Due
Light spilling across the dark lawn. Laughter. We could hide, now, till morning, wrapped in a warm September night.
You told me all promises have a due date. What of this last, traced in shaky letters on yellowed paper?
You told me how you'd stow away in his car. Had to be some way to get him to take you home. But desire leans always away from the sun, into the dark. Have another sip.
Fire in the mouth, a little lambent flame running on the lips. Vodka, my lord and savior.
I could tell you secrets, little one. But they have due dates as well.
I saw two lovers on the plaza, this morning, glowing, perfectly suffused with each other, carelessly kindly inclined to all the world. We can't have ever been that young. Can we?
Drink up. Drunks have due dates too.
It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said 'Bother!' and 'O blow!' and also 'Hang spring-cleaning!' and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat.
------------ Kenneth Grahame
Sunday, September 26, 2004
Thursday, September 23, 2004
Being a Boy
A woman with short dark hair, a little gray, walked lightly over to where I sat on the stage, and briskly motioned me to make room. I obligingly scooted over. She hopped up beside me, nestled up to me, and hugged me with one arm. She said something I didn't catch to her girlfriend, and they laughed. Then she squeezed my thigh and said, "I'm Lori"
"Dale," I said, grinning at her. I liked her faded jeans and jaunty walk; I liked her wire-rimmed glasses; and I liked what she later called her "presumption."
She leaned into me again. "I'm fifty."
I looked at her questioningly. The squares were forming in front of us: the people who really knew how to square dance were going to show us what it looked like after you actually knew what you were doing. I wasn't sure I'd heard her -- the caller was starting to speak.
"I'm fifty. I turn fifty day after tomorrow. I'm trying to get used to it by saying it a lot."
On the floor, Moria was in her element, being a boy again.
"You'll have to decide if you're a boy or a girl," she'd said.
"Is there a difference? I mean, is what you do different?" I asked.
"Not really very much. It's more like, if you're on the left, you're a boy, if you're on the right, you're a girl. Some things are different. Being a girl is a little more... twirly."
"I think I'll be a boy then," I said. I've never been very swift about having to decide which is my right and which is my left, on the spur of the moment; I didn't want to add twirling to my troubles.
So when we arrived Moria was a girl, so she could partner me, even though she's usually a boy.
It had taken some doing to get me here, and she was going to do anything she could to ease me into it gently. For fifteen years, Martha and I have been planning to start folk-dancing. We've written start times into our calendar. And we've always chickened out at the last minute. Too tired. Too overwhelmed. Something else came up. Always perfectly true and legitimate, of course, but it was obvious that really we were just too shy.
And now I was having a tremendously good time. Moria carefully refrained from saying "I told you so."
Gay square dancing. The first time I heard of it, it struck me as irresistably comic. It's a big thing, though. There are scads of clubs, and they have a huge yearly convention. And now I could see why.
It's a grand opportunity, of course, to put on different gender, and a few people were clearly enjoying it that way. But mostly it was two things dovetailing: the relief at escaping hetero hegemony, and the inclusiveness of the square dance.
I'm sure there are square dance competitions and square dance ambitions and rivalries somewhere, but there's something terribly democractic and inclusive about the dancing itself. It's an invitation to have fun as a regular person. Even someone right-and-left-challenged like me can do it. If you're fit enough to walk around the block a couple times, you can do it. And doing it perfectly doesn't mean standing out -- it means exactly the opposite. It means making it especially easy for everyone else.
Add to that all the fun of hetero role-playing, and flirtation, with none of the cutthroat seriousness of its usual hierarchizing into levels of attractiveness, and you get something very lovely. There were a couple stout middle-aged women there, who were radiantly happy, loving the dance, and at the end of the evening I realized, I don't think I have ever before spent two hours socially with stout middle-aged women without once hearing any of them apologize for being stout and middle-aged.
A woman with short dark hair, a little gray, walked lightly over to where I sat on the stage, and briskly motioned me to make room. I obligingly scooted over. She hopped up beside me, nestled up to me, and hugged me with one arm. She said something I didn't catch to her girlfriend, and they laughed. Then she squeezed my thigh and said, "I'm Lori"
"Dale," I said, grinning at her. I liked her faded jeans and jaunty walk; I liked her wire-rimmed glasses; and I liked what she later called her "presumption."
She leaned into me again. "I'm fifty."
I looked at her questioningly. The squares were forming in front of us: the people who really knew how to square dance were going to show us what it looked like after you actually knew what you were doing. I wasn't sure I'd heard her -- the caller was starting to speak.
"I'm fifty. I turn fifty day after tomorrow. I'm trying to get used to it by saying it a lot."
On the floor, Moria was in her element, being a boy again.
"You'll have to decide if you're a boy or a girl," she'd said.
"Is there a difference? I mean, is what you do different?" I asked.
"Not really very much. It's more like, if you're on the left, you're a boy, if you're on the right, you're a girl. Some things are different. Being a girl is a little more... twirly."
"I think I'll be a boy then," I said. I've never been very swift about having to decide which is my right and which is my left, on the spur of the moment; I didn't want to add twirling to my troubles.
So when we arrived Moria was a girl, so she could partner me, even though she's usually a boy.
It had taken some doing to get me here, and she was going to do anything she could to ease me into it gently. For fifteen years, Martha and I have been planning to start folk-dancing. We've written start times into our calendar. And we've always chickened out at the last minute. Too tired. Too overwhelmed. Something else came up. Always perfectly true and legitimate, of course, but it was obvious that really we were just too shy.
And now I was having a tremendously good time. Moria carefully refrained from saying "I told you so."
Gay square dancing. The first time I heard of it, it struck me as irresistably comic. It's a big thing, though. There are scads of clubs, and they have a huge yearly convention. And now I could see why.
It's a grand opportunity, of course, to put on different gender, and a few people were clearly enjoying it that way. But mostly it was two things dovetailing: the relief at escaping hetero hegemony, and the inclusiveness of the square dance.
I'm sure there are square dance competitions and square dance ambitions and rivalries somewhere, but there's something terribly democractic and inclusive about the dancing itself. It's an invitation to have fun as a regular person. Even someone right-and-left-challenged like me can do it. If you're fit enough to walk around the block a couple times, you can do it. And doing it perfectly doesn't mean standing out -- it means exactly the opposite. It means making it especially easy for everyone else.
Add to that all the fun of hetero role-playing, and flirtation, with none of the cutthroat seriousness of its usual hierarchizing into levels of attractiveness, and you get something very lovely. There were a couple stout middle-aged women there, who were radiantly happy, loving the dance, and at the end of the evening I realized, I don't think I have ever before spent two hours socially with stout middle-aged women without once hearing any of them apologize for being stout and middle-aged.
Monday, September 20, 2004
Why I'm not on the Street
A post of Beth's, about some research purporting to demonstrate that street protests are effective, spurred me to think about my reasons for not (usually) protesting. I don't say these are good reasons -- except maybe for the third, they're not. But here they are.
1. I'm enough of a Marxist still to look first at the material conditions when I'm trying to explain anything. I hate the physical activity of protesting. I hate standing on pavement, and I hate walking slowly. Much more than I dislike, say, painting fences or digging ditches. I don't go to museums -- which you would think, given my proclivities, I would adore -- because that's what you have to do in them. Stand, or shuffle slowly along. It makes me want to scream.
2. I hate having words put in my mouth. I'm pathologically averse to it. I have a bone to pick with virtually every chanted slogan and every protest banner, and the fact that someone could take a video of me and legitimately impute those sentiments to me makes me feel ill. There may be no ego-territory I clutch harder than "I'm a man who chooses his words carefully, and stands by them."
3. I hate it when the members of a group get together and tell each other how right they are, and how wrong some other group is. It's precisely this habit that has produced most of the evils I might want to protest. Why would I want to participate in yet more of it? It's like trying to put out a fire by throwing gasoline on it.
There are other reasons, or excuses. I find it very difficult to believe that standing around in a crowd is really an efficient use of my time for any purpose. I dislike crowds at all times. I have always considered that the real purpose of protests is to encourage the protesters, and since protests profoundly discourage and disgust me, I've thought it counter-productive for me to attend them.
It distresses me to earn a poor opinion from Beth and the rest who have commented on how apathetic and unmotivated and generally dim those of us who don't protest are. I'm sorry that you read it as a lack of support and conviction. But I don't think you're going to see me on the streets.
A post of Beth's, about some research purporting to demonstrate that street protests are effective, spurred me to think about my reasons for not (usually) protesting. I don't say these are good reasons -- except maybe for the third, they're not. But here they are.
1. I'm enough of a Marxist still to look first at the material conditions when I'm trying to explain anything. I hate the physical activity of protesting. I hate standing on pavement, and I hate walking slowly. Much more than I dislike, say, painting fences or digging ditches. I don't go to museums -- which you would think, given my proclivities, I would adore -- because that's what you have to do in them. Stand, or shuffle slowly along. It makes me want to scream.
2. I hate having words put in my mouth. I'm pathologically averse to it. I have a bone to pick with virtually every chanted slogan and every protest banner, and the fact that someone could take a video of me and legitimately impute those sentiments to me makes me feel ill. There may be no ego-territory I clutch harder than "I'm a man who chooses his words carefully, and stands by them."
3. I hate it when the members of a group get together and tell each other how right they are, and how wrong some other group is. It's precisely this habit that has produced most of the evils I might want to protest. Why would I want to participate in yet more of it? It's like trying to put out a fire by throwing gasoline on it.
There are other reasons, or excuses. I find it very difficult to believe that standing around in a crowd is really an efficient use of my time for any purpose. I dislike crowds at all times. I have always considered that the real purpose of protests is to encourage the protesters, and since protests profoundly discourage and disgust me, I've thought it counter-productive for me to attend them.
It distresses me to earn a poor opinion from Beth and the rest who have commented on how apathetic and unmotivated and generally dim those of us who don't protest are. I'm sorry that you read it as a lack of support and conviction. But I don't think you're going to see me on the streets.
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Rain
Always when the rain comes in September, and the dark skies -- you don't know dark skies, till you've lived here -- my heart lifts. Dreamtime again. Soft short days that barely open before they're closing again, the silver and slate sky that glimmers in the wet pavement, smell of wet earth, the drumming of the rain. I love this country. The maritime northwest. I love it beyond all reason. I've been in many beautiful places, but I've never thought seriously of living anwhere but here. This place has a softness, a tenderness, a quietness to it. Not silence, like the silence of the desert, or of the high mountains. Those are silences that can be overwhelming, even terrifying. Never that quiet here. When all the other sounds are still, there's always somewhere the trickle of water or the sough of the wind in fir-needles.
Just a quietness.
The forests are gone. Oh, there's still places called forests, vast quilted stretches of scrubby little third-growth douglas firs, like crowds of gawky teenagers hanging around the edge of a dance floor. And deer flourish, and even bear and mountain lions manage to scrape by there. But the forests of my childhood, the endless old growth that you could drive through for hours -- that's all gone. Except for patches. And the whole point of the old growth forest was that it was huge, and dark, and ancient. These new forests are just trees, trees on sunny slash-littered hillsides.
I watched them cut down. We were in the woods all the time, when I was a kid -- my Dad being a science teacher and an avid hiker and climber. In those days every third vehicle on the mountain roads was a log truck, hurtling recklessly down from the hills. They typically carried three logs. That's how many of the old doug fir trunks could fit on a truck -- just three. Sometimes it was only one. Now the occasional log truck comes by, with a load of scrawny trees, like a bundle of kindling. They drive slower and more carefully than they used to. Dwindled, in every respect.
But -- stricken as this country is -- it is still the land of the long winter dreamtime, of the endless rain, the gleam of wet bark, the swish of tires through gutters, a sighing, soft-singing land. I love it more now than ever. On our vacation we drove to Mary's Peak, which overlooks the whole Willamette Valley. High summer, and still so much was green -- brilliant green moss and smoky blue-green noble firs, vine maple just beginning to turn, and of course the inevitable dusky green of the doug firs, the backdrop of any Western Oregon landscape. Ungainly trees, with an odd back-and forth swoop in the growth of their branches, haphazard and disheveled-looking. They're meant to be deep forest trees, and they always look a little embarassed when they're out in the open, caught outside in their housecoats.
Oregon has never aspired to greatness. It's a place of ordinary people living unapologetically ordinary lives. We have no history to speak of. Nothing has ever really happened here, and none of us wants anything to happen here. The native peoples dwindled here more quietly, maybe, than anywhere else. There are places called "Battle Creek," and so forth, but you know it's just where a few people took potshots at each other and then thought better of it and slunk away. The Modoc, who did fight, a few score of them anyway, were way down south by the California border. The Nez Perce wandered through the Northeast corner only briefly. In school we were taught about Lewis and Clark and the heroic pioneers, but I don't think anyone took it very seriously. There are still pioneers around -- at least there were when I was a kid -- and they were just cranky people who couldn't get along with anyone else, and kept on moving to the next place where people wouldn't mess with them, where this time they were going to get rich, they had a new idea, they'd get shut of their bad luck this time, you just wait and see. It's moderately interesting to move to the middle of nowhere and scrape up a living somehow -- certainly damned uncomfortable. But heroic? Nah.
So the winter comes again. We have no Fall here, not usually. The rains just set in, battering the maple and oak leaves off the trees before they've even had a chance to turn yellow. It's winter now, as much winter as we ever have. Dreamtime. It rains, now, forever, till sometime, suddenly, long after we've forgotten there ever is such a thing, it will be summer again.
Always when the rain comes in September, and the dark skies -- you don't know dark skies, till you've lived here -- my heart lifts. Dreamtime again. Soft short days that barely open before they're closing again, the silver and slate sky that glimmers in the wet pavement, smell of wet earth, the drumming of the rain. I love this country. The maritime northwest. I love it beyond all reason. I've been in many beautiful places, but I've never thought seriously of living anwhere but here. This place has a softness, a tenderness, a quietness to it. Not silence, like the silence of the desert, or of the high mountains. Those are silences that can be overwhelming, even terrifying. Never that quiet here. When all the other sounds are still, there's always somewhere the trickle of water or the sough of the wind in fir-needles.
Just a quietness.
The forests are gone. Oh, there's still places called forests, vast quilted stretches of scrubby little third-growth douglas firs, like crowds of gawky teenagers hanging around the edge of a dance floor. And deer flourish, and even bear and mountain lions manage to scrape by there. But the forests of my childhood, the endless old growth that you could drive through for hours -- that's all gone. Except for patches. And the whole point of the old growth forest was that it was huge, and dark, and ancient. These new forests are just trees, trees on sunny slash-littered hillsides.
I watched them cut down. We were in the woods all the time, when I was a kid -- my Dad being a science teacher and an avid hiker and climber. In those days every third vehicle on the mountain roads was a log truck, hurtling recklessly down from the hills. They typically carried three logs. That's how many of the old doug fir trunks could fit on a truck -- just three. Sometimes it was only one. Now the occasional log truck comes by, with a load of scrawny trees, like a bundle of kindling. They drive slower and more carefully than they used to. Dwindled, in every respect.
But -- stricken as this country is -- it is still the land of the long winter dreamtime, of the endless rain, the gleam of wet bark, the swish of tires through gutters, a sighing, soft-singing land. I love it more now than ever. On our vacation we drove to Mary's Peak, which overlooks the whole Willamette Valley. High summer, and still so much was green -- brilliant green moss and smoky blue-green noble firs, vine maple just beginning to turn, and of course the inevitable dusky green of the doug firs, the backdrop of any Western Oregon landscape. Ungainly trees, with an odd back-and forth swoop in the growth of their branches, haphazard and disheveled-looking. They're meant to be deep forest trees, and they always look a little embarassed when they're out in the open, caught outside in their housecoats.
Oregon has never aspired to greatness. It's a place of ordinary people living unapologetically ordinary lives. We have no history to speak of. Nothing has ever really happened here, and none of us wants anything to happen here. The native peoples dwindled here more quietly, maybe, than anywhere else. There are places called "Battle Creek," and so forth, but you know it's just where a few people took potshots at each other and then thought better of it and slunk away. The Modoc, who did fight, a few score of them anyway, were way down south by the California border. The Nez Perce wandered through the Northeast corner only briefly. In school we were taught about Lewis and Clark and the heroic pioneers, but I don't think anyone took it very seriously. There are still pioneers around -- at least there were when I was a kid -- and they were just cranky people who couldn't get along with anyone else, and kept on moving to the next place where people wouldn't mess with them, where this time they were going to get rich, they had a new idea, they'd get shut of their bad luck this time, you just wait and see. It's moderately interesting to move to the middle of nowhere and scrape up a living somehow -- certainly damned uncomfortable. But heroic? Nah.
So the winter comes again. We have no Fall here, not usually. The rains just set in, battering the maple and oak leaves off the trees before they've even had a chance to turn yellow. It's winter now, as much winter as we ever have. Dreamtime. It rains, now, forever, till sometime, suddenly, long after we've forgotten there ever is such a thing, it will be summer again.
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Unasked
If anyone were to ask -- my love has only grown in the quiet. Its mark burns in the sky. A smoking shape in every tree trunk; a pattern in every water. It forms in the stirred cream of my coffee, and it patterns the rain on my windshield. In the mirror, it resolves into the threaded net of tiny capillaries in the whites of my eyes. In my lap, my hands fall carelessly into its gesture.
Not to worry. No one will ask.
If anyone were to ask -- my love has only grown in the quiet. Its mark burns in the sky. A smoking shape in every tree trunk; a pattern in every water. It forms in the stirred cream of my coffee, and it patterns the rain on my windshield. In the mirror, it resolves into the threaded net of tiny capillaries in the whites of my eyes. In my lap, my hands fall carelessly into its gesture.
Not to worry. No one will ask.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Fretting
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me
For now hath time made me his numb'ring clock
Heaped clouds, wet pavement. If wishes were kisses, we'd all make out. Spurred, galled, and tired. But in a mood to go down swinging. At least sometimes.
Oakridge, where the vultures wheel over the empty railway tunnel. That's where Tori is, somewhere, wielding a pulaski and restoring mountain-bike and horse-trails. She who's never ridden either in her life. She's been gone two nights so far, and each night I've woken in the small hours, worrying about her. But the letter I wrote her was halting and lame. Which grieves me. She, with whom I've shared almost all my favorite books -- to her I'll use awkward limping words? Apparently so.
A week in Oakridge, and then off for two weeks of serious back-country work in the mountains of Washington State. I fret. From completely sedentary to hard labor, with no transition. I advised her to do this. And I very seldom give advice. (To my kids, that is. I know, I officiously give it to bloggers all the time.) Tori always makes fun of me about it, misquoting Tolkien: "Go not to the Dad for counsel, for he will say both yes and no." But this time I said yes. You love the outdoors. You want to live and work in the back-country. Go find out if you really can't do hard labor, and if you really can't work alongside people who kill bugs. This is the in-between year, the year for trying things. Whatever happens, it won't be entirely what you expect. Go find out.
And so I advised her to do something I would never have dared to do, at her age -- head off for the back country with a crew of ten strangers to live and work for five weeks. (The back-country I would have done. It's the strangers I couldn't have faced.) She was so nervous she could barely speak, when we left her.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me
For now hath time made me his numb'ring clock
Heaped clouds, wet pavement. If wishes were kisses, we'd all make out. Spurred, galled, and tired. But in a mood to go down swinging. At least sometimes.
Oakridge, where the vultures wheel over the empty railway tunnel. That's where Tori is, somewhere, wielding a pulaski and restoring mountain-bike and horse-trails. She who's never ridden either in her life. She's been gone two nights so far, and each night I've woken in the small hours, worrying about her. But the letter I wrote her was halting and lame. Which grieves me. She, with whom I've shared almost all my favorite books -- to her I'll use awkward limping words? Apparently so.
A week in Oakridge, and then off for two weeks of serious back-country work in the mountains of Washington State. I fret. From completely sedentary to hard labor, with no transition. I advised her to do this. And I very seldom give advice. (To my kids, that is. I know, I officiously give it to bloggers all the time.) Tori always makes fun of me about it, misquoting Tolkien: "Go not to the Dad for counsel, for he will say both yes and no." But this time I said yes. You love the outdoors. You want to live and work in the back-country. Go find out if you really can't do hard labor, and if you really can't work alongside people who kill bugs. This is the in-between year, the year for trying things. Whatever happens, it won't be entirely what you expect. Go find out.
And so I advised her to do something I would never have dared to do, at her age -- head off for the back country with a crew of ten strangers to live and work for five weeks. (The back-country I would have done. It's the strangers I couldn't have faced.) She was so nervous she could barely speak, when we left her.
Sunday, September 12, 2004
Friday, September 10, 2004
How It Works
Here's how I reckon it works. In heaven, where materials science is more advanced than it is here, angels of fire and air brew up a fluid more subtle than air and more dense than gold. This substance can permeate human flesh, saturate it, as water saturates a sponge -- a sort of celestial DMSO. Angels of water and earth (it's too heavy for the others) then carry it carefully before God, who breaths on it and infuses it with joy.
Then the angels position the cauldron directly over me and tip it.
Flooded with joy and delight. Overwhelmed with it, radiant with it.
I can come up with other explanations for why I have been so deeply, wildly happy yesterday and today, but they all seem far less plausible. The occasions I can identify are so obviously inadequate to such an intense experience.
I don't have the slightest idea how my mind works.
Here's how I reckon it works. In heaven, where materials science is more advanced than it is here, angels of fire and air brew up a fluid more subtle than air and more dense than gold. This substance can permeate human flesh, saturate it, as water saturates a sponge -- a sort of celestial DMSO. Angels of water and earth (it's too heavy for the others) then carry it carefully before God, who breaths on it and infuses it with joy.
Then the angels position the cauldron directly over me and tip it.
Flooded with joy and delight. Overwhelmed with it, radiant with it.
I can come up with other explanations for why I have been so deeply, wildly happy yesterday and today, but they all seem far less plausible. The occasions I can identify are so obviously inadequate to such an intense experience.
I don't have the slightest idea how my mind works.
Thursday, September 09, 2004
Suspension
Two teenage girls complimented me on my suspenders.
One was goth'd out to the max, heavily kohled eyes, spiked collar, fingerless evening gloves, all metal and black leather. "I love your suspenders!" she shrieked. And later she called out across the lawn, "Can I have them?"
"I'm using them," I pointed out.
"Oh." Crestfallen. "Yeah."
The other was the houri of all my adolescent fantasies, a slender dark-eyed girl of indeterminate race. "Those suspenders are really cool," she said admiringly. I hope I didn't blush.
They were broad rainbow-striped suspenders, logger suspenders. I do have some cool suspenders, but these I've always thought of as a bit comical. Joke suspenders. I'll never know why they so appealed to these girls. A sixteen-year-old's sense of "cool" defies analysis. Defies my analysis, anyway.
As Sir Andrew Aguecheek might mournfully have said, "I was cool, once."
Two teenage girls complimented me on my suspenders.
One was goth'd out to the max, heavily kohled eyes, spiked collar, fingerless evening gloves, all metal and black leather. "I love your suspenders!" she shrieked. And later she called out across the lawn, "Can I have them?"
"I'm using them," I pointed out.
"Oh." Crestfallen. "Yeah."
The other was the houri of all my adolescent fantasies, a slender dark-eyed girl of indeterminate race. "Those suspenders are really cool," she said admiringly. I hope I didn't blush.
They were broad rainbow-striped suspenders, logger suspenders. I do have some cool suspenders, but these I've always thought of as a bit comical. Joke suspenders. I'll never know why they so appealed to these girls. A sixteen-year-old's sense of "cool" defies analysis. Defies my analysis, anyway.
As Sir Andrew Aguecheek might mournfully have said, "I was cool, once."
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Far Too Easily Pleased
Well. Back at work. And never have I felt more strongly, "I need a vacation."
I think maybe I don't need a vacation. I think maybe I need a dharma practice.
It was good to go to KCC last Sunday night. Michael was wonderfully unexpected. He said, "you should find some joy in your practice. In fact you should demand some joy in your practice."
C.S. Lewis wrote, in the same vein, but on a different scale:
If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
Well. Back at work. And never have I felt more strongly, "I need a vacation."
I think maybe I don't need a vacation. I think maybe I need a dharma practice.
It was good to go to KCC last Sunday night. Michael was wonderfully unexpected. He said, "you should find some joy in your practice. In fact you should demand some joy in your practice."
C.S. Lewis wrote, in the same vein, but on a different scale:
If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
Sunday, September 05, 2004
Drifting Down
Hard to start again.
I generally go backwards, when I'm on vacation. Stop meditating. Hit the taverns. Take up many more projects than I can accomplish, and fret because I can't finish them.
I guess the fact that I haven't hit the taverns, so far, is progress of a sort. If going backwards a bit more slowly can be viewed as progress. And soon I'll be back at work.
The funny thing, of course, is that while at work I imagine that I would have more time, and be less tense, and do more of the things I feel I should do (exercise, meditation), if only I didn't have to work. The reverse is true.
I have been working feverishly at my Chinese. Fashioning an elaborate system for memorizing characters. Generating pages and pages of meaningless strings of characters, as I practice, practice, practice.
-- "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?"
-- "Practice, man, practice."
But only if you practice at something you are eventually going to do for real, yes?
A scrap of tissue paper twisting slowly in the air down from the roof of 14th story of a building, riding the thermals, rippling and spinning. That's my mind, drifting away from the Dharma. It floats gradually, noiselessly, but inevitably, confusionward.
Hard to start again.
I generally go backwards, when I'm on vacation. Stop meditating. Hit the taverns. Take up many more projects than I can accomplish, and fret because I can't finish them.
I guess the fact that I haven't hit the taverns, so far, is progress of a sort. If going backwards a bit more slowly can be viewed as progress. And soon I'll be back at work.
The funny thing, of course, is that while at work I imagine that I would have more time, and be less tense, and do more of the things I feel I should do (exercise, meditation), if only I didn't have to work. The reverse is true.
I have been working feverishly at my Chinese. Fashioning an elaborate system for memorizing characters. Generating pages and pages of meaningless strings of characters, as I practice, practice, practice.
-- "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?"
-- "Practice, man, practice."
But only if you practice at something you are eventually going to do for real, yes?
A scrap of tissue paper twisting slowly in the air down from the roof of 14th story of a building, riding the thermals, rippling and spinning. That's my mind, drifting away from the Dharma. It floats gradually, noiselessly, but inevitably, confusionward.
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Friday, August 27, 2004
Grays
Day before yesterday was stormy. Yesterday the seas were still high, great breakers plunging into the half-sunk rings of basalt, the whole sea-face lathered white. Huge knots of kelp, humps of lustrous tentacles the color of ancient tarnished temple bells, lay scattered across the beach, each with its attendant cloud of beach-flies. Single bronze strands glistened on the wet sand. When I stepped on them they pressed into the sand and lay there like inset enamel.
At evening a faint white mist rose over the whole heaving mass of the sea, and the setting sun, bringing light but no trace of color, lit all the sky and foam with a pale glow, as from an exalted, intensified moon. Gull Rock hovered, a featureless oblong of dark gray, above the white sea, and off to our right the cliffs of Cape Foulweather rose, the same featureless but cleanly-outlined dark gray, against the white sky.
We have seen not only the Grays -- which, I learn with some chagrin, are not the migratory population but year-round residents; other Grays migrate past in April and November, but these ones stay put -- we have seen not only Grays but also, for the first time, Orcas, smaller and darker but far more active. Smaller spouts and that unmistakeable dorsal fin flying like a war-banner. They played in the stormwater, breaching a couple of times. What the Grays thought of them, I don't know, but I pictured them irritable but fascinated, watching the Orcas with envious contempt, like the stodgy residents of a small town invaded by a Hollywood film-crew. We saw the Orcas just that one day. They're off now, no doubt, to winter in Cancun.
Day before yesterday was stormy. Yesterday the seas were still high, great breakers plunging into the half-sunk rings of basalt, the whole sea-face lathered white. Huge knots of kelp, humps of lustrous tentacles the color of ancient tarnished temple bells, lay scattered across the beach, each with its attendant cloud of beach-flies. Single bronze strands glistened on the wet sand. When I stepped on them they pressed into the sand and lay there like inset enamel.
At evening a faint white mist rose over the whole heaving mass of the sea, and the setting sun, bringing light but no trace of color, lit all the sky and foam with a pale glow, as from an exalted, intensified moon. Gull Rock hovered, a featureless oblong of dark gray, above the white sea, and off to our right the cliffs of Cape Foulweather rose, the same featureless but cleanly-outlined dark gray, against the white sky.
We have seen not only the Grays -- which, I learn with some chagrin, are not the migratory population but year-round residents; other Grays migrate past in April and November, but these ones stay put -- we have seen not only Grays but also, for the first time, Orcas, smaller and darker but far more active. Smaller spouts and that unmistakeable dorsal fin flying like a war-banner. They played in the stormwater, breaching a couple of times. What the Grays thought of them, I don't know, but I pictured them irritable but fascinated, watching the Orcas with envious contempt, like the stodgy residents of a small town invaded by a Hollywood film-crew. We saw the Orcas just that one day. They're off now, no doubt, to winter in Cancun.
Thursday, August 19, 2004
Gone to visit the Whales
Dear friends, I'm off tomorrow to Otter Rock for a week, and then scurrying over the Cascades and across the Eastern Oregon desert for a few days more, as far as Idaho, maybe. Maybe I'll find an internet cafe in Newport or Sisters, but odds are posts will be scant or none, till September.
I'll miss you all.
We always go down to the coast at the tail-end of summer. The gray whales go by, this time of year.
Dear friends, I'm off tomorrow to Otter Rock for a week, and then scurrying over the Cascades and across the Eastern Oregon desert for a few days more, as far as Idaho, maybe. Maybe I'll find an internet cafe in Newport or Sisters, but odds are posts will be scant or none, till September.
I'll miss you all.
We always go down to the coast at the tail-end of summer. The gray whales go by, this time of year.
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Venerable Bokar Rinpoche
I never met him, but sometimes a person will shine through other people in such a way that it feels like I have.
I'll always hold Bokar Rinpoche in my heart, for the moment when Bill suddenly softened and quoted him, holding up his hand -- unconsciously, I think -- in a teaching mudra, and in a soft resonant voice said:
"Nothing to do. Just -- nothing to do."
This from a man who of course did everything, the whole nine yards of the institutional schtick. But he held on to that knowledge, that on a deeper level there was nothing that needed to be done, nothing that needed fixing; and he conveyed it to others -- pale anxious fussy foreigners from half a world away, among them.
I never met him, but sometimes a person will shine through other people in such a way that it feels like I have.
I'll always hold Bokar Rinpoche in my heart, for the moment when Bill suddenly softened and quoted him, holding up his hand -- unconsciously, I think -- in a teaching mudra, and in a soft resonant voice said:
"Nothing to do. Just -- nothing to do."
This from a man who of course did everything, the whole nine yards of the institutional schtick. But he held on to that knowledge, that on a deeper level there was nothing that needed to be done, nothing that needed fixing; and he conveyed it to others -- pale anxious fussy foreigners from half a world away, among them.
Monday, August 16, 2004
The Illuminated Quick
Where are you in your guts, your lungs, your brain?
I want to keep you from them,
separate you from them,
but I only find the vastness of your molecules,
the grace of your arteries,
held together by the illuminated quick
of your tears, your smile.
From Andi's Sixteen Verses
Tranquility, Unfound
Of course we can't find tranquility in our daily lives...because we define tranquility in a way that excludes our daily lives from it.
From Lorianne's Tranquility
One Grief
all our ancestors hanging by their dead mirrors
and the tools we invent to polish them,
leaving behind old days, thinking
the marbled water flows through one grief.
From N's Chance Self
And
And that last haunting line of N's set me thinking, what if -- what if there really is only one grief? What if time and personhood fold over, and we really come back to the same one grief, whether it's yours, or mine, or Achilles'? What if this sense of continual return is just perfectly accurate, and what we are experiencing is not new, but the hundredth return, the millionth, return, each time richer and (in this case) sadder? "You only go around once in life," says the beer commercial, and every time I hear it I think, "well, you certainly don't only go around beer commercials only once. Why should I believe what you say about life? It doesn't feel like once."
All time is irredeemable, says Eliot, if all time is equally present. I'm not sure that's true. But anyway it sort of assumes that there's only two choices: the moment is present, or eternity is present. But what if there are other choices?
Every once in a while you get someone brave or stupid enough to ask real questions, at the Sangha. One of them is -- where do all the extra modern consciousnesses come from? If there were just a few million people once upon a time, and now there are six billion -- isn't there a problem with the arithmetic, here?
And of course the orthodox answer is that this world is just one of millions, and this realm of worlds is just one of many, which makes a universe quite as disquietingly vast as that of the scientific imagination. The deficit is made up from other, depopulating worlds. But I always think, what if we're reincarnating simultaneously? What if there are really only thirty-one people, say, in the universe -- or maybe seven -- and the sullen kid lounging by the fence is actually me some forty-seven lives ago, while my barber is Martha, six lives ago?
In that case, all time is infinitely redeemable. We may be actively engaged in our own redemption, intervening in our own pasts, and in the pasts of those we love.
Do I believe this? Well, sometimes I could. Do I think it's true? Probably not. But it seems no more implausible than the story that billions of little individual consciousnesses pop up out of nowhere and wink out again. That story only seems plausible because we're used to it.
Where are you in your guts, your lungs, your brain?
I want to keep you from them,
separate you from them,
but I only find the vastness of your molecules,
the grace of your arteries,
held together by the illuminated quick
of your tears, your smile.
From Andi's Sixteen Verses
Tranquility, Unfound
Of course we can't find tranquility in our daily lives...because we define tranquility in a way that excludes our daily lives from it.
From Lorianne's Tranquility
One Grief
all our ancestors hanging by their dead mirrors
and the tools we invent to polish them,
leaving behind old days, thinking
the marbled water flows through one grief.
From N's Chance Self
And
And that last haunting line of N's set me thinking, what if -- what if there really is only one grief? What if time and personhood fold over, and we really come back to the same one grief, whether it's yours, or mine, or Achilles'? What if this sense of continual return is just perfectly accurate, and what we are experiencing is not new, but the hundredth return, the millionth, return, each time richer and (in this case) sadder? "You only go around once in life," says the beer commercial, and every time I hear it I think, "well, you certainly don't only go around beer commercials only once. Why should I believe what you say about life? It doesn't feel like once."
All time is irredeemable, says Eliot, if all time is equally present. I'm not sure that's true. But anyway it sort of assumes that there's only two choices: the moment is present, or eternity is present. But what if there are other choices?
Every once in a while you get someone brave or stupid enough to ask real questions, at the Sangha. One of them is -- where do all the extra modern consciousnesses come from? If there were just a few million people once upon a time, and now there are six billion -- isn't there a problem with the arithmetic, here?
And of course the orthodox answer is that this world is just one of millions, and this realm of worlds is just one of many, which makes a universe quite as disquietingly vast as that of the scientific imagination. The deficit is made up from other, depopulating worlds. But I always think, what if we're reincarnating simultaneously? What if there are really only thirty-one people, say, in the universe -- or maybe seven -- and the sullen kid lounging by the fence is actually me some forty-seven lives ago, while my barber is Martha, six lives ago?
In that case, all time is infinitely redeemable. We may be actively engaged in our own redemption, intervening in our own pasts, and in the pasts of those we love.
Do I believe this? Well, sometimes I could. Do I think it's true? Probably not. But it seems no more implausible than the story that billions of little individual consciousnesses pop up out of nowhere and wink out again. That story only seems plausible because we're used to it.
Thursday, August 12, 2004
Paul
The sun beats on me as on a drum.
They refreshed the reflective white paint of the crosswalk carelessly, so that the pavement all around it is dusted with reflective paint. As I cross the street, I walk in the center of a circular rainbow hovering, it seems, half an inch above the wavering blacktop.
Above, the pale blue sky is filled with great whorls, spiral arms made of tiny rectangular tiles of brilliant white cloud, stiff yet twisting like a Byzantine mosaic, and down by the horizon are sullen humps of distant thunderheads. I walk by exhausted rhododendrons. Pick a brown shrunken flower-corpse. To my surprise it is supple and responds to my fingers. Not dead, not stiff. Nothing can be quite dead today. Worn, fragile, faint, loved to gasping by the overbearing sun, but not dead.
I think of Paul, the best and the worst thing that ever happened to the West. Childish, quarrelsome, opinionated, overwhelmed by Love and by the insufficiency it revealed in him, the greatest poet of his age, the refractor of the mystery that walked out of Nazareth. We are made in his nervous, unstable image.
And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
The sun beats on me as on a drum.
They refreshed the reflective white paint of the crosswalk carelessly, so that the pavement all around it is dusted with reflective paint. As I cross the street, I walk in the center of a circular rainbow hovering, it seems, half an inch above the wavering blacktop.
Above, the pale blue sky is filled with great whorls, spiral arms made of tiny rectangular tiles of brilliant white cloud, stiff yet twisting like a Byzantine mosaic, and down by the horizon are sullen humps of distant thunderheads. I walk by exhausted rhododendrons. Pick a brown shrunken flower-corpse. To my surprise it is supple and responds to my fingers. Not dead, not stiff. Nothing can be quite dead today. Worn, fragile, faint, loved to gasping by the overbearing sun, but not dead.
I think of Paul, the best and the worst thing that ever happened to the West. Childish, quarrelsome, opinionated, overwhelmed by Love and by the insufficiency it revealed in him, the greatest poet of his age, the refractor of the mystery that walked out of Nazareth. We are made in his nervous, unstable image.
And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Why
Kevin asked, "Why meditate?"
The stock responses come out rapidly, of course, grinning, with extended hands; the car-salesmen of the mind, crowding forward as soon as the question sets foot in the lot. I meditate in order to open space between the experience and the response. I meditate to still the mind. I meditate in order to observe just what happens in this mind of mine. But those don't answer "what motivates me to meditate?" They answer "what have I been told about why I should meditate?"
I meditate because
1) So many of the people I love most dearly, and admire most, meditate. I want to be like them. I want to be accepted by them.
2) Unfortunately -- I cringe as I write this -- I love the cachet, the sense of superiority, it gives me. "How can a person who can't even sit still with his own mind for twenty minutes consider himself an adult?" That sneer has prepared itself in my mind many times, just waiting its time. It gives me high ground, makes me special. And when I refer back to the authority of its experience, no one will really challenge me. Non-meditators can't, and meditators won't.
3) It's beautiful. As a purely sensual experience, there often really isn't, for me, much that beats it. Even the pain in my hips can be beautiful. The flowers on the shrine become brilliant. Elegant forms materialize as my eyes cross. Sounds resonate with a new intensity and clarity. My own breathing, other people's breathing, becomes the breathing of the world. And the bell, when it rings at the end of the session, is the purest single sound I have ever heard, liquid silver.
4) It takes the edge off of my compulsions, makes them more manageable. I don't really know why. Maybe it's that space opening between the experience and the response. But anyway, the correlation is beyond question, and the causation looks pretty convincing to me, too.
5) I don't want to die in terror. I want a well-known routine to swing into when my consciousness begins to shut down, regardless of whether reincarnation is a crock. If it is, no harm done. If it's not, I'll be pretty damn glad I trained.
6) I can, & do, use it to manage pain, mental and physical. I don't need novocaine at the dentist. I have something to do with grief.
7) To meditate is to believe I'm on a path, that my confusion and suffering are not permanent companions.
8) It gives me an excuse to go sit quietly by myself every day.
Many of these motivations are -- crude, to say the least. I'm sorry to report that one of the biggest motivations I'm supposed to have, one I affirm in my prayers every time I sit down on the cushion -- the aspiration to benefit all beings -- doesn't even appear. But an honest accounting struck me as maybe more valuable than the party line. Maybe someday.
Kevin asked, "Why meditate?"
The stock responses come out rapidly, of course, grinning, with extended hands; the car-salesmen of the mind, crowding forward as soon as the question sets foot in the lot. I meditate in order to open space between the experience and the response. I meditate to still the mind. I meditate in order to observe just what happens in this mind of mine. But those don't answer "what motivates me to meditate?" They answer "what have I been told about why I should meditate?"
I meditate because
1) So many of the people I love most dearly, and admire most, meditate. I want to be like them. I want to be accepted by them.
2) Unfortunately -- I cringe as I write this -- I love the cachet, the sense of superiority, it gives me. "How can a person who can't even sit still with his own mind for twenty minutes consider himself an adult?" That sneer has prepared itself in my mind many times, just waiting its time. It gives me high ground, makes me special. And when I refer back to the authority of its experience, no one will really challenge me. Non-meditators can't, and meditators won't.
3) It's beautiful. As a purely sensual experience, there often really isn't, for me, much that beats it. Even the pain in my hips can be beautiful. The flowers on the shrine become brilliant. Elegant forms materialize as my eyes cross. Sounds resonate with a new intensity and clarity. My own breathing, other people's breathing, becomes the breathing of the world. And the bell, when it rings at the end of the session, is the purest single sound I have ever heard, liquid silver.
4) It takes the edge off of my compulsions, makes them more manageable. I don't really know why. Maybe it's that space opening between the experience and the response. But anyway, the correlation is beyond question, and the causation looks pretty convincing to me, too.
5) I don't want to die in terror. I want a well-known routine to swing into when my consciousness begins to shut down, regardless of whether reincarnation is a crock. If it is, no harm done. If it's not, I'll be pretty damn glad I trained.
6) I can, & do, use it to manage pain, mental and physical. I don't need novocaine at the dentist. I have something to do with grief.
7) To meditate is to believe I'm on a path, that my confusion and suffering are not permanent companions.
8) It gives me an excuse to go sit quietly by myself every day.
Many of these motivations are -- crude, to say the least. I'm sorry to report that one of the biggest motivations I'm supposed to have, one I affirm in my prayers every time I sit down on the cushion -- the aspiration to benefit all beings -- doesn't even appear. But an honest accounting struck me as maybe more valuable than the party line. Maybe someday.
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Objection
Usually when I object to being objectified, all I really want is to be objectified in a different way. I don't want to be a sex object like Bruce Willis. Of course not. Because as that sort of object, I'll lose. I make a lousy sex object. I want to be a clever object, a sensitive object, something in the Alan Alda line. I can compete there. Objectify me that way, please.
Is there a difference between wanting to be admired for being able to read six languages, and wanting to be admired for having six-pack abs? There most certainly is -- to wit, I don't have six-pack abs. Any other difference? I don't think so. It takes certain physical and mental qualities to learn languages. Likewise, to have a trained and beautiful body. Why do we call one set essential, and one superficial? Insofar as they both require a certain amount of discipline and willingness to take trouble, they're pretty much the same. Insofar as they require a knack, a certain amount of native ability, they are also pretty much the same.
As long as I want to be loved for being handsome, I will have to expect to be shunned when I am ugly. As long as I want to be loved for being intelligent, I will have to expect to be shunned when I am stupid. As long as I want to be loved for being kind, I will have to expect to be shunned when I am cruel.
If I really want to be loved as a subject -- which I do, desperately -- I will have to be a subject. I will have to stop objectifying myself. The enormity of that task becomes more and more apparent. I will have to accept love that doesn't value me at my own price, in my own way.
I want to be loved for what I am. But what is that? A slender stream of wandering thoughts and emotions. As long as I pretend to be anything else, as long as I insist of the world that it take me as anything else, then I make myself an object. And I can hardly object, then, when I am objectified. It's what I have been asking for.
Usually when I object to being objectified, all I really want is to be objectified in a different way. I don't want to be a sex object like Bruce Willis. Of course not. Because as that sort of object, I'll lose. I make a lousy sex object. I want to be a clever object, a sensitive object, something in the Alan Alda line. I can compete there. Objectify me that way, please.
Is there a difference between wanting to be admired for being able to read six languages, and wanting to be admired for having six-pack abs? There most certainly is -- to wit, I don't have six-pack abs. Any other difference? I don't think so. It takes certain physical and mental qualities to learn languages. Likewise, to have a trained and beautiful body. Why do we call one set essential, and one superficial? Insofar as they both require a certain amount of discipline and willingness to take trouble, they're pretty much the same. Insofar as they require a knack, a certain amount of native ability, they are also pretty much the same.
As long as I want to be loved for being handsome, I will have to expect to be shunned when I am ugly. As long as I want to be loved for being intelligent, I will have to expect to be shunned when I am stupid. As long as I want to be loved for being kind, I will have to expect to be shunned when I am cruel.
If I really want to be loved as a subject -- which I do, desperately -- I will have to be a subject. I will have to stop objectifying myself. The enormity of that task becomes more and more apparent. I will have to accept love that doesn't value me at my own price, in my own way.
I want to be loved for what I am. But what is that? A slender stream of wandering thoughts and emotions. As long as I pretend to be anything else, as long as I insist of the world that it take me as anything else, then I make myself an object. And I can hardly object, then, when I am objectified. It's what I have been asking for.
Thorns and Admonitions
Wandering through this patch it's difficult to go far without getting snagged by admonitory thorns. The ones that scratch my skin, and try to keep me from from wasting my time and my love. I march on anyway, of course, but they tried:
If I can't have irregular verbs, I'd rather grunt and point.
--Language Hat
Any description of reality is an exercise in inventing differences.
--Siona
The question and answer are planted
in different lifetimes. Stop.
--Lekshe
Wandering through this patch it's difficult to go far without getting snagged by admonitory thorns. The ones that scratch my skin, and try to keep me from from wasting my time and my love. I march on anyway, of course, but they tried:
If I can't have irregular verbs, I'd rather grunt and point.
--Language Hat
Any description of reality is an exercise in inventing differences.
--Siona
The question and answer are planted
in different lifetimes. Stop.
--Lekshe
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