Yesterday morning, sitting out on the balcony reading poems, and thinking of writing my own, I found a dying moth on its back: legs crossed and tucked into its body, antennae motionless, unflinching when I touched it with my finger. Its wings were splayed out, flat on cement, trembling lightly, sputtering as if in a breeze. Naturally, I thought of Virginia Woolf, her eyes' precision watching a moth die against the glass of her window, her meditations on life's fervent impulse to live. Maybe I should finally read The Waves, I thought.
Having gone inside awhile to try and put words on the page, I came back out to find the moth in the same position, though now perfectly still. Dead. Hours later, I noticed the moth's wings had folded in and curled around its body. The moth, no longer on its back, had turned over on one side.
*
My Dad, a minister, has been with many people in their passing. He has noticed our tendency when we die to return to the fetal position.
*
In yoga, the fetal position is often explored as a transition between lying on one's back in Shivasana (resting and integration at the end of practice), and rising to a seated position. The yogini, bringing her knees up to her chest, hugs them, then falls to one side and rests before gently pressing herself up to sitting. What follows is hands at heart center, and bowing her head--a show of gratitude for the teacher, the practice, the practitioners, and herself.
*
This weekend, despite my efforts to stay strong and take care of myself, I slipped into my habit for self-abuse, loading my pockets with the mental rocks that would weigh me down beneath a general wash of self-hate (this is not, of course, meant to suggest any resemblance to Woolf's situation and experience: only that her struggle with depression is and has been on my mind). I lost all gratitude. Then my mentor, Bearded Poet and Tibetan Buddhist, phoned and left a message. I listened as he expressed his love--and chanted a Tibetan healing song. I replayed it several times: it worked.
*
To love oneself means to be equally grateful for joy and suffering. To forgive oneself means to love one's weaknesses as much as one's strengths. If weakness is a teacher, then I now learn the importance of its definition: that it does not define me, but encourages me to use it, through compassion and effort, as the ground for change. It is not so important to "stay strong" as it is to be weak with the right attitude. Balance is never perfect, and the importance of its practice is in learning how to fall. Falling gives me the opportunity to be compassionate, to accept and adjust, refocus without judgment and find my balance again.
*
Life is too precious to abuse in myself. I embrace the opportunity of my falling. From this weekend's anxious fetal position, I gently push myself up to sitting, hands at heart center, feeling grateful for my teachers, my practice, my loving family and friends, my fellow practitioners, and myself.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Private Pain
"Everybody's private pain: in Korea once, in a mountain pass,
a carved placatory shrine, a figure of a couple copulating,
and underneath in hangul: we beget joy, we beget suffering."
--Robert Hass
I know my body releases some of what it stores when, lying on my back in Shivasana, after yoga, in a quiet, dim-lit studio full of students, all strangers, I don't want to cry, but do. I can't help it: it happens without me.
I think about seeing a friend a few years back who was having a hard time. Tapping her foot with mine, I asked "are you happy?" She tried to fight the tears, but couldn't. "Ninety-nine percent of crying is self-pity," she said. But I didn't believe it then. It isn't that simple. Is it?
Coming home from yoga class, I see the news images of oil-coated Pelicans in the Gulf. Terns migrating north, caught in the sludge, their bodies immersed in the toxic goop, heads struggling to lift from its glue, barely discernible as a bird but for the beak stabbing helplessly for a breath of air.
What is private turmoil compared to this? Overwhelming to think of the ecological devastation, the ruined communities, human and non-human. How many displaced families? How many suffocating turtles? How many barrier islands, breeding grounds for birds, that will lose their grasses and network of roots, will erode and sink into oil-slicked water? In forty-six days of spewing oil (and still counting) a way of life, a culture, an ecological history that dwarfs human time, has all become threatened with extinction. What right do I have to sit here, considering my personal loss?
There is obvious value in taking responsibility, or trying, for my private grief. But here I make it public. Why? I don't know. I can justify it by admitting that no one is reading this, which is not self-pity but belief in fact. That doesn't resolve the problem. All I know is that the imagined audience is a strange comfort, a prompt to write, a possibility to be heard, to find shared meaning, even if I risk vulnerability and seem too self-centered. Maybe it's ridiculous, but it works for me now: I'm writing. And I can't seem to write much else (poems).
Another justification: because we are all inextricably linked, there is possible universal substance in private pain. And communal pain has to be reckoned with, at least in part, privately. How many of us sit in living rooms, watching helplessly as the events in the Gulf progress? We breath and hold that communal grief into our bodies, lock it in our tissues, make it personal, private, our individual experience. We carry it with us. And in our body, the line between private and public is not made. We hold, we hurt, no matter. Sincere attempt to release it, to let it go, on the yoga mat or otherwise, inspires understanding and compassion for the bonds we all share. The wisdom which unites.
Robert Hass:
"Private pain is easy, in a way. It doesn't go away,
but you can teach yourself to see its size. Invent a ritual.
Walk up a mountain in the afternoon, gather up pine twigs.
Light a fire, thin smoke, not an ambitious fire,
and sit before it and watch it till it burns to ash
and the last gleam is gone from it, and dark falls.
Then you get up, brush yourself off, and walk back to the world.
If you're lucky, you're hungry."
a carved placatory shrine, a figure of a couple copulating,
and underneath in hangul: we beget joy, we beget suffering."
--Robert Hass
I know my body releases some of what it stores when, lying on my back in Shivasana, after yoga, in a quiet, dim-lit studio full of students, all strangers, I don't want to cry, but do. I can't help it: it happens without me.
I think about seeing a friend a few years back who was having a hard time. Tapping her foot with mine, I asked "are you happy?" She tried to fight the tears, but couldn't. "Ninety-nine percent of crying is self-pity," she said. But I didn't believe it then. It isn't that simple. Is it?
Coming home from yoga class, I see the news images of oil-coated Pelicans in the Gulf. Terns migrating north, caught in the sludge, their bodies immersed in the toxic goop, heads struggling to lift from its glue, barely discernible as a bird but for the beak stabbing helplessly for a breath of air.
What is private turmoil compared to this? Overwhelming to think of the ecological devastation, the ruined communities, human and non-human. How many displaced families? How many suffocating turtles? How many barrier islands, breeding grounds for birds, that will lose their grasses and network of roots, will erode and sink into oil-slicked water? In forty-six days of spewing oil (and still counting) a way of life, a culture, an ecological history that dwarfs human time, has all become threatened with extinction. What right do I have to sit here, considering my personal loss?
There is obvious value in taking responsibility, or trying, for my private grief. But here I make it public. Why? I don't know. I can justify it by admitting that no one is reading this, which is not self-pity but belief in fact. That doesn't resolve the problem. All I know is that the imagined audience is a strange comfort, a prompt to write, a possibility to be heard, to find shared meaning, even if I risk vulnerability and seem too self-centered. Maybe it's ridiculous, but it works for me now: I'm writing. And I can't seem to write much else (poems).
Another justification: because we are all inextricably linked, there is possible universal substance in private pain. And communal pain has to be reckoned with, at least in part, privately. How many of us sit in living rooms, watching helplessly as the events in the Gulf progress? We breath and hold that communal grief into our bodies, lock it in our tissues, make it personal, private, our individual experience. We carry it with us. And in our body, the line between private and public is not made. We hold, we hurt, no matter. Sincere attempt to release it, to let it go, on the yoga mat or otherwise, inspires understanding and compassion for the bonds we all share. The wisdom which unites.
Robert Hass:
"Private pain is easy, in a way. It doesn't go away,
but you can teach yourself to see its size. Invent a ritual.
Walk up a mountain in the afternoon, gather up pine twigs.
Light a fire, thin smoke, not an ambitious fire,
and sit before it and watch it till it burns to ash
and the last gleam is gone from it, and dark falls.
Then you get up, brush yourself off, and walk back to the world.
If you're lucky, you're hungry."
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Intellectual Dishonesty
My previous post was a kind of lie. No, not really a lie, but a protection. An intellectual distance from the actual, the raw falling-apart-ness of my present experience.
Truth is: am anxious and afraid. What now?
The day comes to good in a Robert Hass poem, "Regalia For A Black Hat Dancer." Literature is friendship, as Kerouac said, and when I can't manage to make a friend of myself, and am cautious from leaning too heavily on others, I find a poem. Buffer against hopelessness--that is the art.
"Walking down to Heart's Desire beach in the summer evenings
of the year my marriage ended--
though I was hollowed out by pain
honeycombed with the pain of it,
like the bird bones on the beach
the salt of the bay water had worked on for a season--
such surprising lightness in the hand--
I don't think I could have told the pain of loss
from the pain of possibility,
though I knew they weren't the same thing.
When I think of that time, I think mainly of the osprey's cry,
a startled yelp,
the cry more a color than a sound, and as if
it ripped the sky, was white,
as if it were scar tissue and fresh hurt at once."
Truth is: am anxious and afraid. What now?
The day comes to good in a Robert Hass poem, "Regalia For A Black Hat Dancer." Literature is friendship, as Kerouac said, and when I can't manage to make a friend of myself, and am cautious from leaning too heavily on others, I find a poem. Buffer against hopelessness--that is the art.
"Walking down to Heart's Desire beach in the summer evenings
of the year my marriage ended--
though I was hollowed out by pain
honeycombed with the pain of it,
like the bird bones on the beach
the salt of the bay water had worked on for a season--
such surprising lightness in the hand--
I don't think I could have told the pain of loss
from the pain of possibility,
though I knew they weren't the same thing.
When I think of that time, I think mainly of the osprey's cry,
a startled yelp,
the cry more a color than a sound, and as if
it ripped the sky, was white,
as if it were scar tissue and fresh hurt at once."
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Developing An Appetite For Groundlessness
"The 'secret' of life that we are all looking for is just this: to develop through sitting and daily life practice the power and courage to return to that which we have spent a lifetime hiding from, to rest in the bodily experience of the present moment--even if it is a feeling of being humiliated, of failing, of abandonment, of unfairness." --Charlotte Joko Beck
Yesterday was a breaking point. We all have them: that moment of realizing that what you imagined as a ground in your life, a constant you depended on, trusted and held, has rapidly dissolved. Once holding, you now discover, like Creeley, that "Everything is water / if you look long enough." How long can you cup water?
There is a relief in this. With loss, comes grief. And grief is a plum line dropped, a weight dangled to the center of your gravity. It has always been there, stored in the body, hung up in the marrow, knotted by the way you have muscled through. Unexpected grief frees it, lets it sway again unobstructed. You must feel it now, threading through the breath, and can follow where it leads. Or, you can step around it, try to move away. You can frantically re-bind it. You can go buy a six-pack of beer.
I woke early this morning to find a dove perched on my balcony railing. It bobbed and worried when I opened the door, but stayed put. I watched and admired for awhile. Later, when the dove was gone, I saw a fledgling below, huddled under a few tired Birds of Paradise plants. I stood right above it, looking down, watching it tremble, and soon discovered the adult perched close in the acacia tree. Then, much to my surprise, I located another pair in a nearby branch: fledgling and adult. The parent picked tenderly at the young one's down. The thin branch swayed under their motions. I watched them hold to that height all morning.
When I returned home, early evening, the doves were gone. No young ones, no adults. Had they made their way into the foliage where I couldn't see? And what of the fallen bird?
Treacherous, to try and fling oneself out into groundlessness. But what an ordinary miracle to have a dove perched on the iron railing of my balcony, nurturing, watchful. By grief, we can learn to be both parent and child, protective, protected and afraid, a tender groomer, a flier, a faller, a waiter for courage. The line leads us there. And the weight, I suspect, is no weight at all, but a lightness we have tightened around like a fist by the many strategies of fear.
This moment of heightened grief is here because I need it. Relax. Sit and listen. If I have reason to suffer, then I also gain a teacher. What has slipped through my fingers waters the geraniums. Isn't that a Noble Truth?
"A man of supple
yielding manner
might, too, discover
ways of water." --R. Creeley
Yesterday was a breaking point. We all have them: that moment of realizing that what you imagined as a ground in your life, a constant you depended on, trusted and held, has rapidly dissolved. Once holding, you now discover, like Creeley, that "Everything is water / if you look long enough." How long can you cup water?
There is a relief in this. With loss, comes grief. And grief is a plum line dropped, a weight dangled to the center of your gravity. It has always been there, stored in the body, hung up in the marrow, knotted by the way you have muscled through. Unexpected grief frees it, lets it sway again unobstructed. You must feel it now, threading through the breath, and can follow where it leads. Or, you can step around it, try to move away. You can frantically re-bind it. You can go buy a six-pack of beer.
I woke early this morning to find a dove perched on my balcony railing. It bobbed and worried when I opened the door, but stayed put. I watched and admired for awhile. Later, when the dove was gone, I saw a fledgling below, huddled under a few tired Birds of Paradise plants. I stood right above it, looking down, watching it tremble, and soon discovered the adult perched close in the acacia tree. Then, much to my surprise, I located another pair in a nearby branch: fledgling and adult. The parent picked tenderly at the young one's down. The thin branch swayed under their motions. I watched them hold to that height all morning.
When I returned home, early evening, the doves were gone. No young ones, no adults. Had they made their way into the foliage where I couldn't see? And what of the fallen bird?
Treacherous, to try and fling oneself out into groundlessness. But what an ordinary miracle to have a dove perched on the iron railing of my balcony, nurturing, watchful. By grief, we can learn to be both parent and child, protective, protected and afraid, a tender groomer, a flier, a faller, a waiter for courage. The line leads us there. And the weight, I suspect, is no weight at all, but a lightness we have tightened around like a fist by the many strategies of fear.
This moment of heightened grief is here because I need it. Relax. Sit and listen. If I have reason to suffer, then I also gain a teacher. What has slipped through my fingers waters the geraniums. Isn't that a Noble Truth?
"A man of supple
yielding manner
might, too, discover
ways of water." --R. Creeley
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Vivekananda
"We are responsible for what we are; and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in the future can be produced by our present actions. So we have to know how to act."
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Pema Chodron
"When we train in awakening bodhichitta, we are nurturing the flexibility of our mind. In the most ordinary terms, egolessness is a flexible identity. It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure about who we are--or who anyone else is either."
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