Anne Lamott

I don't buy books any more. Since my income is about a quarter of what it was when I was a programmer, and since I'm a fundraiser for library programs, I get books from the library instead. This is good in some ways. Books were threatening to inundate the house; by most people's standards, I suppose they already had. I was starting to recognize the impossibility of continuing another twenty years with the same habits of book acquisition. And different books seem to ambush me in the library than ambushed me at Powell's, and the change is refreshing. Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. That was a lot of fun. Six Frigates, that naval history that brought me through the heat o' the sun recently. (The library's quite rich in readable military history: I suspect I'm not the only person in Portland who survives depression by reading about people trying to kill each other. It's a weird solution, since in real life I find people trying to kill each other a bit of a downer, but it seems to be otherwise in books about the past. & when it comes to coping with depression, I have no pride and no political correctness.)

Anyway -- Six Frigates had made me curious about James Madison. I have pictures, or at least caricatures, in my head for most of the Founding Fathers, but none for Madison. It's a lacuna I've been meaning to fill for twenty or thirty years. So I wandered through the library's biography stacks, surfing the letter 'M'. None of the Madison biographies seemed quite the thing, so I wandered on, or rather backwards, into the 'L's The name "Anne Lamott" caught my eye. I'd heard the name before; I was sure of it. Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith. I liked the title, so I picked it up.

I don't know why it was in the biography section, since it was a collection of personal essays. But it started off with the ham essay, and so that oriented me. A couple years ago, everybody seemed to be trying to get me to read this ham essay. Something to do with winning a ham and giving it away.

I'm not proud of this, but there's nothing like having everybody tell me I should read something to make me lay back my ears, bare my teeth, and dig in my heels. Then a couple years later, when I'm sure nobody's looking any more, I'll surreptitiously pick the thing up and read a page or two. If I don't like it, I don't have to hurt anyone's feelings. If I do like it, no one gets to tell me "I told you so."

Lamott delighted me and irritated me. She's sweet and perceptive and realistic, and she writes about what she knows. She gives the impression of complete honesty, complete disclosure (I may not be as impressed by this as some people are, since I know I give the same impression.) The irritating thing is that she breathes my air a little. She occupies precisely the same writing-space that I do, writing about personal faith from the standpoint of personal doubt, and it's a little spooky how many essayistic habits we have in common. The slow, sidling return to the original image with a soupcon of added meaning. The candid exposure of doubt. The inclusion of the ludicrous and ugly in descriptions of beauty. No wonder people recommended her to me: if I were a better writer, I'd be Lamott's male Buddhist twin.

Two things impressed me most about the book. One is, how grateful I am to have landed in a religious tradition without a creator. It looks absolutely exhausting, trying to square the reality of the world with the doctrine that an absolutely good person made it on purpose. I don't think I could stick it out. It's obviously a valuable teaching -- it takes you new places, way out of your comfort zone -- but compared to that, I find, say, holding George Bush to be my spiritual teacher fairly easy. (In Buddhism, you know, you are supposed to be grateful to anyone who angers you, and consider them your teacher, because they're showing you the aversions you're not willing to release.)

The other thing that impressed me in this book, was how Lamott brought her spiritual life into her family, and in particular how she dragged her son to church every other Sunday, how she made sure he knew it was the center of her life. It made me think of how little of my inmost life I share with my family. I tell you all much more about it than I tell them. We took Tori and Alan to the "Sunday school" at KCC, every once in a while, but it never really took. If anything I suspect that I put Tori off Buddhism by talking about the illusory nature of the self. Teenagers are already anxious enough about the substantiality of their selves; they don't need any extra doubts about it. And Alan has absorbed his grandfather's easy scorn of religion as obsolete superstition: he thinks the whole thing is absurd.

I know some people at KCC who are distressed because they don't share their faith and practice with their partners, who look at me and Martha with some envy. I think they're imagining an intimacy and congruency that aren't really there. It's not easy to share this sort of thing with your lover, even when you're supposedly doing the same practices and acknowledging the same teachers. You never both feel quite the same about a teacher at the same time: generally one of you is inspired while the other is irritated. One of you wants to go to lots of teachings precisely when the other wants never to hear another mealy-mouthed Buddhist sermon in his life. In some ways it might be rather nice not to share a faith, to have it be acknowledged as a private space you go into.

But I wonder if I've given up too easily, if I shouldn't work a little harder to let my family know what these central experiences of communion and liberation mean to me. It doesn't really seem like the people closest to me should be the last to know.

What Bones Are For

I've been researching and writing about rib pain in pregnancy. It's an interesting subject, but in trying to write about it I found I kept bumping against a fundamental misconception about what bones are for, and how they function in the body. We tend to think: skeleton is to body as frame is to house. That's certainly how I thought of it, before I went to massage school. What are bones for? Well, to hold your body up, obviously.

It's a perfectly sensible thing to think, but it's quite wrong, and it insidiously distorts how we think about the body and its discomforts. If you've seen a model skeleton, or a real one, it's immediately apparent that the thing can't stand up. It needs to be wired firmly together. So we amend our idea of a frame to include the ligaments. Okay, we say, it's like a frame nailed together, or lashed together, with ligaments.

But we're still wrong, because the damn thing still won't stand up, without a post to support it. As you push it around, and try to imagine making it stand up, it becomes quite clear that the skeleton, admirable though it is, would be a disaster as a frame. That's not its function at all. The bones are not really there to support weight. What supports your weight is your muscle and connective tissue. The real function of bones is almost the opposite of our naive conception: they're as much there to keep us from stretching, as to keep us from collapsing. They're spacers. For the arm to work properly the wrist and the elbow have to be kept a certain distance apart. That's what the bones are for.

Most joints of the body come apart easily, if you remove the muscle and connective tissue. There is, for instance, no bony reason why our arms don't simply come off: they're held on entirely by muscles, ligaments, and tendons. If you've ever had to lug a heavy suitcase through an airport, you'll know that you can't simply hang the suitcase off your bony frame and walk along comfortably, taking the weight on your legs. Not even with a shoulder strap. Your neck and shoulder muscles start screaming bloody hell. The bones are not analogous to a house frame at all.

Why does it matter? Well, because if it's painful to move a joint, we tend to think that something must be out of whack with the frame. The bones are deteriorating, or maybe the ligaments have been overstretched. Our doctors will take x-rays and helpfully tell us we have osteoarthritis (which means, in English, "you're in pain, and there are some bones near the painful place.") Or tendonitis ("you're in pain, and there are some tendons near the painful place.") Or that we have bursitis, whether we do or not. And they tell us that the only thing to do for it is to take painkillers. Our chiropractors will tell us that our bones are subluxated and need to be repositioned, which may or may not be true: what is certainly true is that bones, ordinarily, only stay subluxated if the muscles are pulling them out of position.

Most pain is muscular in origin, and can be treated by 1) rest and 2) massage to resolve knots. It should be the first explanation for pain that we look for, since it's by far the most common: instead it's often the last.

You're Doing Fabulously

The smoke has arrived from California; the sky at its rim is a dingy, smudged, yellowish gray. Gray sky here in Oregon is no novelty, but that particular shade is different, and disquieting.

My supervisor is leaving the Foundation, to run the database for a much bigger, international non-profit. We have our little "party" for her today -- one of those odd little events when we all sit around the conference table for half an hour and chat, and praise the admin's discernment in treats. These affairs were really dismal in software companies, where people-skills were rare -- a dozen male programmers awkwardly loitering together eating spongy cake, all twitchy, longing to be back in their cubicles, one or two managers making what they hoped were team-building gestures and being resolutely jolly. But even here, in a fundraising office, where people-skills are the stock-in-trade, it will be a bit funereal. The card the admin bought had a black envelope, something nobody but me noticed; I guess the significance of black in correspondence has dwindled away, since the years when you were notified of your son's death in Vietnam by a black-edged letter. But it was appropriate to my feelings.

I'll be tempted to lift up my head and howl, like Hagrid when they have to leave the infant Harry Potter on the doorstep. I'm devoted to Faith, but it's more than that: she's been the living symbol, for me, of leaving the corporate software world, of appearing in the world exactly as what I am. I want nothing at the Foundation to change, which of course is very foolish, since change is what it represented to me: that's how fast we set about walling ourselves in again, once we've broken out. I know that. Still. I took to Faith immediately. At the first set of interviews, when a couple people were leaving and another had not yet come in, I said to her, sotto voce, "this is what I'm worst at in the world, talking to strangers." Not something I could conceivably have said to anyone, in my former life, let alone to a stranger. She smiled with quick comprehension and said "you're doing fabulously."

There's the difference between the world in which I used to work and where I work now. Taking care of each other emotionally is simply assumed to be part of working together. The level of interpersonal intelligence is extraordinarily high. Checking in, making sure there's no hurt feelings, making sure people know you appreciate what they're doing for you, that you know how hard they're working -- we all do it. There was no lack of good will or kindliness at the software companies I worked at. But nobody knew how to apply them. And it matters, it matters deeply, over time. You need to hear it, out loud. "You're doing fabulously."

Oh dear. I'll miss her terribly.

Third Turn

"I don't think you really think poorly of your own poetry at all, do you?" commented Jean. She's right, of course. I wouldn't inflict it on you all if I thought it was awful. I value you highly, and I try not to abuse the privilege of having your ear too often.

But I'm anxious that people should know that I have no aspiration to write great poetry, or to be a great poet.

A student reported that he once said to C.S. Lewis, "the amount of really great poetry is very small." At which Lewis snapped, in some irritation, "The amount that can be read with pleasure and profit is enormous."

I agree. I don't have much patience with the idea of "greatness" in the arts, which I think does more harm than good. It does some good: to approach anything -- art, poetry, another human being -- with reverence, open to learning, is the best way to see what is there. This has something to tell me of great importance and significance. If I don't like it, that's because I don't see it properly.

It's a fruitful attitude, and I wish I, and everybody, spent more time in it. If I thought reverence for great art instilled it more often, I'd approve of it highly. But it seems to me that many of the people who make the most extravagant claims for great art spend most of their time dismissing things that fall short. The chief value of greatness, for them, is that it allows them to luxuriate in contempt for things that are not. You know the sort of people, always talking about how bad this poetry is or how execrable that art is. I always want to say, "for heaven's sake, if it's that bad why are you piddling away your time on it? Go look at some Goya, read some Yeats! Do you think you're going to live forever?"

And then there's what the idea of "greatness" does to the artists. It makes every artistic endeavor a referendum on the quality of their souls. Are they among the saved or the damned? It brings self-consciousness and anxiety into a process that needs above all self-forgetfulness and (in the best sense) carelessness. The best art, I think, is not created by people who are trying to create a great work of art. Praxiteles, I'm guessing, didn't give a damn about art. He wanted to get Hermes, get him exactly right. The greatness, if there is such a thing, is not a special tincture of genius added to the art. It's simply what happens when a person of terrific skill and intense imagination gets it perfectly right. There's no way to just skip being good and go straight to being great. If I had one piece of advice to give to artists and poets, it would be, "just try to do the best work you can. Greatness will happen if it wants to. It's really not your concern. You can't know and it wouldn't matter if you could."

I think what we all need to do, to increase the pleasure and profit of art, is to approach it, and each other, with more reverence. There's no lack of wonderful art and poetry in the world. What's lacking is generosity and openness of appreciation. The greatness isn't in the poem, or in the poet. It's not in the reader either. It's in the communion between poet and reader, refracted through the poem. Which is why -- as we all know, in our bones -- a poem is not complete until it's been read. That's what's important. And that's why I don't care that my poetry's not as good as William Blake's. It can still be an occasion for that intensity of communion; sometimes the more intense and precious for being local, ephemeral, and flawed. I'm not looking for more than that. As T.S. Eliot would say, the rest is not our business.

Second Turn

I like to master things. I find it challenging to read contemporary poetry, because I learned to read poetry, really, as a student, and established poetry is always wedged in between magisterial introductions and learned footnotes. I didn't always agree with these things, of course, but they oriented me, and gave me a sense for what people, in general, thought the poetry was doing. And they were boxed up. The Complete Poems of Wordsworth really is the complete poems of Wordsworth. He's not going to blindside you by suddenly writing a new book. A living poet might do all sorts of unpredictable things. And the jury is still out. You might stupidly admire something contemporary that the cognoscenti despise, or dislike something they admire. That would be fine -- my taste has always been eccentric -- but only if you knew it. If you know it, you're unorthodox; otherwise you're just dim. But there's no way to master a contemporary poet. (I'm sure academics try, very hard, but you really can't.)

Which is why, probably, this sort of sidling into reading contemporary poetry by reading the poems in people's blogs, was the best, possibly the only, route for me into reading it. If you know somebody, their poetry becomes a personal communication. You don't try to master it. You just listen to it. And it brought into play for me the long-practiced skills of sympathetic critical reading I developed as a teacher. What are they trying to say? Where are they trying to go? How can I help them get there? It was an unexpectedly rich experience.

My taste is extremely old-fashioned. It's taken me a long time to accustom myself to poetry that has no regular meter. My initial -- and still active -- response is, why should I call this poetry? Isn't this just prose in tiny paragraphs, with a ragged right margin, borrowing solemnity from its betters?

And the answer, as always with contemporary poetry, is -- well, it depends. There's no reason, of course, why prose shouldn't be written in tiny paragraphs. And no particular reason why poetry should be written in lines: there are other ways of marking rhythmic divisions and pauses. Some people have a keen sense of the rhythm and music of word-sequences, and some don't. As I've read more of the anarchic poetry that rules the roost nowadays, I've become more tolerant of it. It takes a little longer to evaluate, is all. Someone writing truly vile iambic pentameter betrays their incompetence within a line or two. But it can take twenty or thirty lines of anarchic verse, or even more, before you can safely conclude that the poet has a tin ear. It's hard to be sure; you might just have your metronome set wrong.

I had to become more tolerant of it, though, because it turned out that it was the sort of verse I wrote myself. I experimented a lot, and still do, with meter. But on the balance my metrically regular poems are simply worse than my irregular ones. I'm glad to have the skills, to be able to count out the stresses and patterns; it gives me a shortcut sometimes to understanding why something doesn't work and what I have to do to fix it. And I clue in quicker, perhaps, to the way that iambic pentameter still dominates English poetry: every reader of English can feel the sense of relief when a poem wanders into it for a few lines, the ease and comfort and smoothness of it, even if they don't know why. It helps to be able to put your finger on it.

First Turn

I find myself in alien territory, surrounded by poets. I'm surprised by how deep the conviction runs: I am no poet. Not that it matters: it's hard to see how it could matter to anyone, except -- and I only dubiously except -- me.

No, the interesting part is the the resistance itself: what is that made of? Immediately I see in my mind's eye the college professor, whom I had shown some poems in my sophomore year, struggling for a kind way to put it. "Well," he began, reluctantly, "I think there are poetry people, and there are prose people."

He wasn't one of those professors who like to extinguish students. He had praised my prose extravagantly. And what I can remember of the poems I gave him makes me cringe. Did I simply walk away with that assessment internalized?

I don't think so. My arrogance at eighteen was massive. It wasn't that I couldn't write poetry. It was that I was going to be a famous prose stylist, the Twentieth Century's Ruskin or Carlyle. I adored elaborate Elizabethan prose: Richard Hooker and Thomas Browne were my idols. I was going to write lapidary fables and blistering arguments. I wanted my prose to be fierce, to thunder. I was confident, absurdly confident, of my mastery of prose. Poetry, on the other hand, I was a little uncertain about. I wasn't quite sure I knew what poets were doing.

I've read a lot of poetry, since then, and I'm still not quite sure. They're all doing something different, for one thing. It takes more generosity of mind to read poetry than to read prose. The genres bend more. Poetry is more opportunist, more hit-and-run. Especially now, when every vein seems exhausted. Any fragment of precious stuff is worth digging out, now.

I recognize now that my taste in poetry -- which I really had no way to conceptualize back then -- was very different from my professor's. His favorite poet was Robert Browning, whom I simply can't read: Browning's verse leaves a horrible taste in my mouth. I've tried repeatedly, and I simply can't stand it. It scans, by the rules, but it sits so awkward in the mouth that it seems like it shouldn't. And of course, as someone drawn to mysticism and impatient of naturalism, I find Browning's hobby horses all rather trivial and dull. The fact that religious people are as wicked as everyone else is neither a revelation to me nor a cause for celebration; it's simply something that I thought everybody, including religious people, already knew. It's precisely our sense of our own insufficiency that leads us to wonder what countries lie on the other side of surrender, that lead us to believe in a subterranean vein of goodness: the wonder to us is not that there is evil in the world, but that there is anything else.

But stop -- I am revising my past, here. I didn't think of myself as a religious person, back then. It's just that, to a person who had been raised athiest and materialist, Browning seemed not daring and radical and naughty, but timid and orthodox and boring. What was forbidden and alluring was faith.

This is the first part of several parts. Maybe. Who knows?

A Touch of the Sun

I used to personify him as the sun, his mattock as the sunlight. He always struck from behind. The blow itself was heavy but dull, a vast hammer muffled in layers of dirty canvas. But it was no mortal hammer, because its weight didn't lift after he struck. Death by pressing. The weight would bear down on me mercilessly, easing only at sundown.

He's not such a power in my life, now. I have even learned to enjoy sunlight sometimes, gingerly; to get some faint sense of the pleasure other people take in it. But I don't think we'll ever be friends.

Yesterday he struck again. Only an echo of his former strength. I called in sick to wait it out. Provisioned myself: a bag of potato chips and a fat book of naval history. Do your worst. Our castle walls will laugh a siege to scorn. (Hmm. The Scottish Play. Bad idea. Still, I didn't say it out loud.)

Depression makes you superstitious. You hearken after prophecies and dreams. As the world's messages become more and more opaque, you strain harder and harder to read them. Indeed, my Lord, I am too much i' the sun. (That's better.)

I lose myself in the fitting out of the United States, the Constitution, and the Constellation. Pound L'Insurgent to a pulp in the West Indies. It doesn't trouble me that in real life I would have been of Jefferson's party, railing against the useless expense of a navy, and the needless antagonization of the French, when we needed desperately to pay off the national debt. No; as a woman whose comfort-reading runs to novels of female submission, though she has no desire for it in real life, in the spell of the book that I become a Federalist, hankering for bigger, faster ships, more glorious battles, paying off old scores. We'll show the Barbary States what it means to abuse Americans, by God. They'll be singing a different tune when the heavy frigates arrive. I enter the emotional world of George Bush. At some level I understand it to be a pathological world, but I'm not going to worry about that now. My business is to survive the day.

And so I stand the seige. The sun's in his glory, within days of the solstice, a power to be reckoned with. But night comes at last. The weight eases. Tomorrow I will be fine. This was so light an episode that I dally with the deprecations so common in early depression, before you've learned what you've really come to grips with: Oh, I'm exagerating. I could really have gone to work. I'm just indulging myself. With an effort of will-power I could have just shaken it off. Should have, could have, would have, the familiar long whisper of self-castigation. It still runs inexorably, even though I don't believe a word of it any more. But it dwindles and peters out, as the cool night comes.

And, on the third launch attempt, the newly-built Constitution runs sweetly down its skids to the harbor, plunges into the water, and rocks gently under the stars.

Running Sand

This is the running sand.

Fog walks deliberately over the
shift of surfaces,
knowing cold water flows beneath;
footprints tear the coping, leave bloodmarks,
wet stains. Pale wavelines doodle
away into the strangled mist.

This is one of the places of God,
but not one we look for.
This is the place where questions fall
to the ground under their own weight:
If you knew the answer you shouldn't have asked.

The vapor sinks into the sand,
pulling the light down with it.
The loom of the land behind us, where
the headlights of distant cars make
slow moving glows in the fog;
you can't imagine that any of them
is traveling toward hope.

Buried here, at uncertain depth,
are those who did their duty
to indifferent masters. Those who
duly worked genitals
in dull marriages. Here lie
those who put off opening their mail;
those who checked just one more thing
before making a phone call.

You may say it is unjust
the bones of so many good and almost honest
lie here. But this is not a place of judgment.
No law obtains here but gravity;
no pull here, but habit.
God may have strong arms, but
that does him no good if he can get no purchase.
We gave him no handhold. We slid away; cold,
unskinned, and slippery with untrimmed fat;
and here the sand received us.

Wanderer

She's on her side, with her back to me. I reach under the sheet -- something they taught me never to do, in massage school -- and lay my hand on her taut, baby-full abdomen. Gently stroke backwards, a mild myofascial stretch, helping the bewildered abdominal muscles adjust to being twice their accustomed length. Again. My hand cradles the little one. Straight back, following the grain of her transverse abdominals, then up and back, as the external obliques run, and then down and back, following the internal obliques. The baby shifts a little, and I wonder, as I always do, about this long dream-time in the dark of the womb. The intensity of the tenderness I feel for this little one startles me, quite different in quality from the affection I have for his mother. Spontaneous prayers for his good fortune form in my mind. He could not be more blessed in his parents, but the world is a dangerous and unpredictable place, and his vulnerability staggers me. What a world to wander into, tiny and naked. I hold him for a moment. Om mani padme hum. Behold the jewel in the lotus.

Another part of my mind is assessing: she's in terrific shape. I know the lower paraspinals would love some firm work, but I refrain; you're not supposed to do that, according to the books; so I do some very gentle kneading and holding, and I feel a brief annoyance at how little good information we have. Like most medical massage lore, it's very possibly just made up. If it had to do with expensive drugs you could sell, there'd be half a dozen meticulous (if tendentious) studies on it. As it is, there's no telling: maybe it's just somebody's theory, or it's based on some anecdote that crept into medical texts in the 19th Century, never disputed or verified. I'll try to track it down some day. But anyway, you take no chances with pregnancy massage. On to the legs: just a little edema below the knees; less than most women have late in their eighth month. But clots are possible, especially in the saphenous vein, at this stage -- clots are always possible where there's edema -- so I do gentler work on the legs than I normally would. On the inner leg and thigh, basically just placing my hands, one after the other. Avoid the ankles. This is another possibly bogus restriction. There are acupressure points that are supposed to induce labor, and they include several of my workhorse points; among them the meeting of three ways, where three yin meridians cross at the inner ankle. I suspect that you would have to do things in a particular sequence, at the right time of day in the right season, to induce labor; real acupressure is quite complicated, very far from the magic "push this spot and your headache goes away" of popular imagination; my guess is that your chances of inducing labor by accident are about zero. But another thing I need to know more about. Until I do, no prodding the ankle points.

All this, of course, is just the superficial surface of my mind, the running patter of the conceptual mind. The real work is going on, my hands listening, holding, speaking in their own language.

Halftime. Bathroom break. Not a lot of room in there these days. I go into the living room, look at the photos on the shelves. Her family on a fishing expedition. His mother holding him (three years old) on her lap and reading to him. I lock my hands and stretch, reaching up toward the ceiling, shake out my legs. The toilet flushes; the door clicks. I give her a few moments to get back on the table, tap at the door. Time to do the other side.

She's an old hand at pregnancy massage: she's already got the pillows all arranged. I rest my hands on her shoulder and hip, reconnecting, settling. A familiar sequence of thoughts rises up:

I wasted all my life till now. This is what I should have been doing all along.

No. You couldn't have done this until now. Not wasted. You were preparing for this, though you didn't know it.

Don't be so portentous, Mr Dale. You're just doing a massage. You think too much.

But I am so happy. "I did not know I was so empty, that I could be so full."

The Republican Death Wish

It's interesting to watch the Republicans self-destruct. Eerily familiar: twenty-five years ago the Democrats were doing exactly the same thing. I couldn't believe it when Bush started talking offshore drilling and McCain started talking about dotting the country with nuclear power plants.

Personally, I think nuclear power plants are possibly the least bad option for a country whose voracity for vast quantities of energy is not going away any time soon; but that's not the point. The point is that there's a sizeable population that will never vote for someone who advocates nuclear power. It's just one of those touchstone issues, like the death penalty or abortion, that people completely lose their grip about. Why would you take it on in the campaign if you didn't have to?

And then the offshore drilling. There are two points there. One is that Florida, which lives or dies by its beaches, loathes the idea of offshore drilling, and without Florida there's no way the Republicans are keeping the White House. The other point is that it reinforces the widely-held impression that the Republicans are just stooges for the oil industry. It really seems as though this year the Republicans are determined to lose. Their death gene has been activated, apparently.

The nomination of McCain is exactly wrong. He would have been an excellent choice eight years ago. Back then, even I liked McCain. He said what he thought. He stuck to his guns. He didn't let himself get pushed around by his party. He was far right, but I often find the far right more intelligible and sympathetic than the middle right. I would never have voted for him, of course, but I could have understood why people would.

But in the last eight years, all of McCain's virtues seem to have evaporated. He's waffling and wiggling with the best of them. Where does he stand on immigration? On torture? Well, you tell me. I have no idea any more. And his big foreign policy issue -- pushing on in Iraq and seriously taking on Iran -- is both unpopular and dead wrong. It's true, and has been true for decades, that our serious enemy in the Middle East is Iran. Presumably Mr Bush knew that (though it's never safe, it seems, to assume he knows anything), but chose to invade Iraq simply because Iraq was a much easier country to defeat: lots of open desert, perfect for the air-supported tanks that are the US army's strong suit. Iran, with its difficult terrain, comparative religious and ethnic homogeneity, and high morale, would be another thing entirely. With our army -- brilliant in lightning desert warfare, but desperately unprepared and unsuited for thuggish police work -- attenuated and exhausted, invading Iran would be lunatic. It would make sense, in a way that Iraq never did, but it would be very unwise. Hugely expensive, and we might even lose. And what the devil would we do with it if we won? Conscript all the remaining 18- and 19-year-olds in the country to come up with an occupation force? As you know, all American teenagers are fluent in Farsi, and would love to go work as police in a country where everyone hates them. Their parents would love that too.

So it's becoming difficult for me to see how the Democrats, champion foot-marksmen though they are, can lose the November elections. They have an articulate, engaging presidential candidate, and far better congressional candidates, this year (I'm not sure what rocks the GOP looks under to find its people to run for Congress, but I think they should try some other ones). They have only not to blunder. So I hope they make the best of their day in the sun. It will be good to see our kids come home from Mesopotamia. I pray they get to come home, and stay home.

Quotidian and Rambly

I forget, even in so short a time, what massage does for me. I was exhausted, having run an hour or two short of sleep for many days: I warned Emily I'd probably fall asleep on the table. But I didn't. And an hour later I was centered, steady. Still needing sleep, of course; but clear, and the desperate edge taken off it. Very like what meditation does. When I came out, Emily looked up at me, from the couch of the trendy salon where she's working now, and laughed. "You're so funny about massage," she said indulgently. I was no doubt rather spacey-looking, swaying on my feet, with beatific glow about me. I felt that I'd been rebooted. All caches cleared. I imagine snakes feel that way after a molt.

So I slept, last night, a full night. And still feeling renewed. I hope some at least of my clients feel this way.

My gastroenterologist wants me back in five years; just one polyp, but one of the wrong sort. And she wants me to eat like a sane person, alas! Meaning fruit and veg and less fat and less red meat. Less fat and red meat isn't going to happen -- I know better than to set that pendulum in motion -- but I can at least add in some fruit and veg. So I'm having fruit with my breakfast this morning. It's good. Really good. Why haven't I been having it for years? (Another of those inexplicable resistances. There's a lot of them. I resist meditation. I put off taking my shower in the morning. I avoid exercise. These are all things that I love to do; so far as I can tell the only reason I resist them is that I feel I ought to do them.)

Rachel has a novel method of getting her five fruit & veg, but I'm afraid alcohol completely disrupts my sleep cycles; it's a choice between having drinking in my life and having enough sleep in my life, and I'm old enough to prefer having enough sleep.

"When I drink alcohol, I get sick. I can't sleep, and then usually within a day or two I come down with a cold. I mean, like every time." I told the naturopath Martha dragged me to, maybe ten years ago.

He looked at me mildly for a few moments. "Does that tell you anything?" he asked.

Oh. Like, maybe drinking isn't such a good idea for me? (Why do we need experts to tell us this sort of thing?)

So for the past ten years or so, I haven't been drinking at all. I can't even have the heart-recommended glass of red wine with dinner, and still sleep. Which is too bad, because I like drinking; it loosens up my damned self-consciousness and makes me better able to converse. But you can't have everything.

Firebird

Surely their actions might be something we'd do ourselves: the hand raised to strike could be your hand, the face that trembles to receive the blow your face. The finger on the trigger yours, afraid; the heart held in the gun sights yours also.

And that is close enough to forgiveness, to find that any character in the dream of your life might be you. But you don't know that until you tell the story; caught in the narrative yourself, how could you see from that height?

-- Firebird, by Mark Doty

---

Or at least, say, you need to see that a story is always already being told. That you're not seeing the thing itself, never seeing the thing itself. The most deeply misleading (and profoundly un-Buddhist) thing I've ever heard a Buddhist teacher say is that an enlightened being sees things as they are. It is the most fundamental, intractable foundation of Buddhist philosophy that no one, no one ever sees things as they are. We see them as they appear. People, places and things may or may not have intrinsic essence -- how could we ever know? -- but one thing we do know, is that if they do have intrinsic essences, we don't have direct access to them. There is an elaborate Buddhist analysis of perception, with the various stages of construction and interpretation that have to occur before we "see" something. Physics and biology confirm it, and add their own layers of indirection. What we see is light, bounced and quivering from things, making us believe that the color of things is a quality of the things, rather than a quality of their interaction with light. Our eyes deliver a crossed and upside down proto-image (not an image yet; how can there be an image that no one perceives? It's more like the source code, an HTML page before a browser interprets it) to the visual center of the brain; there it's prettied up, the missing pieces supplied, expected images filled in. And this is what's delivered to the thinking centers, where (brain scientists always speed up and slur over at this point, they know they have no clue about how this part happens) we become aware of the image. And we, pitifully credulous, say "I see a flower." No. We don't see a flower. We see an image we've constructed from a schema distilled from nerve impulses responding to patterns of light.

And this is the very simplest case, simple perception of a simple object. When we perceive that, for instance, our mother hates us, we are at an exponentially more complex level of perception; we have constructed an entire persona, entered into it, and become aware of its feelings vis a vis our construction of its construction of our persona. The complexity of the process is staggering, and it's riddled with error and supposition from start to finish. And yet these are the facts we are most sure of, the facts we build our lives around; acting on this information received, we are willing to stake everything we care about, take our own lives or the lives of others.

Anyway. Doty's Firebird is an incredible book: I'm grateful to Deb for recommending Doty to me. It's a memoir of growing up a sissy in the America of the fifties and sixties, a deeply moving one to this fellow-sissy. I didn't have being gay to deal with, but the experience is universal, sissy or not: of finding in ourselves desires that the world is determined not to acknowledge, but without which our lives simply will not run. We have no choice; we must negotiate it somehow; breaking the mainspring of our hearts is not an option.

For me? I wanted to look, and I wanted to touch; and I wanted to be able to express the tenderness that welled up in me towards people. I've written about all these things. It's pretty simple, in the abstract: as a practical problem it long seemed intractable, insoluble, something that simply could not happen in the world as it is. Hence the allure when I was young of other worlds: fantasy, science fiction, utopias. Anywhere but here.

Hard to know. Hard to know how the solutions started to seep into my life. Was it meditation that opened cracks in the walls? Art? Friends (meaning you)? Love, beyond my deserts or imagining? The raising of children? All those things, certainly, and more. Not that everything is solved, far from it, but the world I live in is transformed, and what isn't solved is workable, pliable.

To Love, and to Open my Eyes

Okay, I take it back. Sometimes meditation is relaxing. Sometimes I like it a lot.

Sat last night in my massage room, as the last of the light faded. I do like the way sitting in one place allows you to see how the light changes. Except of course that you never quite see it. You just realize that it's darker, suddenly, that there's more space in the room, that it's quieter, at some level below sound, that the night -- not that the night is coming, but that the departing day is revealing the night that was there all along, cool and dark and sweet, asking nothing.

And it's good to put my hands together and pray for everyone. I forget -- until I come back, all rusty -- what a relief it is to put aside the world of friends and enemies, the continual reckoning up of who deserves their pain, to exactly what degree, and who doesn't; who deserves good fortune, and how much, and who's been rooked of how much of their due. I had no idea, before I started meditating, no idea at all, how elaborate my judgements about all that were, how hard I was working as a scribe for the Lord of Hosts' book of accounts, anxious to make sure that nobody got credit they didn't deserve and everyone got their full due of blame. I don't know how the world convinced me that was my job -- as if it wouldn't get done without me! -- but it certainly did; and it's a strenuous, effective exercise in shrinking the heart and narrowing the mind. Such incredible liberty to step out from that. It's no business of mine. Which is lucky, because I have no talent for it, and the kind of information I'd need to make accurate judgements isn't given to human beings on this earth. My business is to love people. Which I do have a talent for, and I do know enough to accomplish. I am not going to hold anyone accountable for anything. I'm not going to punish anyone. It's not my job and it never was; the world will rattle along just the same without my majestic apportionments of praise and blame. The whole thing was an exercise in megalomania. The world doesn't lack for praise and blame: its cup overflows with them. What it lacks is love and clarity. That's my work. To love, and to open my eyes.

Faith

I found myself in an online conversation the other day about meditation, rattling away with my accustomed volubility, and then I went silent. It's been a long time since I've been meditating. I felt I didn't have the right to talk about it any more. It was surprisingly, intensely painful. Like speaking animatedly about a fun time with a friends for a moment or two and then remembering that they're dead.

I built an online identity around meditation, and now I've forfeited the rights to that identity. The painfulness of that makes me only too aware of how, comically, I'd invested my ego in training in ego-less-ness. (To do myself credit, I was aware of it at the time, too. But at least I was meditating then.)

It's not that I no longer have faith in meditation. I do, if not quite to the extent I used to. And I mean to be meditating. I'm just not. A kind friend suggested that a lot of the space that meditation used to inhabit in my life, massage now inhabits; and that's true, and helpful. But there's more going on than that.

A piece of it is that the Seventeenth Karmapa came to America, and to Seattle. And as usual, when one of the Tibetan bigwigs comes to town, I start avoiding the sangha. People get weird about authorites. And it brings all the more superstitious types out of the woodwork, the sort of people who excitedly tell you that this is the month in which the Buddha achieved paranirvana, and that therefore all practices done in this month are 100,000 times more efficacious. There are people for whom that sort of talk is meaningful and encouraging -- and may their practice prosper! -- but I'm not one of them. It reminds me of nothing so much as of Huck Finn going into the closet to pray for a fishhook. So that support has not been available, or at least I haven't been able to configure myself so as to avail myself of it.

But this conversation stirred everything up in my mind. Made me realize that I urgently need to meditate, that my clarity has been degrading a little, and will degrade more if I don't resume sitting.

Meditation is not usually relaxing. It can be unpleasant or frightening. It's hard work, and usually not very obviously rewarding, not in the short term. It's often lonely, even in a group setting. Why then do it?

Well. 1) I am convinced that the Buddha got the main proposition right: that our experience is suffused with suffering, and that meditation can be an important part of reducing that suffering. 2) I am further convinced that the mind is basically good, and that the more it is freed from suffering the more that goodness will appear, and 3) I am, finally, convinced that the mind is extremely powerful, and that I have a moral obligation to train it, just as the owners of a pit bull have a moral obligation to train their dog. It may be basically good -- I'm of the opinion it is -- but that doesn't mean it won't tear somebody's throat out.

So. I will go and sit, now.

My Fiftieth Birthday Present

The Reader is Warned: this post is all about my bowels. No spiritual revelations, effusive poetry, or lyrical descriptions of massage here. Feel free to skip.

---

I watched, on the monitor, the endoscope nosing its way up my colon. The surprising thing was how colorful it all was. It had a little spritzer, and it would occasionally wash away a patch of bright yellow scum to reveal the pink, rose, or red surfaces. Along came a polyp, like a little skin tag, and a black tongue snaked out into view and bit it off. It was like that movie, long ago -- Fantastic Voyage, was it? Except the graphics were much better.

I'd asked them to go light on the anesthetic, so I remember it all, though it has a dreamy quality.

While waiting for it to start I was impressed -- as I often am, in hospitals -- at how little they knew about how to make the body rest comfortably. It's not rocket science: it's something every massage therapist knows, how to make people comfortable in a resting position. One thing you don't do is leave someone in a semi-recumbant position with their legs stretched out straight in front of them and nothing under their knees for 45 minutes. When I sat up and stretched and sat cross-legged instead, they worriedly came over and asked if I was okay. "Just stretching," I said. They'd given me this blanket folded narrowly, just wide enough to cover my legs; I was apparently expected to half-sit, half-lie there with my legs poking straight out till doomsday, if that was how long it took the doctor to get to me. You couldn't dream up a better position for instilling trigger points in the lower back and anterior neck.

I liked the doctor, when she finally showed up; a young woman with a wry sense of humor, who was happy to accommodate my request to go light on the anesthetic. But oh, dear, those hunched over shoulders.

"Hi! So you're the person who's going to push five feet of optical tubing up my ass!" is one of the things I didn't say. I also didn't say, "hey, I probably don't really need this colonoscopy, but you really need somebody to work on those traps and pecs. Why don't you get on this table instead?" I was very well-behaved. Afterwards she and the nurses said I was a great patient, they wished all patients were like me, which mystified me a bit. I lay there on my side for half an hour and let them get on with their work: surely that's what most people do?

I was surprised by how grumpy and nervous I was about this. Not the procedure itself, but the business of not eating seeds for three days, and then the liquid diet for two days, and the horrible gallon of laxative stuff you have to drink the night before. Almost everything I like to eat, I discovered, has seeds in it. Raspberry seeds in my breakfast jam, cucumber seeds in my lunch salad, pepper seeds in my dinner salsa. It was, however, easy to "avoid consuming red or purple products" (shudder) on the liquid diet days.

There's nothing I have less equanimity about than food. It's downright weird -- given that I've had plenty of food, all my life -- how screwed up I am about it. The levels of anxiety I have when facing any minor restriction to my diet would be appropriate to someone who had faced starvation multiple times: for someone who's lived in dietary luxury all his life, it's really rather repulsive: possibly the thing about myself I am most ashamed of.

So anyway. Now -- having just had my breakfast with raspberry jam -- I am as happy as a buttered clam. I am in my fifties. My "rout of passage rite of passage," as Martha was pleased to call it, is over.

Purity of Intention

My eyes are drawn to a curious photograph:
West Point cadets, a coffin, scarlet sashes;

On the shelves a book on The Howitzer
A nervous dog named Monty -- it all adds up,

And I know why I am so comfortable.
I love military people. Like Tibetan monks,

They live in the close awareness of death
And it gives them a practical, matter of fact

Approach to things. No fuss about getting naked;
We're here for a massage, for heaven's sake.

Harder here. Do there again. Some more pressure
Right there: ah. That's good.

No ceremony on leaving. She's off to take a bath
And I let myself out of the well-ordered house;

Grateful for the clarity, the demarcation,
The purity of intention.

Hapsburg

A crumbling old imperium
Limping into the Twentieth Century;
I am provided with an arrogant
Incompetent bureaucracy, officered
By martinets. The order to mobilize,
We are told, went out in fifteen
Languages. Beneath it all, paying taxes,
Are the Serbs and Croats and Italians of my soul,
The Czechs and balances, slovens and Slovenes,
Albanians, Dalmatians, and pit bulls of my heart.

This is the empire of my self, the fifth wheel
Of Europe. Here in Vienna, impossibly,
Beautiful music is still made, pastries concocted,
Stunning pictures are painted in gold and crimson.
Here Dr Freud shocks sensibilities, finds himself
Unable to read Shakespeare, knowing as he does
The real secrets of the heart.

Let me only come under the spell of a vigorous,
Simpleminded Kaiser, and the end will begin;
The loans will come due all at once, the fragile
Eggshell of the dynasty will smash.
I await a blundering, inarticulate
Assassin: who unable to hold the steel barrel
Steady, will fire, convulsively, more
By accident than by design. All the king's horses
Will not put my spirit together again. The cracks
Run every which way, branching, tracing,
Fragmenting. This fractal shell
Patterned in elaborate destruction: I
Am finished.

Intakes

I have deeply mixed feelings about doing intake interviews. I have the forms I made up, a long checklist of things (diabetes, warts, asthma, etc., etc., on and on for two pages) for the client to fill out and sign. Legally I have to do something of the sort. I'm often glad to know about the stuff people fill in. But it feels aggressive and intrusive to me, and an unfortunate way to start a therapeutic relationship. I soften it by saying, "this is just a checklist, to remind you if there's anything you want me to know about." But it brings the air of the medical office with it, hints at the capricious authoritarian rule of insurance companies, brings in the whole label-and-dismiss atmosphere that has displaced healing in our world. I hate it. It says, "you might sue me, and God help us both if you do."

(As it happens, massage therapists are very seldom sued: the cheapness of my liability insurance was a pleasant surprise. But still, that's the world we live in.)

One of the reasons I dislike it is that it throws a wrench into things right at the beginning. In general my policy would be, if the client says something about it, they want me to do something about it. But do they? If they put "bipolar disorder" or "depression" under "major illnesses" -- should I assume they just wrote it down because they're conscientiously filling out a form (or possibly even under the impression that they're legally obliged to mention it?) Or should I say -- "where do you feel that in your body? How can I lay hands on it and ease it?" -- which seems to me a perfectly rational thing to say, but would probably strike a lot of people as nonsense, if not mockery.

The information is genuinely useful, and people wouldn't bring most of it up if they weren't nudged by the forms. Still I'd like to find a good way of saying, "if you feel like it's none of my damn business, then it's probably not. Don't tell me anything you don't feel like telling me." I don't feel that being someone's masseur entitles me to know their whole medical history. The whole medical model of massage -- the idea that massage is a treatment for a disorder -- seems to me a very unfortunate, ill-fitting one. Every once in a while, sure. Someone will get off the table and say "wow, my back pain is just gone." Which makes me very happy, although I know that it will probably return, and that half an hour in a hot tub would very likely have had the same effect. What makes massage special is not its medical efficacy, which is not particularly impressive, but the fact that it's shared; a physical intimacy, but one that doesn't make demands and provisos. We're just so damned lonely in our bodies, stranded in them. Nobody cares about the tension in your shoulders, not your doctor, not your lover, not your friends; not unless you're very very lucky. Not the way a massage therapist cares about it. Not so as to take it on, to feel it as their own business, to want to know it with their own body, undo it with their own hands. It's not so much that we can make the tension go away. Maybe we can and maybe we can't. It's the fact that we're interested, that we want to know all about it, that it's worth all of our attention and love. That's what makes massage special. For once the body is getting its due, for once it's being treated as if it was something important in its own right, as if its comfort and pleasure was something that mattered.

I am glad that Buddhism gives me a place to stand, here. I'd feel this way anyway, but the Dharma gives me a vocabulary for it. That every person is infinitely precious, a buddha. I want to bring the same attention and devotion to every massage that I'd bring to washing the Buddha's feet. Because that's really what it is, really the truth of the matter. Every thing that lives is holy. Contempt and disregard aren't realism, they're ignorance.

I think what I love about massage is that I feel that, during a massage, I am able to attend to people with the reverence and intensity that makes sense to me, that has always made sense to me, but which is generally considered inappropriate in the (sogenannt) real world.

Dwelling in the Body

I read the books -- I've just been paging through Beck's Therapeutic Massage -- with some impatience. This is a field in which what you can learn from books is limited. I learn most from two things: getting massage, and massaging myself, and thinking about it. When I'm going to work on someone the next day, I lie in bed and try things out. What ways of opening the chest are there? What feels good and right, what awkward and bad? How should a person breathe while I'm pressing in on the ribs?

A wonderful thing about massage school, all along, was that our own bodies were always there for a cheat-sheet, and our teachers were enlightened enough to encourage us to use them. Where does the pronator teres attach? Well, take hold of it and feel it bulge as you pronate the forearm, and find out. It's all right there.

If I have a mission as a therapist, it's to encourage people to explore their own bodies. It's a variation on the theme that I keep returning to: to dwell in our lives, instead of camping in them. Applied to the body, it's: live in this body, here, now, not the perfect body we ought to have or will have. There's so much that can be done to open it, to release what's tight and stuck, to relieve what's suffering. What I was trying to get at a week or two ago, clumsily, is just that the shame so many of us have about the body makes us stupid about it. It makes us neglect to learn the simplest things about it, to take the simplest steps to make it work more comfortably, rest more deeply. It's a profoundly malleable system, in many many ways. Losing thirty pounds may be beyond the power of most of us, but learning to sit untwisted, with nice support for our arms and lumbar spine, is not. Finding our own trigger points and working them out it is simple and pleasurable. Stretching out comfortably -- not trying to lengthen anything or force anything, but just stretching, like a cat -- is almost always an option.

But we'll do none of those things if we're holding our body, as it were, at arm's length. We have to be inside it, be noticing it, and be kindly toward it.

Before I went to massage school I was in physical pain or discomfort, probably, more often than not. The spooky thing is that I didn't even know it. I wasn't paying attention. It becomes normal: the stiff neck, the aching lumbar spine, the shoulders hunched forward, the head thrust down, the breathing rapid and shallow. I didn't realize that I was uncomfortable; I didn't check in often enough to know. I came to think of it as normal that closing my eyes brought relief from a burning sensation, that lying down made my low back gratefully but gingerly let go a desperate clutch.

I used to look at middle-aged or old people, with their bowed shoulders and forward-thrust heads and leaden gait, and wonder how they got that way. Now I know precisely how they got that way.

The body does wear out, no matter what you do. I've no patience with the prophets of eternal youth -- it's another part of the shame culture; now you're supposed to be ashamed of being old, as well as of being fat and wrong-shaped. That's not what I'm getting at. What I'm getting at is a basic attitude of kindliness and openness to the body. Listening to it. Assuming from the start that what hurts hurts for a good reason, and that's there's something you can do for it. Maybe it has to hurt. If so, by all means, bring out your stoicism and just cope. But only after you've explored it and found out what it really is, thought about what you do that makes it better and what you do that makes it worse, after you've experimented with manipulating it, and moving and sitting and resting in different ways. No one else has access to anything like your wealth of information about your own body. It will talk to you, if you'll talk to it.

Pull

The river pulls under the Hawthorne bridge
On its way to the Columbia. The same river
You can see from the high windows of the hospital
Where I was born, a hundred miles south of here.
The Willamette. It runs through a country of
extraordinary fertility before
It empties into the Columbia, and the two
Together make their last crook to the sea.

It runs green higher up and swift,
Brown lower down and slow. Full of poison,
Runoff from the myriad farms of the Valley;
But better than when I was young,
And no one worried at all about poisoned rivers,
Except cranks like my Dad. It is not quite dead.
And maybe it will live someday again.

Here, under the Hawthorne Bridge, the water
Dimples and swirls against the pylons,
Cold, glossy, taciturn. How many postcards
Is it carrying, I wonder, messages written
For no one to read, messages for the river
To keep? Cruelties too deep to fathom,
Too hard to understand; glossed as
Personal failures, because
Any explanation is better than none.
The river will carry them home.

It pulls. All that water. The droplet from
The huckleberry leaf on Hardesty Mountain;
The trickle from the culvert in the shabby
Vacant lot in Cottage Grove; the dripping
Rain from the alder leaves on the dry side
Of the Coast Range. All of it pulling together,
The cool brown veins of Oregon, the blood
Running exhausted to the lungs of the sea.

Oregon. Some of my people, the ones with
The French name, came from southern France.
The neighborhood of Lyon. Settled in New Jersey.
It took three more generations to get here. Even I
Did not quite stay still, moving down the river
To Portland. But here I stay. And the river
Speaks to me. It warns me
That some things do not come back. The sea-tides
Talk of eternity, fair enough; but rivers are about
What does not return.

Which is why I stay here in the gentle country
(Though God knows it has seen cruelty enough.)
This green, green home of light through rain,
This valley where all things grow, rice and peas,
Sheep and grapes for wine, beans and strawberries;
This kind and quiet country of running streams,
Where people can afford to smile at strangers.
We face ruin here, as everywhere else. Our small
Towns are emptied of young men to fight
In cruel inexplicable countries, oceans away,
Who come back broken, hoarse, and bearded
To beg along with the Indians on Skid Road;
And the rain is cold when you have nowhere to go.

But still. A more forgiving land than most,
And anyway, it's home. I will stay here, and die here,
Having done little enough for my country, but
Having loved it anyway as it should be loved.

Upriver, to the south, under the freeway bridge,
The dragon boats glow in the watery sun,
And their paddles flash as they pull.

Stoney Moss

Portlanders Who Make Me Happy, I

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

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

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

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

As If It Mattered

songs after the wedding

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

Sometimes I wish
They had never made all the songs.

---

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

---

Listen
Don't waste time.

Opening the Heartspace

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

---

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

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

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

Defector

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welter

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

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

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

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

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

Spring

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that was in a far country

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

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

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

Come, Seeling Night

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

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

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

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

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

Garland

I'm wearing a garland of May flowers. Ashley, my daughter's partner, took it from her own head and dropped it on mine.

"Now I'm the Queen of May," I said. As to say, "Now I expect some respect."

I'm feeling much better, if not quite right. The weather has turned glorious.

Suddenly western tanagers are everywhere; in our back yard, across the street from Tosi's, in other back yards around Portland, apparently. As well as in Bonta's latest poem.

Brilliant, unstable, love-riddled, May-painted.

I loved the picture of them laughing in the wind in front of their yurt. Celibate and never more than fifteen feet apart. The precision and arbitrariness will distress some people; exactly fifteen, no more and no less. But you learn, you learn. In difficult boundaries exactness is your only hope.

The exact curve of your thigh under my hand. The way my palm rests on the saddle of your ankle, like two parts of a broken fossil finding each other again. The way the careless gray strands of hair fall across your cheek.

Last night a mosquito came in through the open door, and nuzzled my arms, lingering. I flapped my book at her, blew her away from my face. But all I was really doing was saying: bite me someplace I won't notice, dear. You don't have to go away.

Thank you for indulging my self pity! Better now, stronger.

This Denim Couch My Prison

I wonder how the abdominal muscles stay in shape for vomiting. For months, or years, I don't use them for that, but when the time comes they empty my stomach with force and alacrity, as if I'd been practicing for weeks. How do they do that?

I wonder about wanting to be elsewhere, living for the future or for the past, camping in our lives rather than dwelling in them. Is wanting to be enlightened is just another version of this wanting to be somewhere else? I think so. So the part of Dharma that's thinking about it, writing about it, arguing about it is just the same old thing. Without practice, that is. You have to start somewhere and catch hold of something.

"I want to be dead," I heard myself saying, in the throes of this sickness.

I was surprised to hear myself say that. "You mean, 'I want to be well,' don't you?" I asked.

I considered. "I can't imagine being well," I answered. "So I want to be dead."

"But you can't imagine being dead either."

"No, but I can imagine the petulance of wanting it. I can't imagine the hope of getting well."

Our neighbor on the corner planted some trees, about ten years ago, that have grown very tall: they are strangly pale, all light-gray, white, and silver. I can see them through the little window above the mantel, from this denim couch my prison.

Ugh

Virus. Nausea. Malaise. Et cetera. Had to cancel my evening appt. :-(

Sediment

Love, love, love, it settles quickly.
The brown flowerdregs of spring, the leafmold of fall:
silting into the sidewalk cracks, tamping down
this version of true.

What I Hate Even Worse

But you know what I hate even worse? It's when somebody describes pain in their feet, or their knees, or their back, and then quickly says, "I know what I really need to do is lose some weight." As if to say, "I know this is really self-inflicted, sorry to bother you with it, really I deserve to be in pain."

No. No, you don't deserve to be in pain. And an extra twenty or thirty pounds probably has nothing to do with it; an extra hundred pounds probably has nothing to do with it. (Except that you may have put on weight because moving around hurts). Skinny people have plenty of foot and knee and back trouble, trust me.

Doctors, who are generally ignorant about the causes of myofascial pain and how to deal with it*, advise people to lose weight all the time, despite the fact that nobody has a method for losing weight, in the real world, for the long term, that's very effective. It's just silly to go around saying that people ought to be able to lose weight when obviously, in the long term, most of them can't. It's not only silly, it's cruel. So you have a metaphysical doctrine that says people can control what they eat by the exertion of will power. Bully for you; you can believe whatever you like to believe; but what right have you to lay your bizarre religious doctrines on other people? People come to you for help, not for preaching. Prescribing cures that have a 5% to 10% effectiveness, at best, and then blaming people when they don't work, is not good medical practice.

There are millions of people who are suffering daily pain, sometimes excruciating, sometimes disabling pain, and doing nothing about it (except guiltily taking some pain medications and compromising their livers), because they've been told that it's their own fault, and that the only real thing they could do about would be to exert their will power and lose weight.

It's not true. None of it is true. There's nothing wrong with your will power; it works about the same as everyone else's.** Your pain isn't caused by being overweight. It isn't caused (not directly, anyway) by stress. It's caused by purely mechanical problems that have mechanical fixes: fascia that's stuck, unresolved trigger points in the muscles, bad ergonomics at work or at home, insufficient rest, nutritional deficiencies. The weight is the least of your troubles: if you miraculously dropped to your recommended weight overnight, your pain might become a bit easier to work around, but it would not go away.

* I'm sorry to keep dissing doctors. I have great respect for medical doctors; what they're good at they're very good at. But I work in a field that makes their deficiencies rather glaringly obvious. People come to me with pain that's been diagnosed as arthritic, that can't possibly be arthritic; they come to me diagnosed (correctly) with plantar fasciitis, without having been told about the most elementary stretching exercises for alleviating it. These things aren't rocket science. They're just things that doctors aren't taught to take very seriously: lives are made miserable by them, but people don't die of knee pain or plantar fasciitis.

** Nobody -- nobody -- resists overwhelming, omnipresent temptation, in the long-term. Most people who are fat are tempted to overeat that way. Most people who aren't fat aren't. I think it's likely that when we really understand the metabolic mechanisms of appetite, we'll work out how most people can live in the normal state of mild, passing, intermittent tempation, and most of us won't overeat. Heroic exertions of the will, and shame at their failure, are dear to the traditions of revealed religion, but they're not a good basis for public health.

Light

A long, long spiral of delight winds down from heaven; it kisses me between the shoulder blades. Wind stirs the lilacs and the fruit-tree branches, clotted with wet blossom. The air is sweet and something eases in my eye sockets. It's all okay.

Oh lovely, lovely, lovely: the way the biceps dives under the pec major, the way the curves of both carom off the curve of the deltoid.

---

If one more woman apologizes to me for being ten imaginary pounds overweight, I am going to scream.

1) You are not overweight
2) It would be no damn business of your massage therapist if you were
3) You are so beautiful that it makes my heart sing

Let's just get a few more things straight, while we're at it. Your ass is not too big. Your ankles are not too thick. Your legs are not the wrong length, they're not too hairy, and they're not the wrong shape. Your belly is not too large / soft / pendulous. Your skin is not too wrinkly / blemished / pimply. Your upper arms are not too flabby. Your hair is not too thin / coarse / straight / kinky. And it's not the wrong color. Oh, and your toes? They're bashed up a little and the nails aren't perfect. Neither are mine. That's because we walk around on them instead of keeping them in a box on the shelf.

Poet

You gaze bleakly from the back of the book;
your mouth the straight and bitter line
of a man who can neither nurse a grudge
nor give one up. You are a poet, which you thought

was what you wanted. We all make mistakes.
Loneliness rises from the pages like
the sour dust of old newspapers.
Immortality is a dubious achievement

if you're not sure you want to live.
I want to say: lighten up, it's only poetry
the love you have already is enough;
you're the sort of man who burns

only one bridge at a time. Take what you have.
Stop here. Compromise: philander if you must, but
lie about it like a man. The truth you serve
is no more true than a story about

how you had to work late at the office.
You only wanted to be loved. Me too: that's not
such a terrible crime. You wanted to be understood,
and that's not so terrible either, except

that you wanted to be understood on your own terms,
and that's what nobody gets. Not even poets.
Don't get me wrong. It's a beautiful book, and it taught me
Cautiously to love you.

But stop here. Stop cultivating
desolation. It grows fast enough in waste ground
all by itself.

Feed Your Horse First

It's a delight too to work on a perfectly healthy body: I thrust my hands under her back and it was easy, everything ran so free; her spine rose like a dolphin; nothing was stuck, nothing was guarded. Oh, there was a bit to do in the pecs and the abdominals; sore hamstrings; but mostly it was a body in perfect working order: young, soft, strong, fluid and malleable.

I admire bodies in a new way, now. I ogle shoulder girdles: "lovely," I think, "all the room in the world between the clavicle and the ribs. No thoracic outlet syndrome for her!" A scapula with full range of motion entrances me. Someone looks gracefully back over his shoulder and I think, "If you knew, if you only knew, what a blessing it is to be able to do that, and how many people can't!"

Sunday was an exasperating day: I had to turn two prospective clients away because I was scheduled for the afternoon, and then my afternoon appointment cancelled. So I was grumpy, and it was lucky that I had yesterday's lovely massage to restore my spirits.

---

I was reading Polka Dot Witch's tuesday confession: she wrote that her back was killing her and she wouldn't go see a doctor. I was about to write a Dutch uncle comment, telling her to take care of it right away, when I realized that I myself was sitting there with a crick in my neck and stiffness in my back. Physician, heal thyself!

So I put down the laptop and went into the massage / shrine room and took out that most magnificent creation of modern civilization, the tennis ball.

Got down on the floor on my back and slipped the ball underneath, and gradually worked it up and down the paraspinals on both sides. Oh, my God, it was glorious. And then stood up and leaned against it to work the upper traps and lev scaps, the neck and shoulder muscles. Wonderful. Now I can go talk like a Dutch uncle to the Witch. I wouldn't go see a doctor about my back -- what do doctors know about backs? But I'd do something about it right now, right away.

I've had a rule of thumb for twenty years. It's like the cowboy's rule of "feed your horse first"; it's "take care of the body first." If my back and my emotional life and my work and my spiritual practice are all wrecks, my back is what I should attend to first. I've often regretted deviating from that rule, but I've never regretted following it.

---

You know what's wrong with 21st Century Americans? They won't do preparation, maintenance or repair. I had huge resistance to riding a bicycle rather than driving, and it wasn't anything to do with the extra time or the extra exposure to the weather. The resistance was to the few simple acts of preparation at the start -- putting on the helmet and the velcro doo-dad to keep my pants-leg out of the chain, putting on gloves if it was cold, settling my backpack in the rear basket and putting a waterproof cover over it. A total of two or three minutes, and it was, till I got used to it, almost unendurable to me. Because it made me feel stupid, a doofus, a loser, to prepare like that. And then I had to take the things off and lock up the bike when I got to my destination. I'm not sure where that sense of shame comes from, but I wouldn't underestimate its influence on what we choose to do. I have a similar resistance to adjusting the brakes on the bike. The tension gradually goes off them, and I have to adjust them. A slight nuisance, a few minutes' work every few weeks: but it looms ridiculously large, and I always wait until the brakes are dangerously soft before doing it. And my impulse is to want to buy a new bicycle rather than spend -- what? maybe half an hour a year? on maintenance. I'm tempted to spend $600 rather than do a half-hour's work.

Notice that the emotion here is shame. A sense that if preparation, maintenance, or repair is needed it means that I've been caught out, found wanting.

Disobediences

From her secret heart at home come crawling
Disobediences, clinging with tacky feet
To the hivestick, struggling with honey, betrayed
By their fellow insects. Six legs
Are all the better for snaring.

Jeans that seemed to fit at the store
Refuse to budge; his wriggling hand
Can neither advance nor retreat; her own smell
Disgusts her. But weakened by desire,

Weakened by the way things never work,
Everything breaks, everyone lies, she will
Just this once, just for now, give up:
If he can get the jeans off, good luck to him.
She'll make up a story when the time comes.

It wasn't supposed to be this way
But she always knew it would.
It wasn't supposed to be this way
But she always knew it would.

On My Fifth Blogday

I started this blog on May 2nd, 2003: five years and a day ago.

I can discern three loose and overlapping phases to it. At first it was a practice journal, primarily about Buddhism and the Vajrayana.

Then came the Laupe phase, in which that community of spiritually-minded writers became a home and a refuge, and gave me room to think through and come to grips with worldly discontents, and to make some radical wordly changes. My practice had been serving partly as a way of putting off setting my house in order. But practice is lousy for that: it keeps bringing you face to face with what's there. What was there, was that I was working at something I had no stake in, with people to whom I felt no connection, in order to maintain a prosperity that I didn't think was really doing me or my dependents any good.

So, borrowing courage from my Laupe friends, I quit IBM, and went to massage school. The first day of class, when we were asked to say a bit about why we were there, I looked around at all the twenty-year-olds and said, "I'm here because I've wanted to do this for... well, for longer than most of you have been alive."

Practice took a back seat. Which was appropriate. The support I felt here -- and leaned on very heavily -- was extraordinary. I'm very grateful to you.

In the last couple years, things have changed yet again. I've taken to reading and writing poetry. I've always read and loved old poetry, but my interest peaked at Shakespeare, and tailed off: the only "moderns" I cared much for were Yeats and Eliot. That, as far as I was concerned, was the end of English poetry.

One of my favorite blogs, discovered early in my blog existence, had been Via Negativa, by Dave Bonta. I loved the range of his thought, his openness, his eye for detail, his kindness, his refusal to prettify. But he did a queer thing. He wrote poems. Just as if no one had ever told him that poetry was a dead language, as if he thought people still wrote in it. And they were good poems. Beautifully made things that held the best of his thought and his eye.

I didn't know quite what to make of this aberrant behavior. It took me a while to credit the fact that I was reading contemporary poetry, for pleasure, just as I might read Chaucer or Donne. I found I was reading other blog-poets with pleasure too. And, with a sense that I was doing something rather ridiculous and spurious, I started writing poems myself. To my astonishment, people read them. Not as many people. My poems generally garner about half the comments that my prose posts do, and I reckon that probably corresponds roughly to how much they're read. But people read them and responded to them.

I don't think I'm a very good poet. I think I'm a good prose stylist, in a somewhat heavy and elaborate way: but I don't really think in verse, mostly. I've written a few good poems and a lot of not very good ones. I don't think of myself as a poet. I don't want to be a poet. But I do want to read and write poems.

And so we're in the third phase. Bonafide poetry blogs have started to show up on my blogroll. At some point I'm probably going to collect together a print-on-demand book of my poems. At the same time, Portlanders, some of them poets, are starting to show up in my blogroll. And the distance between my blog persona and my real-life persona continues to erode. I feel that I'm just too old, now, to maintain pretenses. If people don't like who I am, that's tough. This is it, this is who I am, this is what I'm doing in the world.

And also at the same time I'm increasingly turning back to Buddhism and meditation. I have lower expectations of it now, I guess: it's more a matter of spiritual hygiene for me, now, than a way to escape the human condition. It's not going to change my life, and I don't ask it to. It's a way of touching base. I meditate now because when I stop, my mind deteriorates: it becomes more anxious, obsessive, compulsive and narrow. I don't think I have a lot more to say about it. Not at the moment. A lot of my ideation about it, the stuff I wrote in the early years of this blog, seems to me now a little overwrought and overstated. And I didn't fully understand, then, how many other ways there are of unwinding confusion: in particular, my tradition of Buddhism undervalues the role the body can play in it, as drastically as mainstream American Christianity does. (See Maria's fascinating commentaries on the yoga sutras of Patanjali.)

But still, Buddhism is the center of my life, and my practice community is KCC -- Kagyu Changchub Chuling -- even if only some twenty percent of the people now there have any idea who I am. I need a holy space: I need people to join me in prostrations, to mumble prayers to the three jewels, and dedications of merit, in that rather dreary monotone that comes of imitating the drone of Tibetan prayer in a language that has no tonal variation. It is something to sit in a roomful of people who are, momentarily, determined to end the suffering of every single sentient being in the universe. That's absurdity on a grand scale: that's the kind of silliness without which we can't be fully human.

So. Thank you, old friends and new, for walking with me in this virtual space, and loaning me your courage and your insight. Thank you. That this experience could be so rich was, like most blessings, wholly unexpected.

Sick, Injured, Deformed

When I was in massage school, and thought about the kind of practice I wanted to have, I pictured primarily relaxation massage and maybe sports massage: working on healthy bodies, tuning them up a little, helping them rest. With some shame, I owned to myself that working on sick, injured, or deformed people just scared me too much. I hate hurting people; the idea of blundering and making something worse appalled me; and from childhood I've averted my eyes from injury and deformity. I knew that these people needed massage all the more, but I thought that I wouldn't be able to face it. Someone else would have to do those massages.

The experience has been the opposite of what I expected. I find that I love working on injuries. I love tuning my touch to what someone with Crohn's or fibromyalgia or CFS can handle. Helping someone with cancer do the delicate work of flushing the chemo back out of the tissue is something that gives me great satisfaction. I work happily with scars. It's startling how wrong I was about how I'd feel about these things. People comment on how confidently I approach injuries: "my other therapist was basically afraid to touch it," they say.

And I find that doing the work has radically changed how I respond to the sick, injured, or deformed that I meet in my daily life. I no longer avert my gaze. I'm thinking about what they might need, how I might approach touching them. And I think now that the instinctive aversion was not at all what I thought it was, and nothing I needed to be ashamed of. It was the instinct to touch and explore and help running smack into the deeply ingrained injunctions not to look -- not to notice -- to pretend nothing was wrong. It wasn't disgust. It was baffled tenderness.

And when you actually work with something, it becomes clear that what's extraordinary isn't the injury, the tumor, or the weakness. What's extraordinary is the heroism with which the body is rising to its challenge, how determined it is to find the workarounds, how tenderly it cradles and protects its healing parts.

There's always something you can do. That's another thing I hadn't really understood. Just to lightly rest your hand on an injured place, and let the warmth and light soak into it, and and let it shine back from it into your hand -- that's therapy. It says, to the broken limb or the radiation-seared tissue, you still belong in the human world, you still can give and receive love.

Bodies, even officially healthy bodies, rot and stink and decay. It's going on all the time. We don't need to hide it or ignore it. We don't need to make it something that isolates us. We can make it a ground of love. We had better make it a ground of love, in fact; because it's the only ground we have.