbling overhead. Each car on the freeway kicking up its own wake of spray, the water weeping off the windshield in sheets, headlights glowing yellow through the mist.

I love this rain. I want to wallow in it, strip off my clothes and roll in the muddy grass, plunge my face into the rushing gutters. Cold, clean, silvery rain against the slate and steel sky, against the dark ragged firs. This is home, this drenched, shadowed, gleaming world.

So come kiss me, sweet-and-fifty. Youth's a stuff that won't endure, but rain's a stuff that will.

Wedding Song

Let us not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. The love that can be named
Is not the true Love; the way that can be altered,
Alteration found, is not the Way.

Oh no! It is an ever-fixed mark
Upon a burning page; it is not time's fool,
Love is the boundary of Heaven and Earth,
Darkness of darkness, beginning of an end;

Even to the edge of doom, she scatters
A richer darkness, a welling redness, a fever
In the blood. What we do not admit, she marries,
Without impediments and without a name.

Inside, Outside

Really foul-smelling vomit, the kind you get from an empty stomach, yellowy-cream-colored and lightly curded. Some of those Pokemon cards were beyond redemption. His boots were splashed, but just barely -- given the clutter of his room, he managed to land an awful lot of it on the bare floor. We went through a whole roll of paper towels, sopping it up, while he shuddered and coughed in the shower. Round two for him, as it's been for most of us -- we have at least two viruses haunting the house.

2:00 am. Martha has just headed back to bed, ominously carrying a pot. Of course it's difficult to do this kind of cleanup without feeling nauseous. I don't feel grand myself.

Now Alan's on the couch. I think he's just fallen asleep -- he's put his gameboy aside, and he's lying still, anyway. He trailed up to bed very early this evening. (Last evening, I guess.) I read him a few pages of James Herriot. Stopped reading, and there was just the quiet breathing. Already asleep.

Class at 9:00 am. A required class on ISO processes. (ISO, for the uninitiated, stands for "International Standards Organization." I am not making this up.) So sleeping would make more sense than blogging. But I've been spending my time at work actually working, and I miss this spinning of filament, filament, filament, as Walt would say. This texture, as Suzanne would say. But suddenly I'm weary. I don't think I have a lot of thread left in the sac. Time to go wandering again through the halls of sleep, light and shadow, door and wall. Turning landscapes, heavy with consequence.

Good night, you moonlight ladies.

Rain

Drove home at twilight over the old steel Hawthorne Bridge, in a pounding rain. I looked half a mile upriver to where the concrete Marquam Bridge, the freeway bridge, soars high over the Willamette. Looked down at where its pale pylons disappeared into the gray water. The water was not empty. Five dragon-boats huddled there, at haphazard angles to each other, like pick-up sticks. Sheltering under the bridge, I suppose, though it couldn't have been much shelter. Their bright colors were almost, but not quite, obscured by the sheets of rain.

The Last Time I Saw You

Doctor Hendin, the dear man, seems to think that I'd be startled by being at risk for death. Or that the risk of death would make me eat differently. He doesn't understand that when I overeat I am trying to die. That's the whole point. Die, shuddering, in french fries and hazelnut chocolate milkshakes. Die, shuddering, in the arms of that girl with the dark eyes. What else?

The idea that death is a critical turning point is the real escapist fantasy of our people. There is always a way out, we tell ourselves, and we hug that fantasy close. It's a fantasy in any case. If you're still there after you die, you will be somewhere, but not out. Not free of conditions and obligations. And if you're not still there, you're not free. You're just not there.

No. If we're ever going to be free, we're already free. And conversely, of course, if we're not free now, we never will be.

Light bleeds through the tall windows. Wavering shadows. A tremble of movement outside.

The truth is, that we're always still there. After the milkshake, after the dark-eyed girl. Dream follows waking; waking follows dream. The light comes and goes. What makes us think it will ever be otherwise?

Go out, walk to the edge of the trees, and listen. With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain. The dark fir branches heave restlessly; the needles flicker and gleam. A spray of rain blows up against my face.

I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

What it means to sleep. To make the crossing. Often, falling asleep, I become aware that I'm falling. I think -- I could stop myself. Last chance. But I turn from the waking world, cross willingly into other worlds. Because when I'm already in the crossing, I can see both ways, and forward is no darker, no narrower, than back. I go on down the corridor. I don't know what happens then. I don't know now, I mean. Even the dreams that we sometimes remember, I think, are the shallow-water dreams. The deep-sea ones never come to light. Who do I know, there? Where do we go together?

The last time I saw you, you stopped at the crossing, and kissed my cheek. I didn't know it was a farewell until I looked back, and saw that you and the corridor were gone.

Misguided, to go looking for the little death of the body, as if that would change anything. The waking mind dies every night. That's one place to go looking.

Long ago there was a man who asked his students to pray that he would be reborn in the hell realms. So much suffering there to allay. He walks in that huge darkness, now, carrying a little light. I often wonder about the students who reluctantly, fearfully, sent him there. They can't wish him back, without wishing him less compassionate. Do they wish they had been brave enough to follow? Do they glimpse him, at crossings, and hesitate for that fatal moment, between longing and fear, as the way closes? A tiny point of light, in all that dark.

Untitled

One of my two favorite professors at Evergreen was David Marr. I took his courses even though what he taught was American Studies, and I'm not ordinarily very interested in American thought or letters. But David always challenged us -- he was constitutionally incapable of following a party line, any party line. He made us think hard about our origins and presuppositions. His holy mission was to rout out sloppy writing and sloppy thinking. He welcomed dissent -- one of the few people I've known who really did. He was much happier with forceful disagreement than with vague agreement. In a notably scruffy and shaggy faculty, he was always trim and precise. Short-haired, clean-shaven, neatly dressed, almost prim: in that haven of bearded radicals, his bare face glowed with an unearthly radiance.

He came to a party of ours one night, at our shabby one-bedroom duplex. On finding out that Martha and I were natives of Oregon, he declared himself unsurprised. We seemed like Oregonians, he said. In the manner of one of his seminar participants, I immediately demanded details and evidence. What were Oregonians like?

A familiar pause, while his eyes widened behind their glasses and he consulted some inner oracle. Then he pronounced: "They don't take shit offa nobody."

*

Why does Marr come to mind now? Partly because it was from him that I learned to question American individualism. He was an unabashed Socialist, of an un-trendy political sort. He prefigured a lot of the ideas about family that have since been taken up, in a weak eviscerated way, by neo-cons. Almost any social structure that stood in the way of Capitialism was okay by him. To him, individualism was the ideology by which Capitalism divided and separated us, leaving us by turns hoodwinked consumers and dependent, servile wage-earners -- in either case fragmented, alone, and disempowered, thinking we were pursuing our individual happiness while collectively we were being backed into a smaller and smaller life. We worked longer hours, and a whispering media always urged us to capitulate to the little desires of flesh and vanity, while the larger desires for freedom and meaning withered.

*

To me, getting backed into a purely private spiritual life is letting Capitalism have its way with me. Churches, like families, like enduring friendships, are bastions of non-Capitalist association, places where the rules of Capital are held at bay. They're the places where we say no. No, everything is not for sale. No, I am not, ultimately, a commodity. Some things are not on the market. By the rules of Capitalism, one should "trade-up" when one has a better market position. Get a better house, a younger wife, a classier friend, a church with better connections. And you see people doing that, sometimes. But fewer than you might fear, given the enormous current setting in that way.

I love, about my sangha, that a man like Michael has authority and influence over people who make five times as much money as he does. That people simply give money to the sangha or to the retreat project, with no expectation of ever profiting from them. To me every inch of retreat-land ground, every minute of worship at the urban center, is another thumb of the nose at Capitalism. Every practice-question raised in a public space is an assertion that the life of the spirit is something we have in common, something that connects us, something we do together in public. Capitalism hates that. It wants us to consume our individually-packaged spiritual commodities in private, convinced that we're all following our unique absolute freedom.

*

Now, this does not mean that I think everybody can or should be "churched." People repeatedly take me to mean that. I'm not sure why -- I'm sure I'm saying something that can be construed that way, but I don't know what. There are plenty of people who simply don't live within reach of any church that they could be a part of. And there are some people whose spiritual lives are at once very intense and very fragile, for whom a group would simply be disaster. The last thing those people should do is "hold their nose and go to church," or deliberately put themselves in the way of ruining their practice. Our first spiritual responsibility, always, is to ourselves.

But it's not our only spiritual responsibility. Every life should have in it some spiritual service, some opening to the spiritual life of others. It doesn't have to be sitting in a row of pews or a line of zafus. It can be writing a blog (i'm thinking of Paula's "transcendental etudes," here.) It can be making a space for reverence in your child's life. It can even be simply holding ourselves open to the religious aspirations of others, making an effort to believe in their reality and validity, without ever saying or doing a thing in "the real world."

There's nothing wrong, in fact there's a great deal right, with a private spiritual practice. But it's a mistake to hold it as something we do only for ourselves.

Wondering Again

I don't know what she wanted, though it comes in whispers through the half-light of forgotten attics. A father. A teacher. A troupe to dance with.

All good. Can be. Could be.

But each has opposites. A child. A student. A troupe to break with.

No church that's already there will do you much good. It's the church you would make by being there that serves.

As Andi goes in one door, and Paula goes out another, I wonder, again.

There were times when Kagyu Changchub Choling was the loneliest place in the world for me. Months when my heart broke every Sunday night, drawn by the will o' the wisp of community out into the cold, nauseating marshes of my own inability, my own unwillingness, my own unfitness. My aloneness.

It's woven through me now, for good and ill. It might well the last place that ever takes root in me.

I make my three prostrations; my forehead touches the bare wood. I speak hesitantly and unclearly. I light the lamps. Wipe my hands on my jeans. Outside, the shouts of people playing basketball on the street, the knocking of the ball on the pavement. A blare of radio from a passing car. Birdsong.

"Until the summit of enlightenment is reached I and all beings go for refuge . . ." I intone. It's ugly. Unnatural and formal without being beautful. The Tibetans chant these verses beautifully in their tonal language -- we drag along in a monotone that doesn't even scan. Someday some Westerner will make it poetry and find a way to make it beautiful. For now it's only beautiful for what it says, and who says it. There's always somebody bulling their way through it discordantly, and somebody who manages to sing it. ". . . to the Buddha, the Dharma, and to the supreme assembly of the Sangha . . ."

The three Jewels of Refuge. And then the Bodhicitta prayer; ". . . may I realize Buddhahood, in order to help all sentient beings."

It is something, to hear a roomful of people say those words. No, we don't mean them, of course we don't. But we aspire to mean them. & where else could it start?