The End of Summer

The path to Bridal Veil Falls has been closed for months. Quietly reopened again, so that even though it's one of the falls that are closer than Multnomah, and it was a hot August sunday, there weren't many people there.

Bridal Veil is unique among the Gorge waterfalls in that the trail to the falls goes down, not up; the falls is actually below the highway. We went slowly, on account of Martha's knee; on some of the steeper patches she walked backwards, a trick I learned when my own knee was dodgy. What makes going downhill so hard on knees is that going forwards you come down hard on your uncushioned heel; if you turn around you can come down gently on your toes. Of course, you also can't see where you're going.

Across a little bridge. A miniature promontory stands out into the splash pool. Beyond that is a little protected cove. The sun can't get to it. Cool even on this hot day. A mist of spray wafting over. Dark wet basalt walls on either side. Martha negotiated the climb down, took off her shoes, and soaked her knee in the cold water. Beside her, a couple feet away, was a large frog, glowing green and gold. For a long long time it didn't move at all. We all got to take a good look at it. Eventually it got a little worried, or remembered that this was a frog life, and he was supposed to watch out for predators, and he scuttle-hopped away to disappear into a crevice in the rocks.

Up above, the sun poured green through the thick leaf-canopy. The white falls -- it's really a skitters, not a falls, hence the whiteness of the Veil -- played endlessly, and the pitch black water was lit weirdly and beautifully, at the tips of its little waves, by the green and yellow glints reflected from the shining leaves -- the same color scheme as the frog, and as striking against the black background.

As we usually do at a falls, we didn't talk much. We wandered about, or found rocks to sit on, or climbed up the little headland. There was really only one way to climb, and the handholds were smooth, and gleamed with the oil of thousands of human hands.

On the way back we talked about camping. But we all knew that this, really, was the end of summer. The poison oak was already the red of raw salmon, and since there wasn't much snowmelt left to feed the creeks, the falls were small and quiet.

Visit

He came in bundled up, drowning in a huge mound of ratty brown knit scarf, bulky sweaters stuffed into an overcoat like sausage into a sausage-skin, a hat covered with a hood, thick glasses. Mild watery blue eyes, magnified, gazed at me more in sorrow than in anger. "I think we need to talk," he said.

Oh, Lord. "Look," I said, "I know what you're going to say, and..."

"No you don't. No you don't. This is why people don't talk to me, they imagine they know what I'm going to say. They don't."

"Okay, I don't," I agreed. Anything for a quiet life. "But still, you're wasting your time."

He was unwinding his scarf, which now enveloped his head, and fell in loops like a boa. Or perhaps more like a boa constrictor. A muffled "Hmmph!" sounded from under there. "I'm wasting my time? Don't be ridiculous. Time is tricky to work with, I'll give you that, but I never waste it." His head emerged from the coils of yarn, his hood fell off, and he swept his knit cap off his head. His hair stood up in tufts.

"Look," he said, "I'm not trying to make you give up anything, okay? You're thinking of some other guy."

"I know what the rules say. And everyone says the same thing. So I'm out. Not in the game any more. You can concentrate on your other clients."

"Doesn't work that way, and you know it. This isn't an optional relationship, not for either of us. You think I answered an ad, to get this gig? 'Troubled universe needs firm, loving God, infinite compassion, omnipotence a plus.' That how you think it works?"

I was starting to get irritated. "How do I know? I'm not even a theist. What are you hanging around me for? Tons of people believe in you. Go talk to them! They need to hear from you, believe me. They get up to all kinds of screwy stuff when they're on their own."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone wants to talk about other people. This is about you, bucko. Don't you worry about other people. I'm on it. The point is... you listening?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm listening," I grumbled.

"The point is, you got to meditate."

He folded his arms and pursed his lips.

"I have to meditate? That's all?"

"That's what I said! That's what I come for! You want it on stone tablets? I'm supposed set a bush on fire and crouch behind it and talk in a big voice, is that it? Jesus." He started winding himself up again.

"Well, but wait, wait just a minute. Do you mean like shamatha, vipassana, ngondro? What are we talking about here?"

"'Give us a sign! Give us a sign!' they always say," he muttered. "And you show up and give a perfectly good message, and then what? It's not good enough." He pointed a finger at me. "I don't give a damn what practice you do. It's all the same to me. I sent Penny, sometimes you listen to her, but this time I could see it was no use, I had to come myself. Meditate. That's it. That's the message. Don't make it complicated."

"Hey, but wait just a -- that's not fair, you could at least --"

But he was out the door.

Delight

I am so grateful.

Only Joy

That's all. After lying awake for hours, we went out and sat in lawn chairs, and talked quietly in the finally-cool night air, in our pyjamas. Vega cold and blue and beautiful through the branches of the apple tree. Three pairs of racoon eyes glowing in a flashlight beam. A ghost in the kitchen, in a white dress, when we came back inside. Turned out to be Tori.

So much grief and fear and pain. I don't believe in any of it. I only believe in the joy. But I have no language to explain that. And so many dead, so many lost, it's true. And soon enough we'll spin off into that distance too, and other people will have to adjust to the discomforts and dislocations of our disappearance. They'll get over it.

We speak of radical hospitality, of radical inclusion. But of course it's trickier than that. It would be a fairly simple matter if people only wanted to be invited. But of course, they want to be invited on their own terms. And that -- that we can't do for them, even if we would.

The slow wheel of heaven over our heads, the summer stars sinking in the west.

Changing a Lightbulb

I trotted downstairs to the basement, where we keep our stationary bicycle. For the past few months I've been putting in "seven miles" -- so it assures me, I suspect it's more like four -- every other day on this contraption, which we refer to as "the stuck bike."

But to put in seven miles on the stuck bike you need to be able to see its odometer. At the bottom of the stairs I flicked on the light for that side of the basement. Nothing happened.

I hesitated. Could I see the odometer by the light of the dim narrow window? I took a look. Not a chance. Could I track by counting my "steps"? I'd taken to counting lately. 140 regular steps, 70 faster, 105 regular, that made a mile. I could count it out. But could I keep track of the number of miles at the same time? On my fingers, perhaps?

The watchman I've posted in my mind stirred uneasily. "Hey, boss?" he said. "Take a look at this. I don't think it's quite right."

Reluctantly I brought my attention to it. Oh. Yeah. There is another way to handle problems like this. And the place we keep new lightbulbs is in the basement, five paces away from where I was standing, in fact.

With an effort of will I made myself do what most of you would have done without thinking. I changed the lightbulb. And it occurred to me, as I did so, that for two days, since we got back from the beach, I've been working around the fact that the light in the bathroom has been burned out, without it ever once having occurred to me that I might seize the initiative and change the lightbulb there.

Such is the strength of my habit of passivity. And of my children's. All initiative in our family is delegated to Martha, a burden she staggers under -- but also relinquishes reluctantly. My automatic response to a difficulty is to change, not my circumstances, but myself. Which has its upside of course. I'm temperamentally less easily fooled by the blandishments and threats of Samsara than many people; I'm not always imagining that a million dollars or a newer car will give me a new life. But it has also, obviously, a downside. I spend a lot of time in the dark, concocting workarounds.

The habit has to be undone, piece by piece. I have to notice when I'm being pathologically passive, and I have to respond differently. It is not a glorious task, it's not even a dignified one, but it's the work of my life, at the moment.

The joke is maybe so old that some of you don't know it:

How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?

-- Only one, but the lightbulb has to really want to change.

Fluency

I hold a spoonful of coffee, light brown, trembling. A tiny line of light where the sky reflects from its convexity. All the answers are trembling there.

Well. I put the spoon in my mouth. Bitterness runs over the sides of my tongue. Warmth soaks through the skin of my palate, and into the bone above it. My teeth answer to the heat, waking into the world. Morning. Maybe there's nothing to be learned.

Twin threads of sadness and joy are tracing their way along my veins. Melancholy and sanguine humors. Medieval European medicine has always made immediate sense to me. Grief and happiness move through the body not like winds, as the Chinese have it, and certainly not like electricity, as modern scientists believe. They seep, suffuse, saturate, spurt. They are liquids. A trickle of tears. A small translucent fountain of seed.

I wash my hands in the clean water of the Bull Run River. It's nothing but fluids, bitter or salt, sweet or sour. Running into our bodies and out of them. I cup my hands and the water overflows my fingers. So many stories we tell, and believe. Don't trust anything but your hands, that's my advice. If your hands don't understand it, it doesn't make sense, no matter how many words affirm it.

When we arrived at the Coast there was a disquieting brown cast to the ocean, as though flakes of old bronze were floating under the surface. Whether that had anything to do with the dead zones up north, I can't say -- by the end of the week the sea was green and gray again, laced with white.

I picked up a shard of mussel-shell, and rinsed the sand off it in the little creek that wanders down the beach. Like the bowl of a spoon; inside, where the mussel had been weeping, was an opalescent film. I turned it towards the light. The colors shifted, veils of lavender and violet, hints of green and blue. Over all the silver gleam, cloudlight and seashine.

I understand why people have asked questions of shells and tea-dregs. Ossified fluids, liquids that have stopped running long enough to form an answer. That I might hold in my hand.

But not really. What remains is beauty, not answers.

Back from the Beach

It's still there. So are the whales.

Gone to see the Whales

I'm probably un-netted for the next week or so while we make our annual pilgrimage to Otter Rock.

Five Threads

In October I'll begin taking massage classes. One evening class at a time.

1) This is what I have always wanted to do. This is my vocation. This is my calling and when I'm doing it my life will be wonderful.

2) I'm just excited because I've always loved taking classes. In the event I'll want to do massage no more than I wanted to teach college or program computers.

3) The external circumstances are irrelevant. The problem is not what my work is, my problem is my relationship to it. What I really need to do is meditate, and fix the problem where it actually is. (Hospital patients fretting to change their beds, and all that.)

4) I'm excited because I can communicate by touch, as I can by writing, as I usually feel I can't in speech. What I really ought to do is learn to speak, so I can communicate as other people do.

5) Always, always, I have waited overlong to change my circumstances. I have tried to accomplish over years, by sheer force of will, or by the cultivation of clearer perception, what a change of circumstances would have done overnight. I should have done this years ago.

Hospital

Across from me, Martha dozes in a recliner. To her right Alan is sleeping, his head on the hand that has the monitor connectors taped to it. From the other hand the IV tube snakes away up to the clear bag of steroids and antibiotics and painkiller.

He's okay. What we thought was strep was in fact a nasty tonsil abscess. A couple hours ago the ENT doctor lanced it, and after a period of spitting out blood and pus and looking miserable, he was looking a little more cheerful and asking when we could go home. And not long after that he fell asleep. Martha and I went out to grab some food. Came back, and he was still asleep. So now we're just waiting to see how he feel when he wakes up -- good enough to come home, or should he stay the night?

The setting sun filters through the blinds. It's very peaceful here. I've never been in a hospital where it was peaceful, before. Maybe it's because we're in the pediatric wing, for reasons I don't fully understand -- Alan is sixteen and I'm guessing the the only six-foot patient in this wing. But anyway, it doesn't have the constant irritating sounds, the insistent ringing of bells and beeps and pagings that generally make hospitals hellish. I've never quite understood the theory behind making sure that people can't rest in hospitals, though it seems to be widely accepted. But anyway, here, and now, it's actually pretty quiet. The high-pitched almost-whistle of the air conditioning. The occasional fussing of a baby. Alan's barely-audible snoring.

Update: Alan's home today and much improved. Thanks for all your kind words!

Watermark

It is with amusement -- I'm sitting here grinning -- that I consider how just now, at the nadir of my confidence in Buddhist institutions and in some of its claims, I have been busily preaching the Dharma in several unfortunate people's comment-threads. Who am I hoping to convince? Three guesses.

Well. The rose blossoms across the sky.

I say, I know this, or I know that, but I don't. There's the hugeness of the sky, and the sweetness of the rose, and beyond that, who cares? Not me.

Ring the bell once, twice, three times. Bow to the Buddha, bow to your own awakened mind. Suppose you are looking at the blue sky through a fragment of blue glass. And someone says: which blue are you looking at?

You remember, from the high places, you look down on the western sea, at about five o'clock? And it's nothing but shimmering. Like that. And you realize that the sea isn't made of water at all -- what a ridiculous error! -- it's actually made of light, and the light is made of metal. Steel, maybe.

And then when the sun drops over the horizon you forget all this. You look at the gray heaving sea, and you say -- oh yes, how foolish! the sea isn't made of water; it's made of fog. And the fog is made of dirty rags. Everyone knows that.

Knell of the Magi

Flames swirl, and servants
Lay three shrouds in the coals;
A shivering brotherhood
Shudders and swells in the shoals.

Sweet burning, the purling
Extravagance of light;
Endwarped cedarwood,
Curling and turning to white.

At play in the plunge of fire,
In the glowing shallows of hell,
Still longing to be understood,
Each pulls at the tongue of a bell.

Some Great Sudden Hest

And in thy face strange motions have appeared,
Such as we see when men restrain their breath
On some great sudden hest.

All of Oregon seems to be laboring under some great sudden hest, this weekend: a damp hundred-degree heat and a gray haze; a breathless restraint, a sullen crawling yellowish heaven. What treason the sky may be contemplating, I can't say, but its dependents must fret until they know.

My mood is unsuited to this oppression. I, for once, am breathing freely. I've made a rash decision and scrambled on board a ship bound for God knows where; but now that we're fairly underway, and land is disappearing astern, there's no point in regret, and no way to second-guess my decision even if I wanted to. Obeying a great sudden hest of quite a different sort.

Among my rash acts has been applying to massage school, to begin evening classes in the Fall. I have an interview there Thursday evening. Suddenly all sorts of unthinkable things are thinkable. A binding has broken loose, since Montreal, and I am unstuck.

Also unsecured. I've thrown up all my sangha work. I am taking refuge in Samsara; and no doubt Samsara is already thinking of ways to let me down. But at present I feel I simply have to throw a tuft of grass up for the wind to catch, follow it, and take the adventure God sends me.

Campus

A perfect day, sunny but not too hot. I bought a sandwich, which they gave to me in a bag, and then I climbed a grassy embankment, and dodged across the five-lane road. There was a campus here that I'd always meant to visit. I knew they held community college classes; I'd considered brushing up my Spanish here. And there were offices of the University of Oregon System and a couple high-tech training institutes. Well and good. A campus, I thought. I'll sit in the shade, eat my lunch, and watch the students walk by.

There was a banked wall of lawn and then a moat of parking lot -- for which you needed a quarterly pass, I presumed to keep interlopers such as I from just drifting in -- which surrounded the campus on all sides. The lot was more than half full. But there were no students to be seen. Half a dozen very large buildings, inscrutable in their reflective, smoked-glass windows. Evidence of a couple hundred people having arrived, in the form of empty cars. But not a soul in sight.

I walked clear around the campus. In that time I saw exactly four human beings. Outside a job-training office a young woman sat on a bit of lawn, spreading sunblock on her bare legs. Outside a -- what? an industrial arts building? -- a stout young man hesitated, casting anxious surreptitious glances at me. Around by the System offices a tall woman walked briskly, talking into her cell-phone, also glancing sidewise at me, determined not to meet my eyes. And around the back, marked "staff parking" -- the servants' quarters, by the dumpsters -- an anomalous woman in heels and dark elegant suit strode past me, rummaging in her leather bag.

There was a shady bit of lawn. I did sit down and eat my sandwich. But a crawling horror of this place began to prickle around my neck. To walk from a sandwich shop to the campus -- my subversive scheme for visiting the campus even though I wasn't purchasing any education -- involved crossing pristine, never-trodden lawns (presumably soaked in weed-poison, to maintain that unearthly green purity), and then crossing the parking lots to arrive at the first sidewalks. No sidewalks led from the street into the campus. Why would they? Who would do such an outlandish thing as walk into the campus from the road?

I had thought that the place and its parking were designed to keep me out of some inner place, some courtyard where students laughed and played. I could understand this plan, even if I didn't approve of it, and planned to flout it.

But there was no inner place. There was no place at all, here. They were not keeping me out -- there was nothing to keep anyone out of. This was not a creation of over-controlling authority. It was the naturally occurring loneliness of the suburbs. Nobody had to encourage these people to dart from car to classroom, from classroom to car. They did this by instinct. I had pictured questioning, or at least flustering, authority; but I was the one getting flustered.

Back across the banked pristine lawn, the five-lane road, and down the banked pristine lawn on the other side, that walled off the mall parking lot. Into my beat-up van. I drove back to work -- driving in through yet another wall of poisoned grass, and into yet another moat of parking lot. Not a soul. This is how you do it, I thought to myself, not very coherently, as I parked. This is it. This is how you train people to drop bombs on civilians. If they're lonely enough they'll do anything.

A New War

Here, slightly edited, is part of mail I sent today to a friend I've been in some conflict with since the latest fighting began in the Mideast. I copy it here in hopes that it may make my otherwise (I'm afraid) erratic and difficult behavior more intelligible.

I should know by now that when new war starts, I should simply leave cyberspace for a week or two. The hatred is just too much for me, it's so toxic to me, and I start thrashing, and trying to make everbody who comes down on one side see the other side with love and understanding, and it's just stupid, the worst possible time to try to do that. I can't seem to help myself, though. I forget -- since I don't do television and only occasionally do radio or newspapers -- that I'm talking to people with the images fresh in their minds: they're seeing the children bleeding in their parents' arms, and that's what's important: preachy little buddhists are very far away and very unimportant.

Shorts

There's a short short of mine up at Qarrtsiluni, titled the 5th of July. The latest Qarrt topic is turning up some really interesting stuff. Extra credit: devise the plot of the novel that would have as integral parts all of these short shorts.

Black Oaks

Black oaks against an intensely blue sky, their leaves glittering and gleaming. I don't understand how they do that. From this distance you would think that each node of each leaf was inset with a fragment of mirror, catching the sun. Look at a single leaf up close and it's a dull, dark green -- no luster, no shine. How do they shimmer and sparkle like that?

I walked down to look at the brown water of Cedar Mill Creek. The blue-black backs of the swallows shone like tempered metal as they flickered, hunting, under the bridge, under my feet. Directly below, the reflection of the noonday sun was as impossible to look at as his counterpart in the sky. A predatory dragonfly skimmed the water, a hungry blue-green jewel.

Love. Love and hunger, hunger and love: I think of nothing else these days.

All that wanting.
All that wanting.

A fragment of Cyndi Lauper floats through my head:

We think we know what we're doing
We don't know a thing.

Burned by the sun above, and the sun below. A man with thinning hair needs to learn to wear a hat, on a day like this.

On either bank the young thickets of blackberries grow strongly, fiercely, exulting in the light, pushing their iron thorns out above, thrusting their iron roots out below. They mean to keep what they have taken.

Because it's all in the past now
Money changes everything
Money
Money changes everything.

Winter will come here, whether we believe it or not. The gentle rain, the endless shifting silver clouds. The sky will learn softness and mercy. The creek will whisper in a happy undertone to the reeds. The colors will fade to the grays and drabs and tans of my childhood, and the only brilliance will be the young green of soaked grass, the dripping of holly leaves.

Love turns into hunger, and hunger into love. They must contain each other somehow. But turning this dusky matte oak-leaf in my fingers, I can't imagine how.

Hurry

I resolved this morning that today -- just today -- I will not hurry. I'm finding it a queerly difficult vow to follow, and queerly rich to observe. I had not realized how much of my day I hurry, how much, in various ways, I strain to somehow push something faster than it wants to go. It does not, I think, make anything move much faster, but it does cloud and fret and abrade my mind.

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

Is nature more real than the human, and is the body more real than awareness?

Put baldly, both questions are clearly stupid, questions to make a philosophy professor shrug his shoulders impatiently. I am not interested in the correct answers to these questions -- if I thought they were available, I suppose I would be -- but I'm interested in my kneejerk answers to them, which are yes, and yes.

Put the questions a slightly different way: Is nature more important than the human? Is the body more important than awareness?

Or put the questions yet another way: Is the human derived from nature? Is awareness derived from the body?

Again, these are stupid questions. They make assumptions that are false: among them, that these are discrete categories, when they're clearly overlapping. And these questions beg other questions: what is real? Important to whom? And, most important of all: why do you ask?

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

Three baby crows have fallen from their nest above our front yard. Two have come to grief: one hit by a car, one killed by a cat. The third made its way to the back yard -- a dangerous be-catted place. Martha, who always prefers action to waiting, and who learned from the Audobon wildlife people that the handling of baby birds does not, as folk tradition avers, put their parents off them, took the baby crow and put it on the trampoline, and sealed off the entrance: with high netting all around, but open above, it was cat-proof but crow-accessible. A clever solution.

But not one that pleased the mother crow. She was infuriated, diving repeatedly at Martha and screaming at her. Martha couldn't step out of the house without the crow denouncing her in vehement shrieks.

After a day of this, Martha told me, "I think she wants me to put the baby back down in the yard."

I disagreed. I thought she just wanted us to leave the baby alone and stay the hell away.

The next day, after being scolded all morning by a mother crow that refused to eat our Judas dog kibbles, Martha took her life in her hands, acted on her intuition and took the baby off the trampoline and put it in the bushes behind.

The mother crow's fury abated. She complained, of course -- you're not a crow if you don't complain -- but the edge was off it, and that afternoon she came to the back porch for kibbles, meeting Martha's gaze with some embarassment (which crows express by repeatedly wiping their bills against something.) And next day, all was back to normal.

Meeting for Lunch

I took the train into work yesterday. The drive generally takes forty-five minutes; by train it took a little over an hour going in, and an hour and forty-five minutes coming back. Not sure I can face adding an hour to my commute time. Though that does include twenty minutes' walking, which doesn't count as time lost. Still.

Anyway. The interesting thing is how vulnerable I felt, being un-carred. Imperceptibly I've become accustomed to having that metal shell around me when I'm out and about. I've been working in the suburbs for years now, and all my walking and bussing habits have gradually disappeared. I've become car-dependent. It's insidious.

I've speculated before about the attraction of cars having more to do with territory than with convenience. It's a little private space of your own, travelling around with you. The speed at which you travel confers a kind of anonymity. So you're picking your nose at 158th avenue; who will ever know it was you, by the time you get to 182nd? Everything goes away. The world is disposable. But this little lair, with whatever comforts most signify to you, it does accompany you. A room of your own.

Recently, rather than going into the Burgerville to have lunch, I went through its drive-thru, and then stopped in the grocery-store parking lot to eat my hamburger in my car. It is not a pleasant parking lot, of course. There are no pleasant parking lots. It's a field of asphalt with cars parked in it.

Even the interior of Burgerville is a far pleasanter place. What impulse drove me to eat here? Just that it was my own nest, my little six square yards of territory. I had escaped from the public space of cubicle-land. I wanted to be in my own space, however unpromising that space might be. I cranked up my radio, unwrapped my hamburger, and ate.

When I was done I licked my fingers, wiped them, crumpled up the paper bag with the hamburger-wrapping and napkins inside -- with a strong twinge of environmental guilt -- and put the car in reverse. Time to drive back to the office.

For the first time I focused on the car directly facing mine. It wasn't empty. Through the reflections on the windshield I could see a woman, dressed in office casual, hunched in the driver's seat. Her head was bowed over a little cardboard tray of french fries. I could see her tousled brown hair, but not her face. She was plucking the french fries up in bunches, and loading them methodically into an unseen mouth. She didn't look up as I backed my car away from hers.

Maybe I will start taking the train.

Answer to Dweezila, 5

Jean commented, You do realise you have to carry on now? Having got this involved, we need to know the whole story of how you got from there to here. I falter, at that. How did I get here?

I know things that looked like turning-points at the time. I view them with some skepticism. People love to find turning points. Decisive battles. Reigns of great kings. Declarations of rights. History, and personal history especially, is usually considerably more messy and inconclusive than that.

But here's a thing like a turning point. It was summer. I must have been thirteen. I stood in my bare feet on the sidewalk in front of my stepfather's house -- my house. The cement was already hot in the morning sun. Ants hurried erratically past, chasing their shadows.

I said aloud, "I have to get out of here within a year."

Or at least somebody said it in my voice, and I knew it was true. I had to get out.

"She may die. I still have to get out," said the same voice.

My mother's second marriage went bad faster than her first. She had made friends in graduate school, and her friends didn't like her husband -- and as always, she was fatally susceptible to other people's stories; their story was that this was a sensitive woman's unhappy marriage to a boorish alcoholic. It was not, to my mind, particularly true. Mostly what was true was that they -- and she -- were lefty New-Agey idealistic psychology students, and he was a phlegmatic, no-nonsense, Republican engineer. And she knew the way out of a marriage, now, which must have sped things up.

So anyway, after a brief disorienting time of having my mother energetic and happy, we were back to what I knew as real life: slow revolution around a center of brooding despair, an implacable machine for devouring chocolate, gazing blankly at the television soap-operas. The spell of depression was broken from time to time fits of sudden extravagant affection. She would seize me and hug me. I was the apple of my mother's eye. I was cheerful and encouraging, affectionate and sweet. The one unbroken piece of her life. I was not at all sure that she would survive, if I left home. Suicide -- never talked about -- hovered in the corners of the house. I might be abandoning her to die, if I went away. I looked at that and decided to go.

My sister had been away for two years already at a couple different free schools. My brother was sometimes at the house, more often not -- drinking heavily, bussing dishes at a steak house, showing up at random in the early-morning hours on his motorcycle. Sometimes he had his own apartment, sometimes not.

Next year my sister was going back to the New School, in Spokane, one of those free schools. I sounded the idea that I might go too.

I was only thirteen. But I was going to hell in a handbasket. I had always been an A-and-occasional-B student, but in the last two years my grades had plunged to C's and D's. Nearly flunking some classes. And I was starting to get in trouble sometimes. There was not, my mother may have thought, much to lose; it was worth playing a longshot that a radically different environment would straighten me out.

I was in terror -- as I always have been since -- of talking to strangers on the telephone. Then as now I will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid it. My mother eventually agreed that I could go to the New School. But only if I was willing to make the phone call to arrange it.

I made the phone call. Stammered my way through a conversation with the director of the school. I got out.

I was to spend a couple more summers, and one strange twilight year, my sixteenth, living with my mother, back in Eugene, in a big empty house on the heights above the Willamette River. But in my mind I always think of myself as having left home at age thirteen. I left home the moment I decided to let my mother die.

Gazing

Dave reprinted one of my favorite posts of his -- he had forgotten it, he says, but I had not -- which chimes interestingly with the self-portrait project: Looking Ourselves Over. I am apparently, by Apache standards, egregiously a whiteman. Almost everything irritating that whites do, I do to even greater excess (well, except for speaking rapidly and aggressively). Particularly looking long and directly into someone's eyes.

Long ago and far away, when I was in graduate school, I used to have coffee sometimes with a friend, and we'd talk about this and that, gossip about department doings and so on. I'd just drop by the coffeeshop and see if she was there; if she was, I'd sit down and have a cup. It was an easy and rewarding relationship.

One day I sat down, and she was looking bemused. "Just before you got here, the girl at the counter asked me if we were in love," she said. "She said we were always gazing into each other's eyes."

She laughed, and added (with what seemed to me unnecessary emphasis), "I said NO!"

The long night of childrearing descended on me, then, and since I had no social life how much I looked into people's eyes was not an issue. But recently, emerging slowly from my burrow as I have been, it's a matter of interest again. I had lunch with a woman last month, and I thought of my grad school friend, and of the Apaches, so I paid some attention. Sure enough, I was gazing into her eyes. I consciously did a bit less of that, turned my body slightly aside, looked elsewhere. Every time I checked, though, there I was again. Violating the Apache sense of decorum and probably even the Portland one. Gazing. It's not easy to shift such habits. It will take some mindfulness and practice.

I can trace it back. For many years of my life the only relationships I was at all interested in having were love-relationships. I don't think I ever learned the body language of friendship. So I treat everyone as a lover. No wonder I make hetero men uncomfortable. (Why, I wonder, do I not make lesbians uncomfortable? I don't seem to. I'll have to ask.)

I always needed to push. The Apaches have that tagged right. It is aggressive, challenging, to lock onto people's eyes like that. Even -- or maybe I should say especially -- when it's an affectionate gaze. I'm demanding more than my share.

Measure for Measure

... God in my mouth,
As if I did but only chew his name,
And in my heart the strong and swelling evil
Of my conception.

Along with Richard II, it is my favorite: Measure for Measure. It is neither wise nor satisfying. Its end is ludicrous, or horrible; everything holy is trampled on. The Duke of Dark Corners is indeed God as Renaissance England conceived him; righteous, capricious, irresponsible, putting people through agonies for their own unexplained and unexplainable good. Present when he likes and absent when you call on him. Never apologize, never explain. God learned his statecraft from Disraeli.

Death is a fearful thing. There is nothing edifying in this play. To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot. We are reduced to the brute resistance of Barnardine: I'll not consent to die today on any man's persuasion.

Why do I love this horrible play? Because it's Shakespeare at the ragged edges, Shakespeare out of control. There's no play that better reveals the strange vampiric opportunist that drove the Lord Chamberlain's men. It solves nothing. Shakespeare doesn't fall back on the empty grandeur and stagewide desolation with which he brilliantly and dishonestly begs the question in Hamlet and Lear. There's nothing here but the poet, the man who can't stop seeing.

Trees

All night long, the trees have been writhing, quarreling, pushing and shoving, showering down leaves and twigs, pacing back and forth in their narrow lanes between the sidewalks and the streets. They stop me to earnestly explain things in their whispery voices. When I can't understand them they become agitated. They shiver and sway and complain.

I go walking beside them, trying to explain in my turn, but my mouth is all full of a huge, meaty tongue; saliva drips from my mouth, but no words will come out. The trees moan in frustration, fretting the bark of their limbs together. I want to reassure them, but they point at my mouth and shudder. I realize I'm soft and repulsive to them, as a slug might be to us, and that my huge tongue is for them the crowning horror. I want to explain to them -- it's not always like this, I don't know why it's this way, this isn't how people usually are -- but I can't get intelligible words past it, only slaverings and grunts come out, and the trees crowd away from me, muttering in alarm.

At dawn they get quieter, and knowing they will not be awake long, I kneel down in the muddy track -- they've churned the ground all up with their roots -- and I try to draw them pictures in the dirt. They all lean over, shaking their heads. Slowly my tongue shrinks, and their movement dwindles. I make as if to stand up, but I find my knees have take root, tendrils run out from them far under the sidewalk, under the street; there are little trickling waterways down there that they find with delight. Now my tongue is gone. I can only whisper and sway. The talk of the trees is almost intelligible to me now, but even as I understand them their voices die away into a faint murmur. With a sigh I lift up my arms. It's more comfortable that way. As the morning gathers around us, my fingers grow longer, split, grow longer still; and then without warning they burst into leaf.

Only Light

Threading my fingers through your hair. The warmth of your scalp, like sun-warmed metal, glows against my fingertips. Words, words spoken, words written, scatter from this central point, dissolving. They spin slowly away. Even desire stops pulling. There's only light.

Suddenly I'm walking alone in a wide place. The smell and sound of the sea, just out of sight. I'm not sure what door I've gone through. I'm a girl walking in the wind. Not really alone. A hint of the future shimmers somewhere. Also out of sight.

I kiss the corners of your eyes. For a moment everything fits together. The smell of you, the smell of the sea, your breath on my face, the wind off the headland. The taste of salt on my lips.

I climb over the crest, and down below is the endless wrinkled sea, flecked with grains of pollen from the blossoming sun. The wind threads its fingers through my hair. Kiss me. Kiss me, again.

Quilting

The idea is stuck in my head, like a burr in a sock -- the idea making a book out of some of my blog posts. It would be like a quilting project. I have all the made squares; I just need a frame, and to arrange them so that the colors please each other at the edges and the whole thing makes a satisfying pattern.

It does not strike me as a good idea, but that doesn't make it go away. Its first incarnation was the thought that I could make a poetry chapbook. I like some of my poems, now. But I gathered them all together, and there weren't enough good ones to fill a chapbook. Half a dozen, maybe, struck me as good enough to bother with.

Even as I was gathering them, I was thinking, this isn't the right thing to do. Poetry isn't my strong suit. My strong suits are short rhapsodic prose meditations (I loathe the term "prose poem," but I suppose that's probably their proper name) and informal essays on practicing the Dharma. Could those be made into a book? Dubious. One that would sell? That's not dubious at all. Of course such a book wouldn't sell.

But it might be fun to make. It's been interesting just to pull out pieces and think about them as parts of something bigger, to think about juxtapositions, to think about what a frame might look like. I might be far enough distant from the toxic (to me) ambition to "be a writer" to actually have some fun with that sort of thing.

Apple Pathways

He lay face down in the grass, with his black wings swept down close to his sides, like a perching falcon's. Martha turned him over tenderly. His eye glittered, too bright for death. At his throat a single white underfeather curled like a bunch of lace.

Not a mark on him. We buried him in the back yard without much ceremony, murmuring a few om manis. There is always the moment, burying an animal, when you have cover its eyes with dirt. That's always the real moment of death, for me. Doing something you could not conceivably do to a living creature. I do it gently and unhappily.

We don't know which crow this was, of the three or four who visit regularly. The brash one who swooped straight down to the back porch rail to pick up his kibbles? The prudent one who hung back on a branch of the apple tree, waiting to see what happened to the first before commiting himself? The one who complained if we were late, going round from window to window to remind us of our duties? No telling. Maybe he wasn't even one of ours.

Yesterday I went through my blogroll from top to bottom. I don't keep it up well. Some of the blogs are gone altogether. Three have become private, asking me for passwords; I always wonder if I should email their owners and ask, but I think I already know the answer. Then there are the ones that simply stop. Six months, nine months, a year ago. Those are the ones that trouble me. I suppose I should just have a cut-off date, and move them to a second tucked away blogroll. Title it "inactive" or "hiatus" or something. But it feels like that moment of covering those bright, glittering eyes with earth. I keep putting it off.

Last night I got a comment on one of my posts from one Nasra Al Adawi, whom I didn't know:

Your web was listed as Gulnaz's friends .

In tribute to her Please spread the message and please visit my blog to see what I wrote

The tribute is here. It's lovely. I suppose lots of us fell a little in love with Gulnaz. If any of you knows, please let us know.

Mosquito's Song

The night is interminable
And you are far away
Only the mosquito's song
For company.

Finally silence,
And I can hear it --
The echo of longing,
The thin wail of grief.

Answer to Dweezila, 4

My mother likes to tell entertaining stories about me. This is one of her favorites.

I read virtually all the time. I used to walk from class to class, reading. One day I walked into gym class, reading, completely absorbed, forgetting to suit up. The gym teacher said, in some exasperation, "if you want to read, Dale, maybe you should go to the library."

I looked up blankly. "Oh." I said. "Okay." And I turned around and walked off, still reading, to go to the library.

This story, she says, was told to her ruefully by the gym teacher, who was dumbfounded to see me walk out of his class. My innocence in taking him at his word was so patent that he just let me go. He didn't know what else to do.

Probably, like most of the stories my mother tells about me, this one is almost true. I have no clear recollection of this incident. If I ever had one, it would have been buried long ago under the repetitions of my mother's version of it. But my horror of gym class was so deep that I would never have gone into it so defenseless. My sensitivity to sarcasm was so fine that I could never have misunderstood him. If I really did trail off to the library, it would have been with full exultant knowledge of what I had pulled off. This is not a story of innocence; it's actually a story of deep duplicity.

I try very hard not to tell stories about my children. Particularly not droll little stories illustrating their charming foibles. Everyone, I believe passionately, should be allowed to tell the stories of his or her own life. No one else ever really knows what these stories mean.

Answer to Dweezila, 3

I had a set of little blue plastic soldiers, half an inch high. They were supposed to be Foreign Legionairies. Why they were blue, I have no idea. At the time I had not the slightest idea of what the Foreign Legion was, so I saw no reason they shouldn't wear blue clothes, carry blue rifles, and have blue hands and faces.

I had them at the dinner table, that first night in our new house with my new stepfather. I marched them in a circuit around my plate. Set them up in strategic positions on my napkin and silverware. Eventually they spilled onto the plate itself, taking up positions behind green beans, standing sentry over the meatloaf barracks, cautiously climbing the dinner-roll to survey the terrain. I was dimly aware of disappointing the people around me. But I always disappointed the people around me. What was wanted was a good-natured, cheerful, outgoing, mischievous boy. Something in the Tom Sawyer line. A boy with enthusiasm, a boy who made friends, a boy who scorned girls. What was wanted was someone to fill the role of Beaver at the "Leave it to Beaver" dinner table -- brash, impetuous, full of impish ideas; no harm in him.

I was reserved, sullen, and pessimistic. I had no friends. I liked girls. I had no ideas that had to do with actually doing or making anything. My ideas were about how to communicate with alien species. What the consequences of the population explosion would be. Whether infinity admitted of degree. That sort of thing. And there was harm in me. Oh yes, Precious. There was harm in me.

I was intensely visual. As a particularly enterprising legionary scaled my milk glass, and perched uncertainly on the rim, I became enamored of the blue and white. I loved then, as I love still, the intersection of planes and three-dimensional objects. The Legionary slipped and fell into the glass. He floated there, half-submerged, the lines of intersection with the surface making fascinating curves of blue against white. Soon his comrades, a whole lemming Foreign Legion, were dropping into the milk.

"That's it," rumbled my stepfather. I looked up in some surprise. He was standing up. My mother was making half-hearted protests. What was going on?

"He's just trying to see how much he can get away with," said my stepfather, almost kindly. He wasn't especially angry; it was just clear to him that it was time to exert some authority. It took me a few moments to understand what he meant, and when I did I flushed with rage. By that time he had hold of me -- he was a big and very strong man -- and he marched me into my new room, bent me over his knee, and spanked me, hard.

I had been struck exactly once by an adult, before this. One short sharp richly deserved swat. Never this kind of ritual humiliation, deliberate and extended.

When he finally allowed me to stand up, dry-eyed, speechless, and trembling with fury, I said not a word. From that moment till I left his house, I hated him, coldly, implacably, and absolutely. Oh yes. There was harm in me.

Answer to Dweezila, 2

Kids didn't wear backpacks in America in those days. You just carried your books. If you were unpopular, somebody might knock the books out of your hands and into a mud puddle. Dirty water would seep into your algebra book, and soak your homework.

There was a TV show, of excruciating stupidity, called The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Crude Cold War propaganda, but I didn't notice that, of course. What I noticed was the swaggering hero's sidekick. This sidekick was a small, sensitive, reserved Russian defector, played by David MacCallum. I even remember the character's name: Ilya Kuriakin. He wore black turtlenecks. He had no home. He had hopelessly divided loyalties. He carried a black attache case.

Attache cases were fetishes of enormous power, in the years of the Cold War. Do you remember? I talked my mother into buying me one. It wasn't quite the same, somehow. It was plastic. It was too fat -- really it was more a dwarfish suitcase. But at least it was black. I carried my books in it to school, and I'm sure I looked quite ridiculous. It would have served to confirm my dork status, if that had needed any confirmation. I wore black turtlenecks, too. They somehow failed to make my pudgy pink Norwegian face pale, thin, sensitive and slavic like Ilya Kuriakin's, but I persevered.

There were always science fiction books stuffed into this case. I read all the science fiction in my school library. There wasn't much -- science fiction was still marginal in those days. So after school I went to the town library. It had a whole wall-full. I simply started at the A's (Asimov) and read every single one.

Answer to Dweezila

I asked Dweezila where the hell she came from, to write such beautiful harrowing stuff, and she answered with a wonderful letter which explained a lot. But -- I don't know why I didn't see this coming -- she asked me the same question back. I keep writing bits of answers, but nothing holds together. I told her this and she said just do it in bits, then. Why should it hold together? So here's one bit.

Once upon a time, circa 1950, a Midwestern girl went away to college and had sex with a fellow-student, a science nerd there. She had sex with him because science nerds had a faint glamour about them, in the age of Sputnik; and also because he didn't care what anyone thought about him and she thought she would like that. As it turned out she didn't like it as much as she thought she would, but she liked the sex more than she thought she would, which sort of balanced things out and possibly meant they were in love. So, on the quiet, because this was the fifties and not the sixties, they got married.

Then when she went home her parents were distressed at the secret wedding and they convinced her to get married again, to pretend she was getting married for the first time -- a big wedding at the big white congregational church in her home town. Her twice-now husband knew nobody there. There are photos of this wedding. He stands stooped there, forlorn, defeated. All around is a big wedding, with places in it for everyone but him.

They went to California, but they didn't like the cities so they drove north, and eventually they came to Oregon, which they liked. There was the ocean one hundred miles this way and the mountains one hundred miles the other way, and in between an idyllic green valley. In a school administration office in that valley, the man overheard someone say, "I can't for the life of me find a science teacher."

"I teach science," he said.

So he taught highschool science in Pleasant Hill, Oregon. They had three children, neatly spaced at two-and-a-half year intervals. I was the last.

The little house, the sameness, wore on the girl. She wasn't a girl anymore. And all of her specialness seemed to have drained away. She knew now that she didn't actually love this man. But fourteen years went by. She ate a lot of chocolate and became fat. Her life was so small she couldn't stand it. And now it was the sixties, so she started graduate school in psychology, bought a little used car of her own, and filed for divorce.

Thank You

Sage Cohen wrote beautifully, a while back, of the decline of thanks:

Are we really living in an age where the only feedback loops of closure are complaints? How did we get to a place where we have mutually agreed that what's worth mentioning is what's wrong?

Mindful of that, as I left my inexpensive hotel in Montreal, I scrawled a note to leave with my tip, thanking whoever it was who had made up my room. And I meant it. I'd run short of clothes -- not having expected to be drenched with sweat periodically, as I was -- so I'd washed a change of clothes in the sink, twisted them in towels, and then draped them over the shower-curtain rod to finish drying. When I came back to the made-up room they were on hangers, and the shirt that would take longest to dry was cleverly hung on the bed-post in front of the air-conditioner. I was touched. The fact that I was washing my own clothes meant, obviously, that I was a poor prospect for tips. Putting the clothes on hangers, I felt, was one thing, possibly just automatic, but thinking about how to make sure the clothes were dry by dinner-time was quite another thing. Gratuitous kindness.

A little thing, of course. But people do that sort of thing all the time -- gratuitously think their way into what other people will need, do their jobs just a little better than they have to. So often we let the fact that these things occur under the auspices of a financial transaction erase the fact of the human kindness, the real connections, they represent. I remember one morning, chatting with a waitress at breakfast in the early morning, she ruefully recounting rushing to get to work. I said earnestly, "we really appreciate it, you know. You hurrying to wake up fast so the rest of us can wake up slow." She colored up and looked away and said "thank you."* I had a feeling neither she nor anyone else had ever put it in that light. But this was a big part of her life, waking up in a frantic scramble, and this was a big part of my life, reading and writing for an hour before work. I meant it.

The thing I most dislike about Capitalism is its tendency to make these human connections invisible, and hence to progressively weaken them, until "cash," as Thomas Carlyle put it, "is the universal sole nexus between man and man." I'm not particularly interested in getting rid of Capitalism.** All economic systems have their own propensities for exploitation, cruelty, and inhumanity. It seems to me that the 20th Century has demonstrated that in agonizing detail. More important than swapping one system for another is recognizing the faults of the one you've got and trying to mitigate them.

On a large scale, in our case, that means recognizing how much of our prosperity derives from poverty and cruelty elsewhere (or here, for that matter.) On a small scale, it means preferring whatever is small and human-scale and face-to-face to whatever is huge and mass-produced and anonymous. And recognizing the small kindnesses without which our lives, all of them, even here in the wealthy first world, would be hell.


* No, I don't think she was pissed off (a legit response, to be sure.) I think she was pleased.

** Anymore. I was passionately interested in it, thirty years ago.

A High Place

A high place in a dry country. No ghosts live here. No one has ever come here, even to die. Below the mesa, the marbled hills come to a sudden stop, like the toes of lions on a plinth. A pale violet sky kisses into lilac, and then dissolves into ice-blue above the ridge, in this place that has never seen violets or lilacs, and never will.

I say I come here to think, but of course I do what people always do when they set out to think. I remember, and I imagine.

A tumble of rapid images. I could have done this, and I could have done that. I should have known, I should have ignored -- and on it goes, the thin sad piping of a thread of mind that can't realize its irrelevence. If this were to be solved by thinking (remembering, imagining) it would have been solved long ago.

No devil comes to tempt me. No angel brings me tidings.

I crouch and find three stones to set together. A fourth to rest on top. A monument to -- what? You, I suppose.

Is there even anything to solve? To look for a solution is to assume so many things. To assume a problem. To assume progression. To assume agency. Now, now I really am thinking, and I think -- all those assumptions are wrong.

There are none of those things. There is nothing but the burning, nothing but the welding torch of love.

Per-Capita Happiness

I saw lots of children in Montreal. Groups of them trailing through the Museum of Contemporary Art; groups of them in the Parc Lafontaine. But I never heard a single child wailing or whining. No children threatening or screaming. None pummeling their mothers or each other.

I do not of course imagine that children in Montreal never do these things. We're talking about another city, not another species.

I said something like this to Beth, and she said simply, "They're happy children."

I think of all the measures of prosperity and well-being and quality of life that you read in the papers. Canada of course tends to come out on the top of those, as well. But I think you could replace them all with a simple scale based on what the children sound like.

At the Edge of Things

Born into a different light
There is a brightness trembling at the edge of things
The world may burst into flame
At any time.

I kiss your shoulders, your fingers;
Nothing before or after
Matters.

Montreal

Desire
Destroys a man

Twice: once
In the wanting,

Then again
In the not letting go.

-- Ben Zen

So. This morning's idle tears done with, I walked a bit in Montreal, singing softly, as I have a habit of doing, when I walk.

I will buy you a garden
Where your flowers can bloom
I will buy you a new car
Perfect shiny and new
I will buy you that big house
Way up in the West Hills

And now I'm sitting by the pond in Parc Lafontaine. Today will be a day of meditation and prayer -- badly needed -- and tomorrow very early I fly back to Oregon.

But first I will have breakfast with Beth, Dave, Tom (the front man for Ben Zen), and the Sylph. This is a beautiful city, and I will miss it. But I'm ready to be home.

Mole in the Sun

Blinking in the light, joyful and frightened. Wayfarers all.

Over Montana

Over Montana, I reckon. As always when I fly I remember too late that I want to have a map with me. A wide swash of flat valley-land between two mountain ranges, and I don't have the faintest idea what the mountains were, or what the valley might be. The mountains go on forever, now.

We took off southwest, St Helens out my (righthand) window. Wheeled around over the Columbia, while Hood floated slowly across my field of vision. Then up throught the clouds, and when we came out we were over the Oregon desert.

Mole blinking in the sunlight. It's been a long time, a long time since I remember the world getting wider, more spacious. For almost twenty years it's been narrowing, closing down to just family and work and compulsion. Then I guess seven or eight years ago, the Dharma began opening up space inside -- where it counts, of course -- but outside still the narrow round, work I don't particularly care about, the daily routines of "our little family," as we always refer to the four of us. We've had something of a fortress mentality, really.

So day before yesterday I had lunch with E., and it felt so different. Like when I was in grad school. Everything interesting. Except better, because I don't have anything to prove now. I feel marvellously agenda-less. I'm done with all that. I'm not trying to make anything happen. It's like taking off a seventy-pound backpack after a day's hike; I feel I could float into the air. It's been a long time in the making.

This is not what the Dharma is for, of course. It's the step that means the most to me right now -- it's a measure of freedom from things that have oppressed me all my life, all of this life. But really it's just an incidental side-effect. A minor increment. It feels huge, though. What would real freedom feel like? I can't even begin to imagine.

That Hippie Free School, Again

I see them as if through a tiny window, a teenage boy writing a teenage girl's name in red paint on the wall, the paint trickling down like blood. It can be nothing, in those days, but a reference to the Manson cult murders. The other teenagers in the house profess to think it's funny. What did the adults think? No one knows. The question arises -- as so often, thinking back -- where the hell are the adults? The ruling fiction is that the teenagers are adults. They'll work it out. And they do, of course. They work it out. It costs some of them more than it costs others. They grow up, in some ways, fast. They will take less for granted, all their lives, than those who grew up under authority. They don't assume that anyone else will take care of things, that somebody somewhere has it all under control. It's not under control. That's a lesson worth paying for.

Most of us remember the place with love. Some with intense nostalgia. I and at least one other student I know remain firmly convinced that it saved our lives. We were headed for jail or for one of any number of addictions -- pick one! -- and we found community, of a sort, that made us think a rapprochement with our species might be possible. A shared alienation. It was okay to be smart here, to love art or poetry or philosophy or difficult music -- if you didn't grow up in small-town America you may not understand just how not-okay those things can be. It was okay to think hard about politics, or religion. It was okay to be gay here; in 1970, that counted for a lot. Saved some lives right there. There was a shared body of knowledge about drugs that probably also saved some lives, given that no force on Earth was going to stop these kids from getting stoned repeatedly.

Still, as I read the posts on the Yahoo group, thirty years down the road, I am struck more forcibly by the cost, than by anything else. And what it says about the world these kids were growing up in, that this was a better place than where they came from. The intense, unrelenting sexual pressure on the girls. The violent outbursts of temper. The bad acid trips. The voyages -- scruffy teenagers hitchhiking a thousand miles on a whim, going to Canada, to Mexico, anywhere. You'd get into a car and realize the driver was dead drunk. It's an interesting problem: how do you get out of the car, now, alive? Life skills. You bet.

The leitmotif to me is loneliness. This, I'm sure, isn't the school's fault. Teenagers are all, so far as I can tell, intensely lonely. It goes with the territory. I want to go back and help these kids -- or help the kids, no different from them, right down the street, in 2006 -- or for that matter, the kids playing D & D in my living room -- and I realize, I don't know how. There is no general answer, of course. There's only attending to this child, here, now. They need so much kindness and encouragement, and mostly they don't make it easy to give it to them -- it takes a light touch and a willingness to fail. Sometimes I rise to it and sometimes I don't.

This Brave Bare World

A few days ago, I wrote, of poet Elizabeth Domike:

'Sometime there's going to be a long appreciation of her recent chapbook, "Disenchantment," here. I have to stop being staggered by it, though, which may not happen soon.'

I have since realized that in fact it's not going to happen ever, so I better just get on with it. And my appreciation isn't very long, after all. But herewith, what I scribbled at lunch, today --

The fifteen poems of "Disenchantment" are independent, but together they form a sustained elegy, a celebration of a heterogeny of lost or broken things. Of a mass at Notre Dame:

ind All I ever wanted was to feel
indThe filtered light
indThrough those particular windows
indRain on my upturned face

Of a disastrous connection:

indMy little sociopath. Trouble
indFrom the day you were born.
indAt least that's what your dad said
indwhen he set your crib on fire.

indHe was drunk of course and it was
indan accident, the glass and the cigarette
indslipped from his shaking hand
indYou were tough and moved fast,

indEven then.

There is no narrative here. No movement in time, no-here-to-there -- she is losing these things even as she has them. Loving and losing become the same thing, simultaneous, coterminous. These poems inhabit a world in which "was it worth it?" is a question that makes no sense. There is no before and after.

indWhen the boatman comes I wonder
indif he will carry me in his broad arms down
indthe cracked marble steps,
indor if my body will fall away,
indand I will drift lightly on the wind.

What's extraordinary in this poetry is the quality of attention, the painfully intense watching and listening. The opening lines of maybe the best poem, "In Spite of All the Dreaming" might be describing the world the poems lead us into:

inEverything is visible in this brave bare world
inBirds' nests sit high and shine with frost.

Reunion

The curtain stirs. Six burnt matches lie in the bleak ashtray, patterned on the cold glass, the petroglyph of an ancient, unintelligible people -- us, thirty years ago. Us, last night.

When you were seventeen your hair fell across the scimitar curve of your jaw, and I grieved to watch your fingers sift leaf into the papers and twist them closed. You smelled of vanilla and sulfer, cinnamon and tobacco.

Last night you said, "how could we have wasted all that time?"

It would not have been kind to answer, "we are still wasting all that time."

Praying a Second-Hand Grief

All the symptoms are there; the sleeplessness, the self-conscious awkwardness, the amorphous sense of betrayal, the longing to go home and the conviction that there is no home to return to. Places in the house that I dare not go. It's too hard.

It's not my grief. I have no right to it. But it's settled in with me, even so. "Om mani padme hum," I mutter, over and over, the way we do in Chenrezig practice. Then, in many voices, it's like the murmur of bees. Now, alone in an empty house, it's a nonsense phrase in a foreign language, somebody else's nursery rhyme.

Behold! the jewel in the lotus. "Behold," who says "behold," anymore? "Lo" is even worse. Translating Beowulf, the very first word is a crux: how do you translate the one-word sentence "Hwaet!"? People say "Behold!" "Hail!" "Lo!" "Listen!" "Hark!" -- even, in desperation, the lineal etymological descendent, "What!" Seamus Heaney took the bull by the horns, dropped the exclamation point, and at least said something that someone who speaks Modern English might say: "So." Take a leaf from him. So. The jewel in the lotus. So. The jewel in the lotus. So. The jewel in the lotus.

What jewel, what lotus? Oh, I know, the translation is a red herring. It's a mantra, not a motto. Each syllable, they say, purifies one of the six realms of samsaric existence. Nevertheless, I can't help forming it into a sentence, and it becomes a more sardonic one, with each repetition. So. The jewel in the lotus. You think so, huh? So. The jewel in the lotus. You think so, huh?

Men ne cunnon
secgan to sothe
sele-raedende
haeleth under heofonum
hwa thaem hlaeste onfeng.

Men do not know,
truth to tell --
talkers in the hall,
heroes under heaven --
who received that cargo.

Training helps. I don't fight with it. I just patiently release it. Like lifting a kitten off my lap, gently freeing its claws from my jeans. Give anything conceptual free rein, and eventually it wanders off.

You know the story, of the learned abbot who heard of a man who lived alone on an island and did nothing but recite om mani padme hum, over and over. An ignorant man, nothing to learn from him, but still it was interesting, so the abbot rowed a boat over to the island. When he found the hermit it turned out, disappointingly, that he wasn't even pronouncing the mantra correctly. The abbot taught the old hermit how it should be said -- at least he could practice it correctly for the few remaining years of his life! And he was rowing back across the lake, when a voice interrupted his thoughts.

"Please, sir," said the hermit, walking on the water alongside the boat, "how was the mantra supposed to go, again? I want to be sure to get it right."

You don't have to get it right. You just have to want to get it right.

It's okay to pray the wrong way, in the wrong measure, at the wrong time, for the wrong person. It's okay to suffer a grief that isn't my own, a grief well-tainted with jealousy. Chenrezig has a thousand arms. He's very good at sorting and arranging. Every prayer will get to its destination. Our job is just to keep on praying, and to keep on trying to get it right. "Just do the practice, and the meaning will reveal itself." Not to do it until we're sure we will do it right can only mean not to do it at all.

Portrait

I dreamed of you again last night. I explored your face with my fingertips, like a blind man. It is a face I have glimpsed only in worked photographs, but I have touched it many nights now. The furrows where tears would run if you let them; the eyelids that hood a barely-checked ferocity. I tried to understand how such a stern face can be so warm. I brushed your lips with my index finger. A kiss is beyond even the reach of my dreams, I guess; a tolerant irritated moue was all I would get. It was enough. My hands fell. You tossed your head, a gesture I have guessed from photographs is a characteristic one. Throwing your hair impatiently from your face. Better things to do.

No words. What would I say? I would only lie. Better to stay silent.

I have a long tradition, I suppose, of loving photographs. But that was when I mistook my communion with the photographer for communion with his subject. I am warier now.

Under the gaze of those dispassionate eyes, I hesitate. All right. I made up the dreams. I suppose because it wouldn't be willful self-indulgence, if I had dreamed it. And it wouldn't be part of an even longer tradition of nudging the facts to win indulgences from others. It is both. So -- indulge me. It's little enough I want now. Sire, a man without craves audience.

Lying again. How many times can a person lie, in the course of one short essay? I want everything. You knew that from the start, I'm guessing.

A Note to my Googlers

First of all: you really don't want to consult a computer programmer and erstwhile English teacher about your mole that is red, itchy, growing, or otherwise changing. You want something like this site:

Mole Melanoma Information Site

Second: no. you don't die if you scratch a mole off. Nothing at all spectacular happens. But it's not a treatment, either. See above.

Now, as for Chinese mole reading: so many of you search for it that I suppose there must be such a thing, but I don't know anything about it. You're on your own. I know you're anxious to find out what a mole on your chin (forehead, ring-finger, knee) signifies. Personally, speaking as a computer programmer and an erstwhile English teacher, I think it probably signifies that you have a mole on your chin (forehead, ring-finger, knee). But what do I know?

For those of you who want to find "picture of mole (animal)" or "mole cartoon," what you want to do is click the word "image" above the google bar and then search for "mole." Glad I could help.

For the surprising number of you who want to know "why does bread mole?" -- now you, as an English teacher, I really can help. It's spelled "mold," with a 'd'. Repeat your search with "mold" spelled that way, and you won't end up reading bad buddhist poetry on the internet the night before your science paper is due.

For the rest of you, I will reluctantly admit that yes, I did once write the sentence, "I want to have an affair." But I'll go out on a limb here and guess that what you're looking for is not a happily married, stout, white-bearded, 48-year-old male. Since you've gotten this far, though, I will give you a bit of advice: there's one thing you can always find, if you go looking for it, and that's trouble.

Unready

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

A neat house in old suburban northeast Portland. I wasn't sure I was in the right place -- there were none of the "alternative" markers that, in varying degrees of subtlety, tend to mark of the houses of people I visit. No prayer flags on the porch. No beans growing in the front yard. No "save Tibet" or "We are Everywhere" or "Live Simply" bumper stickers on the cars parked in the street.

But it was the right place. I entered, and added my shoes to the dozen beside the door. There was lemonade, grainy chips of some kind, fresh-made guacamole and salsa, sliced apples, chunks of dark chocolate. Tea in the kitchen. And more food that we didn't even find out about till afterwards. If you want to eat well, all you need to do is hang out with American Buddhists: three quarters of them are great cooks, and they tend to turn all of their events into potlucks. This was just an evening discussion group, Gender and Dharma, but we could have lived well on the yield for a week.

L. rang a bell, and we sat shamatha for a space. Very still. I could hear the cat washing himself. Someone farted quietly, at intervals. I was amused at how much that filled my mind -- guessing who it was, imagining their embarassment, trying to think of how to lightly banter the embarassment away when we're done -- oh, that's right, back to the breath. Was it farting at all, could it be, at such regular intervals? More amusement, to think of the whole castle I'd built, complete with relationships and strategies, on a sound that might after all just be something mechanical -- oh, that's right, back to the breath. What else could the sound be? Was there any smell to tip me off? No, just the smell of cinnamon and -- what? nutmeg? from the someone's tea -- oh, that's right. Back to the breath.

My vision rested on the glass of lemonade on the glass coffee-table. As my eyes crossed and uncrossed, the gold dakini on the cover of our book travelled slowly across the lemonade. Two yellow tulip shapes exchanging places. The pattern of relections and shadows was entrancing. I wonder if I could photograph something like that? So many bloggers I read are blossoming photographers. Oh. That's right. Back to the breath.

It's always awkward, sitting shamatha on furniture that's not meant for it. I tried to sit up straight, but I was tilting on the couch like a tower of Pisa. Falling onto J. would be decidedly uncool. Though I had to admit that I liked the idea.

Oh. That's right.

L. rang the bell again. What was that, fifteen minutes? Longer than I'd expected, anyway. A moment of awkwardness -- no one knew, were we going to bow? Dedicate the merit? Would Lynn ring the bell three more times, as at a formal sit at the center?

Someone put their hands together and bowed. I did too, to keep them company.

I had felt like I ought to come, since J. and I started this group, and I'd missed two meetings now, having gone only to the first. But I was a little bored. I hadn't much liked the essay and I wasn't much liking the discussion. The emptiness of self, the self that Buddhism denies and the self it doesn't. Ho hum. When I was first learning about Buddhism, I had a large appetite for this kind of talk. Now it strikes me as a bit ludicrous. I wondered why on earth we were talking. We had two hours. We could have sat shamatha the whole time. Much better use of our time.

Though of course, if I hadn't come tonight, I wouldn't be sitting, I'd be playing computer games.

J. a couple times asked me what I thought about things. Was I obviously withdrawn? I tried. As I spoke my voice sounded thick and syrupy to me. I was awkward. There was no flow to what I said. It made no particular sense to me. I've never been a fluent speaker, and without practice, I've gotten worse. "Conference maketh a ready man," said Francis Bacon. Full and exact I may be. Ready I am not.

Finishing up. Establishing the next meeting place, choosing the next essay. Should we switch over to meeting monthly rather than every three weeks? It takes an absurd amount of time to decide.

We put our hands together and dedicate the merit, all murmuring together: "By this virtue may I quickly realize Mahamudra, and establish all beings without exception in that state." Prosy, unbeautiful Sanskrit rhetoric, abstract and prolix. But it makes a difference. No matter how little merit I may feel I've acquired, and God knows it's little enough tonight, there is something about giving it away that changes everything. It's different, if I've been doing it for all sentient beings. I have to think about its successes and failures a little differently.

Unready. An old Anglo-Saxon king was called that, though not, I imagine, to his face. Ethelred the Unready. Ethelred meaning, of course, "Noble Counsel." Damn Sir Francis Bacon. I've always disliked the man.

That About Covers It

I wanted to set these two Mother's Day posts next to each other.

"Where are your kids?"
My inquisitor is blond and braided. She favors pink, and likes to dance. She turned five last week and is sorry that I missed her party. "It was a princess party," she tells me in conspiratorial tones. "I don't have kids, "I tell her. She will forget, though and ask me again a few hours later. "But why not?" she asks.

-- The Ice Floe

Six in the morning will come quick and still her voice bangs about in my head, her tears sticking to me like guilt.

"I was so hurt by how she spoke to me," the sixty-five year-old mother said, dabbing the folded and refolded tissue to her reddened eyes, her long hair disappearing way beneath the edge of the table. "Why does she do that?"

-- Adriana Bliss

Death

For Death who takes what man would keep,
Leaves what man would lose

On a list I belong to we were talking about death, because the mother of one of our company is dying. One person said suffering is opaque and unredeemable, because we die. But another quoted a story of a wave fearing its death, only because it thought it was a wave; it didn't know it that really it was water. A third, whose father died recently, said simply, and with by far the most authority, "Death sucks."

I wrote a long blowhard response of my own, of course. But while I still do believe what I said -- it too was in the wave-and-water line -- its emotional tenor was all wrong. It sounded like I was saying it was fine that people die. And maybe it should be fine, maybe it is for buddhas. It's not for me.

But. This is what I wanted to say: for me death is not something strange and unexpected erupting in our midst. It's only the most obvious of a series of dissolutions and losses. The friends I no longer have, by circumstance or stupidity. They're dead to me. Every moment of love that passes, every endearment forgotten, is a little death. We're dying to each other every day, becoming inaccessible in a multitude of ways. An acquaintance who was friendly to me yesterday is impatient with me today. Death of an infant friendship. Could be. I don't know yet. I may never know. Hundreds of deaths took place around me today, which won't be revealed as such for weeks, months, years. Lifetimes.

The only thing that's special about real death is that everyone agrees on it. It's an obvious turning in that road. Take the first left, you can't miss it. It's an event with a name, that's all. It's when it's publicly acceptable to grieve for all the accumulated losses of a shared life that has been disappearing into darkness all along.

Or into light. We don't know. I love you now. How strange it is, that we live in this little window of the present, this little glimmer of visible light.

I love you now. The incense-ash falls, all at once, at a breath. Where is the stick of incense, now? In the past? In my mind? The feebleness of the answers tells us that we're asking the wrong question. But it also tells us that our answer to the same question, twenty minutes ago, was just as feeble. We thought we knew then; we think we don't know now. Both wrong.

I love you now. Death is the right question, and that's the right answer. I love you now.

Three Portlanders

Sage Cohen

The weight of the world's diamonds can count on me today to hold everything while carrying nothing. I am that possible.

As of yesterday, when I happened across "Sage Said So," one of my favorite bloggers. She's a gifted poet but at the moment I prefer her prose, which is wilder, & throws runners out every which way.


Tiel Aisha Ansari

Like a lost letter
a lone note goes wandering
looking for a tune.

What she's doing looks simple at first. The longer you look the more complicated it gets. She's got the guts to rhyme, and to stumble in her meter if she has to.


Elizabeth Domike

Who better, I think,
to question the nature of reality
than someone who doesn't exist.

Sometime there's going to be a long appreciation of her recent chapbook, "Disenchantment," here. I have to stop being staggered by it, though, which may not happen soon.

Note

My dearest love. You remember, when we were young, how we went out searching for love, as though the problem was that we couldn't find it? When the problem, of course, was that we couldn't get away from it.

The sunshine has a strange tarnish to it today, a metallic darkness. I'm like a thief who's run from the police for hours, finally letting up, and finding himself in utterly strange streets, walking slowly, wondering how to find my way home.

I know; this is the point at which you worry, "what does he want from me?" But all I want now, really, is to stop wanting things from people. That was always the wrong end of the stick. I'm old enough now to take the gifts given to me and be grateful.

I wish I could go down to the scouring sea, today, hear the mutter of the surf and see its heart beating among the rocks.

Not today, though. But soon. Come with me.

Koshtra's Retraction

Okay. Time for me to eat crow. I'm as far as Beowulf's arrival at Heorot, in Seamus Heaney's translation. I'm blown away. This is a magnificent translation. Read it. He gets Beowulf. No other translator has ever succeeded so well, particularly in capturing the Beowulf-Poet's tone, his modulations from formality to pathos, his passion and his sly, straight-faced humor.

Read it. But be aware that it does not (as some of the rave reviews imply) reproduce the Old English verse-form. This is not a "modernization" -- as some translations of Chaucer or Shakespeare, for instance, are. The words and syntax and verse form are quite different. Which is as it should be. (At this point I'm going to get technical; if you're not interested in metrics, it's probably time to move on. Just get Heaney's translation and enjoy the ride.)

In Old English manuscripts poetry is not broken into lines: it is usually "pointed," looking something like this:

there at the pier stood . the ringed prow . icy and out-eager . a prince's vessel . they laid . their dear king . giver of rings . on the ship's bosom . famous by the mast . there were many treasures . from far ways . ornaments loaded . I never heard of a comelier . keel furnished . with battle weapons . and war dress . swords and hauberks . on his breast lay . many treasures . to go with him . into the tide's sway .

(I've tried to be very literal here, but I've added a sprinkling of articles -- "a" and "the" -- that already vitiate the strength of the original.)

Some of the very earliest editors of Old English verse treated the "points" as line-breaks, printing it thus:

There at the pier stood
The ringed prow
Icy and out-eager
A prince's vessel

(The lines are bound into "couplets" by alliteration: both heavily stressed syllables in line one would alliterate with the first heavily stressed syllable of line two.)

Others -- whose practice prevailed -- borrowed the lineation of the later Middle English alliterative tradition, which printed both "half-lines" (as they came to be called) as a single line with a space, a caesura, in between, thus:

There at the pier stoodsssthe ringed prow,
Icy and out-eager,sssa prince's vessel.

All of Old English verse is now printed this way, in a form that no Old English poet ever saw. Translators, to a man, ape this format, which saves space and "looks like poetry" to people trained in pentameter. But usually they dump even the caesura, destroying the last remaining indication of half of the line-breaks in the poem. Thus Heaney has:

A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour,
ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.

Now this is a beautiful rendering, and it alliterates (as my own does not), though on different words than the original. But notice what's happened. The alliteration has stopped being functional. It no longer ties two lines together; it just decorates one line, and it seems like possibly a bit too much of a good thing, even though Heaney sensibly drops one of the alliterations from each first "half-line." The other thing that has happened is that the verse has sped up. It's verse to be spoken, not chanted, now.

Another thing that is injured -- Heaney is sensitive to this, but it can't be helped -- is that the Beowulf-poet alliterates on the words that are most important to him. There is a deep sense to what alliterates. In the first line, or couplet if you like, the words that alliterate in the Old English are "pier" and "ring"; in the second it's "icy," "out-eager," and "prince." Compare that with Heaney's "ring" and "rode," and "clad" and "craft." The Old English alliterations emphasize the meaning of the verse; Heaney's just ornaments it. This example is maybe a little unfair on Heaney, who is very aware of this property of alliteration and tries to reproduce it, often with brilliant success. But even he loses more of this than he manages to save.

The details of Old Germanic metrics are too complicated for me to get into here. It's far more complex and satisfying than "a four-beat line" (or two-beat, depending on how you count.) It simply can't be reproduced in modern English, which usually has only two (not three) degrees of stress and no variation in vowel "quantity" (a "long a" is not a longer version of a "short a," in modern English -- it's just a completely different vowel.) Suffice it to say that Heaney has not, and would never claim to have, reproduced the Old English meter. He's translated it into a variation on its nearest cousin, the Middle English alliterative line, which is simpler and more forgiving.

Three Reasons Why You Should Not Read Beowulf

Patry Francis recently listed Beowulf under the heading of Great Books that I Personally Hated. I flinched when I read that, and it immediately launched this diatribe (aimed at the creators of Surveys of English Literature) in my head -- which boils down, basically, to three reasons why you should not read the poem at all.

1. People say you should read it because it is the beginning of English Literature. This is not true. It has nothing to do with the formation of English Literature. Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton never heard of it. After its rediscovery and translation in the 19th Century it had some minor influence on English poetry. Not much. There'd be a much better case for reading Virgil at the beginning of an English syllabus than for reading Beowulf.

2. People say you should read it because it tells you about the Old Germanic peoples that the English arose from. Well, sure. So does Old High German. So does Old Frisian. So does Old Norse. Why pick this one difficult, idiosyncratic poem -- which exists in only one manuscript, and is referred to by no other medieval writer -- and pretend it's the national epic of the English? I'll tell you why. Because the English dearly wanted to have a national epic, in the 19th Century, when nationalism was trendy, so they made one up. It will teach you precisely nothing about the English nation (whatever that is.)

3. People say it's a great poem. Well, it is, but it translates horribly. Its metrics are foreign and complicated, its images violently compressed, its stock of metaphors is alien to us. Its literary, legendary, and historical allusions are almost all to things we don't know about. Either you flatten it into dreadful broken-backed prose, or wrench it completely away from its poetic roots and stick it in a pot of blank verse or (even worse!) rhymed quatrains or heroic couplets, where it will die a ghastly death, or you create a brand new modern English verse-form that no one but a few scholars will have any idea how to pronounce.

Actually, of course, these are not reasons not to read Beowulf. They are just reasons not to read Beowulf in translation. If you have the time to learn Old English and find your bearings in Old Germanic culture -- it is one of the most beautiful long poems ever written. You'll be just a hop skip & jump also, then from being able to read Old Norse poetry, which is wonderful stuff too. But don't read it as English Literature. Read it as the most beautiful, intricately-wrought artifact of a dead civilization. Which is what it is. If you don't have time to learn old English, don't insult the poem by reading a translation. Just pick up a recording of it, in Old English, by someone who understands Old English metrics, and listen to the music of the words. It's like listening to the sea.

A May Day Contemplation, in Seven Easy Steps

(1) Stop. Look around, at every single made thing in your field of vision, and think: who labored to make this?

(2) Stop again. For every person who labored, think: who labored to make their labor possible?

(3) Stop again. For every person who labored to make their labor possible, who labored to make their labor possible?

(4) If you haven't yet reached an uncountable number of people, you're not thinking very hard, but go ahead and do another round. Now you've got an uncountable number.

(5) Now, imagine that every one of those people worked solely out of love for you.

(6) Notice how you immediately balk at incurring such a debt of gratitude, and object that they only did it in pursuit of their own interests.

(7) Ask yourself how you know.