We never know how high we are

Till we are called to rise;

And then, if we are true to plan

Our stature touch the skies—

 –#1776, reprinted without permission, but with much gladness–

view from the crown chakra

Laborific

The baby slides out and I catch her.

I’m kneeling on the floor with a creature in my hands.

Her birth is slick, but her skin is clear of vernix, labor-grease, or wastes.  She looks like she has been sleeping in a fairy-tale, awakening to this one.

That is: I decide the baby is a her.

[For a sweet, short and informed read on the importance of vernix-- not extraneous yuckie stuff to be washed off!]

In the dream, I am not ready, but I do my job anyway: protect birth and the birth mama, who is just as surprised as I am, at only four months gestation, to see the perfection of this newborn.

The hospital room tries hard to be bland and sterile.  But the infant doesn’t allow it:  She has so much life in her it leaks into her surroundings.

unlikely birth buds

Reality Has Windows

When I look out the window now, from my empty apartment, autumn is shaking in the trees, stately things that have grown up as innate wealth in the yards of the affordable housing complexes.  Their branches, behaving as if terrified, or as if attempting to terrify, move every which-way, like the gaze when one is first learning yoga.  These movements are pre-death choreography; the winds come through with purpose and everything that lives becomes simultaneously riled up—where will I bury my nuts?—and internal, looking for the bunker at the depths.

Unlike us, the seasons abide with their changes, not resisting themselves.   Are humans distinct in resisting who we innately are?  Hmmm.  I’m still waiting for the day a tree blogs about me.

buddhas abiding with drying

This time of year, when we put garbage in the cans on the avenue, the wind plucks it right back out.  Putting waste in a can is a temporary way to hide the tremendous amount of refuse we leave in our wake as we carry forth.  We may temporarily fool ourselves but the earth is not fooled.

Not fooled at all.  Strong rains brought in the fall, and they have yielded to a chilly shroud.  The last weekend of “summer”, after chanting to a multiplicity of Gods upstate amidst the poo-poo-pauperism-cuz-we-‘ve-got-Lululemon aesthetic of Omega, I returned with my spirit posse on the winding Taconic through an all-night storm.  We rolled onto 4th Avenue, even the GPS tired, at 4AM.  From the car, we saw a disheveled man on the street corner smashing a vacuum cleaner apart with all his might.  He stooped over beside the public trashcan and had his way with the appliance.  The traffic light, despite the fact that no one pedestrians were about at this hour of the almost-morning, blinked its monition overhead: DON’T WALK.  Don’t worry, the vacuum cleaner assured it.  He’s raging against materiality right now.   Its nozzle flew off.

SMASH.

The closest tree, thin and staked into place in its patch of dirt so it would grow up right, like a good urban tree, not bothering the buildings, burst out laughing.  Its glee was louder than the hundreds of voices at the Kirtan calling to Ganesha to move the obstacles already, move those obstacles already, baby.

ganesh in a sultry mood

By Shook or By Crook

Other things shook this week.  An Ortho Jew in his determined glory walks towards me in the subway station—that weird birth canal between Wall and Williams Street, below Tiffany’s and the anti-establishment protests occupying something.  The Jew has the Big-Mitzvah look on his face: this blessing is going to positively tackle you.

Are you Jewish? He asks me.  (To quote my friend John: Yes, Jew-ish.)

I’ll give you two guesses, I say.

He whirls around, his psyche already tasting the virtue accruing in its spiritual piggy-bank.  His pranic tentacles register a high Jew-meter.  He dutifully holds out the accoutrements of miracles: the lulav and etrog.  Take this, he says.  Lulav is a beautiful word—the bound palm leaves, myrtle, willow.  The etrog, which sounds like a genetically engineered toad, is actually a citron, an Israeli species of lemon.

I hold out my hand—these are my people, the fruit and the branch.

lucky mimesis

Shake it, he says.  For some reason, I remember my first year of ballet class, as a three-year old.  I spent most of the class plucking free the massive wedgies my underwear created under my leotard and watching myself perform this delicate action in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors.

I’m doing the shaking wrong, which I can tell by the way his eyes try to take refuge in his septum, appalled by my violation of the ritual, but I don’t care.  YAAAAAY, I shout.  I shake my branch not just in four directions, but in every direction I can think of.

Repeat after me, he says, and begins the Prayer, stopping at prayer-novice intervals so I don’t mangle the Hebrew.  I’m so excited to be holding a lemon in the subway.  I feel like the Citrus superhero.   I want to cut it open and squeeze it and make the space smell like something fresh, invigorating, edgy.

Big Mitvah!  He crows, walking away hurriedly and with the natural elation that comes from accruing spiritual brownie points.

For you, that is, I call back.  But what do I know.  The lemon is not forthcoming.

Later that night, I catch the baby.

mitzvah dilating

Not Knowing That

I didn’t know birth could be like that, I exclaim.  The hospital room impassively witnesses the ordinary and impossible.  It’s all beige to me, it declares.

This baby, premature and yet fully developed, sits in my hands as if we are a sculpture of Rodin’s, cut from one stone and still connected in that elusive place where form yields to formlessness.  Our rough edges and poor chances at survival are smoothed by the generosity of the dream until these two disparate manifestations of life—the creature and I– are returned to a single continuous muscle, breathing.

The night before, I died.

Marie-Louise Von Franz, the heiress of Jung’s work on dreams, teaches: Pay attention to your dreams, for therein “a self-regulating tendency in the soul comes into play which counterbalances the one-sidedness of consciousness or completes it so that a kind of wholeness and a life’s optimum is achieved” (Dreams).  What about those somnievents wherein you’re taking old cream cheese–Philly, whiter than fake teeth– out of the refrigerator?  Whatever.   Cosmic consciousness is like a good vacuum cleaner: it can take in everything, no matter the size of the particle.

So it was.  A brief, nocturnal trip back to Thailand– which cost me no air-miles or jet-lag whatsoever.  I entered a white-walled room in the big, empty house where my old friend, Dha, sat, grinning and chewing on unfurled and twice-brewed sinesia dipped in salt.  Life is the Leaf, he said, nodding.  He caught my eyes as the ground rumbled, a terribly hungry stomach.  Get outside, something is wrong.  The jasmine rice, soaking in huge plastic vats, wobbled.  It had the nonchalant equanimity of a thing that has survived many such quakes.

but nothing looks wrong

In the unreasonable logic of dreams, I copied the example of my befuddled boss—also inexplicably there–who was trying to protect herself by climbing into a kiddie-swing, the kind that looks like a stiff, plastic diaper and feels about as comfortable.  As we waited suspended in the black diapers, a tidal wave of earth swung up over its own rim.  My end came at me like my premature birth: I was prepared and yet unprepared in every way.

This dark wave of earth blacked out everything except its own presence, which bore down over my body.  I fell backwards into my death thinking—that’s all this is?  A plunge?  Really?  But I only just was born!

with catcher's mitts unto the sky falling

Birth and death are like that– BFF.

I woke up disturbed, feeling clods of dirt in my hair that weren’t there.  But the strange miracles runneth over, the fish eyes of Unconscious blinking in the shallow pool of daylight.  The creak of the toilet seat, the drip of the showerhead, the bubbling of the water as it boiled. The lemon wedge, the triphala pill broken open and covered in warm liquid.  As if God turned on the lights too quickly in the theater of being and everyone ran for the candy stand for a sugar refill.  I had to growl through my morning practice—prostrating myself before the dust mites in my carpet—because there are dawns when one must bow before something, anything, everything.  And you?  For what miracle will you fall to your knees shaking, if not the one you are made of?

things that keep me here

Yoga begins with listening...Did you hear that?

 After living in New York on and off for almost thirty-two years, I see my first baby pigeon learning to walk this week.  Its mom was all: “The best garbage is over this way…”

Since the expedition to (the) Holy Land, events of my life waxed shy, wall-flower-ish, introverted—even a little dark.  Then the spirit rumbled again, a tiny earthquake gave the Muse an upper, and here we are, back at square one, tea in hand, trembling at the goodness of renewal.  I already have a bad track record at my local public library, so I don’t use that word lightly.

Time happened in chunks in those months; like a nose dislodging from an archaic statue, the cartilage loosening, the part falling from the whole and getting lost in the general rubble of old stuff.

Tryst with Quiet

Words weren’t there as a net to hold the sacred pieces in reasonable position.  I found this quote: “A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it is to be God” (by prolific author Sidney Sheldon, whose work I am not endorsing).  I shared it with my students, teenage males trying to find words for the core emotions, as they struggled through drafting their personal essays.  “Damn,” I heard all around.  “Damn! I feel like God today!”  God-like, they pilfered hot chocolate and handfuls of stirrers from the off-limits coffee room.

I don’t think the baby pigeon had, as of yet, experienced instant cacao.

 Damn, I feel like God today.

With a goddess’-eye view, I peer back into the rubble.

Compilation Cherry

Caps

The basics are still the basics.  The smell of oolong is brewing past perfection in my “civil dialogue” mug; it “wafts” (a verb to which farts long ago laid primary claim) across the screen.  Civil dialogue: when people are nice to each other while they disagree. Not as easy as it sounds.  A breeze roughs up the bay outside; my mother is counting white-caps.  One! She calls.  From the loft, I can see the sandbars in receding stripes.  Tomorrow, the full moon.

Today, the ornery and hell-bent seagull, who flies so low over the waterline while we swim that it seems he’s mistaking (or just taking) our skull for a perch, or a Perch: footrest or fine dining.

Graybreak

Sub Par

A homeless man weaves through the subway car.  He holds out a small plastic sac.  Hey, I don’t beg, he begins, with accidental situational irony.  I don’t ask for anything, he says, bag agape, letting the shopping bag, like a puppet or an imaginary friend, ask for him.  I’d just like some food if you have any extra food.  Anything you have. 

He weaves around passenger’s knees.  A woman holds out a peach: Here. It’s a fine yellow-orange color, huge, like a birth announcement for August. Likely just purchased at a premium from the farmer’s market.

He looks at it, Nah, he says, I already have a peach.

He didn’t take rhetoric.  He didn’t take ripe fruit.  Beggars can be choosers.

Yes

R gets married under a tent with a field of wildflowers turned towards her.  In their metal pails, fat sunflowers crane their necks this way and that, the Indian flute, piercing and knitting at the same time, a wind in the hair.  Once you say something you cannot unsay it, our teacher reminds us, as he joins R and E inside their yes.  He urges caution with words.  The flowers shake their heads as the rain, too, fills the ceremony; God so excited at the prospect of a wedding she has begun to weep.

Assent

On the long tables a dakini, sitting in careful meditation and consideration of the earth, is bound up in a globe of ice.  When the ice melts, she will touch the fresh air with her perfect bronze fingers.  The ice is already heading towards its next incarnation, as A’s little girl turns to me: Why do you not have a boyfriend, she says, as my once-boyfriend stands beside us.  The directness of little people is unsurpassed.  It’s like when you need a time-out, I explain.  What will a five year old understand of the movements of love?  She nods sympathetically.  O.K., she says in a tone that borders on patronizing.  And shuffles off for another cup of lemonade.

Fire and Ice

With

J says, eventually and fully, what would it be like to be totally and completely present with one another?

Pond-Sum

M and J and I pull off our clothes on the dock, overheated from sweeping and feasting and witnessing, and jump into the shape-shifting pond.  There is just enough pond scum marinating in the still water and marring its perfection that you know this pond is—sorta—a thing of nature.  It seems to respond to our bodies as we paddle around, waiting for the sea monster (every body of water, however infantile, has one).  This Sea Monster is prepubescent, preferring the training wheel scenario of a pond, wherein to rear its head and roar all the dragonflies away.  The insects that alight are a purple-blue, and skim over the surface of the water in oddly connected pairs, dangling from one another in lopsided but totally unperturbed flight.  Maybe this is the way we are too, in the speck of our planet in the black vastness.

Which speck gave us this?

Board out of Mind

My almost-not-in-middle-school-anymore students look at me with their heads all cocked at identical angles.  Why are you the only teacher that doesn’t use the Smart-board?

The Smart Board, a new technology for when you do something Smart—plan your lesson on your computer—and then project it onto a screen, which shows everyone just how Smart you are.

I let the name of the device answer the question for them.

Orderly

I’m trying to make a point to my students about how the arrangement of Latin words in the line is as important as the morphology of the words themselves.  I pluck my analogy from out of my element: It’s like in Chemistry…if you switch the H2O to OH2, it’s not the same.  Even as I say it, I know I’m wrong.

Yes, it is, says my student, X, who is lethally smart (and his initially is really “X.”  Don’t you wish)—It’s exactly the same. 

O.K., or it is exactly the same…but this… isn’t.  I give him a big, generous, you’re-more-right-than-the-teacher smile.  Smartboard?  Who needs a Smartboard when you have a DumbCircle on top of your neck?

My point falls dead in the water but my kids all nod together appreciatively, as if a synchronized swimming team in a drought, a Greek chorus with laryngitis.  Because X is actually quite humble, he looks down at his hands, thinking, perhaps, about all the OH2 trapped therein.

And what about the double-bonds?  I ask Smarty-X, because the language of Chemistry makes me think of complex romantic entanglements.  I have always taken to that one phrase and just wish I knew how to use it accurately.  So maybe X can help me.

He shakes his head and redirects our focus.  I think the next word in the sentence is in the accusative case, isn’t it? 

You can nudge a horse towards water, but you can’t make him incurably thirsty.

A smarter board

Swerves

In the pre-hurricane buzz, everyone is a little disjointed, as if objects will up and start flying ahead of the weather’s schedule.  Ions are flaunting their jazz in the heavy air.

Running along 5^th avenue, aromatic and bulky stacks of catering containers are set out in my path.  I swerve.  Another runner, approaching from the opposite side, swerves.  We come to an impasse, chest to chest.  He and I break out in laughter at exactly the same moment.  Our t-shirts are exactly the same color; our pants are the same color and length and we have the same sneakers on our feet.  Our befuddlement is twinned.  If this were a movie, we would very quickly fall in love, have two babies, and get a three-legged dog (it would be a low-budget Indie film, where real things happen).  But because it is merely Brooklyn, we move to the left and right of one another, still laughing in rhythm, and go off in opposite directions.

When there has not been enough laughter, sometimes it makes sure to ram into you.

Charon Sings, Irene Goodnight

Hurricane Irene does come through Brooklyn with her whiskbroom and whisks some things around.  A few tree branches are on the ground on 5^th avenue as evidence that she touched us—unlike elsewhere, where she played the Great Destroyer.  All week long I had scoffed at her approach and at the manic shopping taking place all around me, an urban (but not urbane) response to impending disaster, the un-calm before the un-storm.

But on Saturday, I woke up in a panic that belonged as much to the collective as to my own drive to survive: When Mother Earth wants to tromp us, there is nothing we can do.  We can buy all the bottled water we like and still—

So, what did I do? I ran to the store—to multiple stores—and bought an excess of  perishables.  I accidentally paid five dollars for a purple cabbage, because I didn’t mind my price tags.  Abhinivesa: death fear and vise-grip on one’s individual life, here demonstrated by clinging unreasonably to cruciferous idols.

Survival 101: Green Clingy Thingy

That cabbage is still in my fridge days later, staring out at me when I open the door.  Its weight—almost four pounds—could fasten you to the earth in a strong wind.  Had Irene taken our house, my life, I could have used it in place of a coin, carrying it under my tongue as I crossed Styx (whatever may or may not be after death, I’m fairly convinced all former Latin teachers have a post-mortem honeymoon in Hades).

And Charon, the mythological ferryman, carting the dead across the water with his precious stick, would be thrilled.  A description of C, courtesy of Vergil, via John Dryden, via Wiki-P: “A sordid god: down from his hairy chin/ A length of beard descends, uncombed, unclean;/ His eyes, like hollow furnaces on fire/ A girdle, foul with grease, binds his obscene attire.”  Just my kinda’ fellah.

I would point at my puffed cheeks, indicating fare for my passage.

C: Dang, awesome!  People usually give me old quarters!

Me: Mwwoffpph.

C: Five-dollar, organic cabbage, al-right!

Me:  HMMMPPPhhhfff.

C: I’m going to sell this on e-bay after I drop you off!  You know, when you’re the ferryman for the dead—first, you hardly ever get fresh veggies down here.

Me: Did you just say “veggies?”

C: Sure.

Me: Veggies?  That’s what my mother says.

C: As I was saying [slow, methodical paddling]—usually people just stick the first coin they find under the tongue of the deceased.  An after-thought, you know?  But this—this is premium.  This is purple!  Sister, I’m going to row, row, row your boat!

Baby, what I would have made you!

When Charon gets over his cabbage glee and reverts to his stately role, he’ll ask me whence I have come, whom I have left behind.  I will talk excitedly with my mouth full of cabbage: Nature asked for me back– who would have thought– after I treated her so badly for so many years, plastic-bagging her like there was no tomorrow, literally—

And Charon, who is wise in his ways, will cut me off: Sweetheart, there-there: when you are eating, eat; when you are dying, die; and when the ferryman is ferrying you, please, shut up.

Cabbage, held in the mouth long enough, becomes sulphur-sweet, like the water upstate, before the rivers rose, before the trees pulled themselves from the earth that gave them form.  I stand on one leg, balancing in the boat, one last vrksasana in this incarnation.  Spirit wafts.

Charon ferries on.  Water, like water does, takes the shape of the story that contains it.

Do you know that story?

“Each life converges to some centre,

Expressed or still.”

–Emily Dickinson, LXI

expressed in stillness

Real Life Stranger than Figs

My rat-a-tat-tatty purple yoga mat, shredding its rubbery dandruff under my hands, stays behind in Israel, land of figs and honey, when I leave.  The mat is in every way unspecial but, like other ritual objects, it seems to have taken on a character and vivacity.  By proximity, it knows something about me that I don’t.

Coming and Going, coming and going, it clucks at me, while I squish my clothes into my travel backpack, forgetting which pocket holds my clean underwear and which my dirty.    The mat has more of my skin cells than I do.

All good yoga mats should be in Israel when they meet their end, I console it, in the distracted condition to which packing reduces me. You’re totally used up! 

 Lame, my mat says, in the tone your mother uses to get your attention. But like the trusty mat it has been, it leans against the wall with utter patience.  It doesn’t mind being clung to.  It doesn’t mind being let go.  That’s why it’s rubber.

 Israel has just rolled into its succulent time.  Benai Berak, the neighborhood where my Aunt and Uncle live with their ever-burgeoning family, is a tiny holy enclave outside Tel Aviv.  It is impoverished and disheveled; yet roses and citrus trees bloom recklessly on the perimeter of the limestone apartment buildings.   Certain kinds of beauty are unstoppable.

Dont try to stop this

I had only one fig while I was there—it was not quite their season.  The fig was a disappointment; it was dehydrated (like me), sulphured (not like me), sugary and squished in a plastic container with its figgy brethren.  It looked shellacked.  The fig tasted like righteous, processed seed.  The grocery store proprietor, a Sephardic with a potbelly like a classroom globe, grinned a proprietary grin:  foreigners had a knack for wanting the expensive shit, didn’t they.

I grinned back, being just that kind of Figgy foreigner.

In the figinning...

Israeli honey I glimpsed once: at the Duty Free shop by the Delta departure gate.  It promised to be pure.  But purity by the spoonful paled beside the prospect of not being able to fit my carry-on luggage into the overhead bin.  So I skipped the sweetness and joined the line of passengers impatiently waiting to board.  But I had honey on the mind, a long, gooey strand of thought that stretched thousands of miles.

Delta Dogs

Orientation

 International travel is hopelessly funny.  It dredges up and makes defunct your best concept of normalcy.

 God, so busy abiding in His infinite and unfathomable perfection, has no time to fuss about airline safety.  He needs his minions to be thorough and vigilant.  As we prepare for take-off, a Chassid, his peyos flapping, flips open his cell phone, fires off text messages—regulations be damned.  When the attendant, a bleach-blond in a tart, fire-truck red Delta dress passes by, he covers his operation sloppily with a pillow.  My sister eyes him down the aisle, as if his intentions are truly seditious.  He’s gonna bring down this plane, her stare says.  Her J had told her that to interfere with the traffic signals, everyone on the entire flight would have to receive a call at the same time.  But nonetheless.  The Chassid blows his nose on the red Delta blanket and then tucks it back into its original plastic packaging.  His phone is still blinking as we gain on the moon.  He pulls out a garbage bag full of sandwiches from beneath his seat, sniffs at each of them, and then chooses one over which to pray.  And the lord separated the wheat from the chaff and the Muenster from the Cheddar. 

Another religious Jew in his idiosyncratic garb piles his prayer books on his tray table until they are high enough that he can rest his head on them and sleep.  He asks my parents to switch seats so that he will not be sitting next to a woman—especially a number like my beautiful Mom. Heaven forbid their elbows touch and electrify the easily-tripped circuits of desire.  Elbow to elbow, the great chain of being goes on.  “Lest the pack should get lost in the dark.”

Many of the passengers throw their trash directly into the aisles.  When I go to the toilet in the back of the plane—the cleanest of the six—I see water suddenly begin to spurt, then rush, out of an upper cabinet in the rear deck.  A flight attendant, hands set brusquely on her hips, watches it with me, as if she were observing an orangutan alphabetize spices.  “No one is responsible except Murphy” her grimace seems to say as she picks up the intra-flight phone, and nonchalantly reports, “Yeah, the ice is going.  I’m just going to wait ‘til it’s done.”  “Do you want me to get my blankets for you?” I ask.  Or the booger blankets, I want to add. “No,” she says, entirely unconcerned.  The water spills out into the aisle and runs backward, with gravity, towards the bathrooms and the tail of the plane.  I step out of its way and watch an elderly man toss an empty plastic cup carelessly to the floor.  He doesn’t even look to see if anyone is looking—ignorance ignorant of itself.   I wonder how many things can go amiss in flight before it is unsustainable, and the plane plummets back where it came from like a kite in car wash.

Turn the Rosy Cheek

When I ask my Uncle if he ever has doubts about the choice to live this ultra-orthodox existence with its particular constraints, he refers me to a meaningful quotation from Torah.  A fence of roses, the Torah calls the many rules and laws by which the faithful abide.  Yes, we live inside a fence, but it’s not a bad fence!  I imagine how many roses it would take to weave an enclosure for even a single being’s life; thousands, millions, maybe even billions.  That fence would smell like the First Garden in June and require intensive treatments with manure.

Hedging your bets

No Dead Time, my uncle says, twinkles in his eyes and exaltation in his voice, of how they pass their days in this community.  As far as I can tell, he’s had on the same blue-black cardigan for the last three decades.  The same slightly scuffed black sneakers, which lack the kind of support that would make them actually useful for exercise.  In this kind of religious life, you always know what to do—what to do with yourself– when you wake up in the morning.  If you want, every moment of your day is prescribed for you.  There is a prayer that frames even the tiniest gesture.  Think fast before you bite that pear.

At moments when I feel at a total loss for guidance, direction, this kind of structure seems almost sensible, at least consoling.  It is the fence, here, that enables and yields a beautiful life—that is, if one decides that what is within the fence is, in fact, beautiful.  Commentary on this Torah passage reads, “Ideals can prove more effective barriers than metal walls.” So if I see the Roses, conjoined into a boundary, and call them perfect, all the barbed wiring in the world couldn’t do a better job of keeping me exactly where I am.

My fence has a lot of gaps

Exactly Where I Am

My cousin, B, fourteen years old, his yarmulke tilted from Purim pleasures, brings my dad the salt-shaker as soon as we arrive from the airport.  Melach! He says, handing it to my dad as we are shuttled to the table, where we will spend most of the ten days that follow.  They remember everything about us from last time, four years ago: our strange tastes and predilections, our excess use of salt, my twisted relationship to tea, my mother’s jogging routines.  There is a rumor that I only eat vegetables.  B hovers over my dad, watching him salt everything on his plate, amused.  When my dad puts down the shaker, he hands it right back to him, gestures at the food, as if one should be able to see the salt like a film of snow.  Then B beckons for his drunken brother-in-law to pass the wine, turns the bottle of Ultra-Kosher Cabernet upside-down, draining it into a plastic cup so flimsy it is almost saran wrap.  Two drops fall out: “L’Chaim” he says,  “You must drink it all at once, and get drunk.”  He looks in his dictionary, whose pages have been well-thumbed.  The word he is looking for is “necessary.”

Clean Pate and Clean Plate

In the mornings, my cousins, fairly self-sufficient from a young age, crack eggs into a plastic cup and fry them in the black, worn skillet.  Eggs and sesame challah and the immediacy of God: a breakfast for Moses’ champions.  Everyone in that house functions on a different time zone.  My Aunt, who bore ten babies and miscarried one, has been an insomniac for over twenty-five years—first because I was always nursing someone, and then because I’m just crazy, she explains with a smile. And then I had to learn how to walk again after each baby. She loves the house and being at home.  Moreso, she loves the concept and practice of a simple home that is as infinitely elastic as the human gene pool.  Each baby was a new rose. Everything she describes she transforms into a miracle.

Baby and baby of baby

We all have to pick, build and tear down our own fences.  The absence of fence is not necessarily freedom.  Some fences are invisible, agreed to by the subtle mind and therefore unchallenged.  Some fences are half-falling down and poorly maintained—staked sloppily enough that one trips over them from time to time, and so knows they are there.  How powerless any one being truly is, my Uncle says, with a hand-gesture that indicates in this predicament only the creator has our water-wings.  But this is where we differ; I think a person—any person– is the most powerful thing there is.

A Weepy Wall

Washing is no secret

At the Kotel ha-Ma-aravi, the Wailing Wall in the old city of Jerusalem, prayers are scrawled on pieces of scrap paper and stuffed into the cracks in the stone.  Passing notes to God: Pssssssst!  It was a wet and cold day when we visited, which made crying superfluous.  I had to wrap my scarf around my head and wear two jackets, but still the damp weather got into my bones like a ghost new at haunting and overexcited to do so.

Read my mind

Jews from all over the world converge upon this remnant, where Shekinah has lodged itself, like a piece of popcorn in a molar, since the destruction of the 2^nd temple.  The wall is unremarkable—actually an outer wall of the temple proper.  Poor King Solomon, who tried to build G-d a suitable house, not realizing that G-d is more of a couch-surfer, later got distracted by his squadron of foreign wives.  Desire concretized into its own inner idol, which no Nebuchadnezzar could conflagrate.   (It may be the good luck endemic in this architecture that made me spell “Nebuchadnezzar” correctly on the first try. O.K.—the second try).

How many times a day or week did the groundskeepers clear out those crumpled requests?  Some of the papers were wedged deeply into the gaps in the masonry; something thin and sharp, like a dentist’s tool, would be needed to retrieve them.  Perhaps whoever maintained the wall also read the prayers personally, purveyors of secrets—that or threw them in the trash. It was a job I wanted, unionized or not.   Somewhere, there must be a garbage bin allocated specifically for expired pleas.  Or, worse: a recycling truck. This purse is made entirely from re-used scraps of prayer; proceeds from this purse go to help those whose prayers were not answered because they were never read. 

My tribe sees the sun

You cannot turn your back on the wall as you depart the square—or you can, but that’s like letting your toddler oversee the stir-frying.  You keep the wall in your line of sight as you slowly back up.  Something like this is also the protocol for departing a temple in Asia without breaking gaze with the Buddha, and for encountering a wild animal.  Of all the ways to die, being eaten alive might be the most primordial.  The wall, however, does not harm you, should you turn away; but it notes your half-heartedness and, as is done for a student caught cheating on an exam, lops off some points on your celestial report card.  Best to keep your intent fixed—to maintain your prayer in your line of sight until it blends with the bricks and mortar and is indistinguishable from the structure itself.  Nothing special.

One does not need to visit such a real wall with great frequency; the wall(s) of the mind, of things longed for but not obtained, usually suffices.   I have wedged so many notes in the cracks of this mental edifice—notes from me to myself.  Some of them sit there still.  Some of them fall out when I breathe deeply.  Some of them have gone through (!) to the little Guru, a diminished God with a stenographer’s pad sitting inside my pituitary gland beneath a parasol, to protect her from the occasional monsoon of hormones.

Once or twice in a lifetime, if you’re lucky, God decides to check betweens two rocks and, good-humored, perhaps because the Magnolias are in bloom, and the wild spray of pink abounds, answers exactly.

But do you speak the language of fire?

Masada

We watch an extraordinary moon rise over the Dead Sea, from the Balcony of a hostel, where a fellow traveler tells me about excursions on his family bicycle as a teen.  He would take his bike and go as far as he could go in any direction, wait, and then, long after school hours, return home.  He drinks an Israeli beer and looks at the commanding Moon as it crosses and then takes over the horizon.   In his mind, I think, he’s riding his bicycle towards outer space, and there is no reason to ever turn around.  Behind us, Mt. Masada—a hiccup of a mountain— looms, topped off with the remains of a BC-style Jewish fortress community. Everyone at the hostel is staying there with the intention of summiting it, either on foot or by tram.

Taster

My mother, father, sister and I hike the mountain in at the edge of morning, after all four of us lie in our narrow, mildewed bunk beds in the hostel dormitory, sleeplessly blinking into the night air, the mosquitoes playing eenie-meenie-miney-moe.  You know something is going to dawn.  There is a certain ambition involved in hiking a holy site—the expectation that it will be hard, that you will work to summit, that you will understand that the reward, for the faithful, was to be that much closer to the hemline of God’s fancy-shmancy white shmata.  As we hike, to our left, the moon creeps down behind the plateau while the Sun comes out over Jordan and the Dead Sea begins to blue.  The Dead Sea is the lowest point in the world.  God’s hole-in-one: where concentration of salt in the water separating Israel and Jordan keeps the great ball of fire from sinking.

Laying down the law

Even though we begin before five a.m., there are two busloads of Teenagers ahead of us on the trail: Birthright Israel trips in which a participant not only must ride a chartered vehicle all over the nation, but undergo physical challenges with The Tribe.  One asthmatic teenager, checking to see if her iPhone gets reception on the ascent, sits down on one of the steps cut into the mountain.  Je-sus!  She says dramatically to her friend.  I’m not going to make it, this is sooooooooo hard.  Her friend is chewing gum vigorously.  She sits down too, chews even harder, like she’s storing mastication power for some later use.  They smooth their hair, then one another’s, religiously.  A bus ride is rough on the coif.

At the top of Masada, where a well-preserved fort community still has enough of its foundation in tact that the imagination can play architect with the raw matter, the Sun blasts over the buttes and cliffs and the breeze picks up.  One can imagine the Jews hording water and wheat and whatever else was needed for survival.  The tour guides begin to orient their students to the facts; one guide, who tells his bunch from the outset they are going to do and learn everything faster than all the other groups declares as a lone black bird cuts through the open air; “the Romans are just like F-in McDonalds…they do the same thing everywhere.”

Everywhere.  The trails marking the Roman siege efforts are still imprinted in the rolling desert.  You can practically feel the Latin profanity, uttered by soldiers decades ago, wafting up from the rubble, where they waited under the swash-buckling Orion for enough morning light to see the way to empire.

Eyecandy for the Romans

Bending

It’s still the quiet part of the morning; only my Uncle is up, studying.  I slide the glass door to the front room closed, unroll my mat, and practice.  The floor is linoleum and often scattered with crumbs.  I’m doing idol-worship for sure as I bow down to the enigmatic shapes of the breath, but my Uncle, asking with a vocal wink if I’ve learned to levitate yet, lets me go for it, even in his house where sacrilege is no small potato.  The clock on the wall is a half-unrolled, gilded Torah Scroll and ticks as if trying to prove a point: time, time, time.  Long breath holds, in which I can feel my heartbeat making a racket against my ribs.   My cousin, M, sticks her head in the door when she returns from her night job in the girls’ dormitory—Yoga, or exercise?  She asks.  I shake my head.  Something. Nothing. 

Coming and Going, coming and going, my mat whispers.

She ducks out again, slides the door shut.  Conversation and prayer begin audibly in the kitchen.

I love you, I say.  I don’t know who I am talking to; my mat, is doing the “I’m rubber, you’re glue” thing, familiar from the elementary school yard.

I love you, I say again.  I’m talking to the room.  I’m talking to my family.  I’m talking to all the people that cannot hear me, to the wall, to the presence behind the Wall, to the eggshells, to the waning moon, to the air, to what’s here and what’s hereafter.

But can you find the line?

jasmine shuggie and l's violets practice nondually

The guy who works at the fancy flower shop on the Friday afternoon shift is so bored he bites his fingernails and tries to spit them from the desk into the pots on display.  I spot him doing this through the glass door of the shop; he seems to be three for three.

I want to bring a Calla Lily home for M, who is visiting.  Between fingernails, the flower shop guy tells me how to manage the single blossom: the Calla Lily needs to be placed in only two inches of water.  So the stem, incapable of absorption, won’t rot.  Outside, February is brightening, and the little buds suggest what’s next.

exactitude

The Calla lily is a fire red that fades to orange, then white, and then green, where it becomes stem.

AO dies lying on the couch with her feet up. This has surprised everybody in the poetry community.  Even the couch, I suspect, was surprised to have someone pass on it like that.

Death: some deranged punctuation?  And a fingernail looks just like a comma.

Rosy Corpse

One death, however removed, invites back all the other deaths.

In my dream, L’s corpse is lying in savasana on our parlor floor.  Every day, I get down on my knees and embrace her.  Her body has begun to crumble.  Her feet are reabsorbed into her tibia, leaving two clean stumps.  Despite these changes, which I note carefully, I don’t stop the daily practice of embrace.

Decay and bloom play rock, paper, scissors

I get up from hugging her.  Her body twitches.  In a moment of convoluted dream-logic, I have to pause: Can a corpse do this?  No: a corpse cannot do. Her body twitches and flops again, as if to defy category.  I think about the phenomenon of Chickens after their heads get cut off.  A certain amount of time postmortem and the body can still…well, do the chicken.

I retreat to the den.  Dad is sitting at his desk.  L rises and follows me in.  She is benign but she wants something.  I gesticulate at Dad—Hello? Help!

L extends her arms to me, for me.

What do you want? I ask.

I want to be loved, she says, as clear as anything.  I think of her on Radio New Zealand, at 102 years old, the last year of her life, archly regaling the host: Well, if all those people that come to read to me stopped coming, I wouldn’t DIE.

Pshaw, I want to say.  But who could say that?  And because all I want is to love her again, we are as good a match as peanut butter and jelly.

Since I am slowly being cornered, I reach out and hold her. It is the least we can do for the dead, when they entangle themselves in the deep strands of our imagination. She dashes out of the house.

I wake up before dawn.  The photo of L lying in state in her nightgown is propped against the wall on her monogrammed clipboard.  I recall that night, five long months ago, when the full moon hollered over Times Square and L hollered right back, dressed up and ready for a date with the Great Nothing.

True to form, when the undertaker entered her apartment the next day and saw her corpse lying there, surrounded by the fat, unembarrassed red and white roses, he exclaimed: For lack of a better word, she looks so…alive!

Only L could get a compliment from an undertaker.

the last word is no word at all

Lily Loot

My mother likes to have flowers around the house in the winter. It’s like forcing the hand of spring.  I go into the Apple Deli to buy her a bunch of tiger lilies—the flowers that throw the biggest pollen tantrum as they die.  She finds their smell tantalizing.

As I am paying, declining to have them wrapped in even more decorative paper, a woman storms into the store, heading straight for the open refrigeration cases, and looks accusingly at the Stoneyfield products, her hands on her hips.

Your yogurt selection is TERRIBLE! She fumes at the top of her lungs.

The tiger lilies blush a sickly orange.  The cashier, a stout Korean, makes change for me with one eyebrow raised.

You have to get SOME NORMAL YOGURT! She says.  This is pathetic. Where is all the REAL yogurt?

She storms out again.

Lilies, as flowers that grace many funerals, are used to being around unseemly and unpredictable shows of emotion.

Then the cashier laughs.  Her laugh sounds like coins jangling.  That lady comes in everyday and shouts at the yogurt, she says. There are so many stores, why doesn’t she just go to another store?

Her pudgy grandson is standing beside her.  As she looks out over the display of mushy avocados, unseasonal fruits, neat cases of packaged vegetables, he keeps taking ginger candies, unwrapping them, and placing them inside his mouth.  I have yet to see him chew, or even slightly move his jaw.

Did you ever ask her what yogurt she is looking for? I suggest.

The proprietor shakes her head.  No, she says.  No, no.

The lilies bow their perfumed heads in tandem.  Yes, yes, yes. It’s the only word they know

I think of Joseph Campbell in tweed Jacket, the tattered copy of Ulysses a fixture under his arm, traveling in India.  His mystical impulse lit up like a beeper.  When he encountered the holy Swami, his question came up of its own accord, as if acid reflux from an indigestible world: How do we bear a world in which there is so much suffering?

And the Swami: People like you and I, we must say yes to all of it.

if yes were a direction

Spades

Sometimes, I cannot figure out what stops us from calling a spade a spade.  As if I should pretend you don’t suffer, and you should pretend I don’t suffer.  As if we should pretend we don’t look into the same dark, when night falls, or the same brightness, when day returns.

twisted sister has eyes in the back of her head

At the shoreline in Prospect Park, the big swans, icons of winter, are badgering whoever dares to visit the lake.  They have learned to want bread and it makes them aggressive.  The ducks congregate where the freeze is incomplete, a slice of liquid as aberrant on the stiff turf as a rosebush in February.  Together, the birds honk irritably for the crappy sandwich bread, puffy and synthetic as shoulder pads from the eighties.  The long reeds and cattails stand straight up when the wind is still.

even reality has roots

For weeks, the trees have looked to be inverted icicles, and the park is coated in white.  It is as if a great sheet has been thrown over the merry corpse of the earth.  You can see far, when the expressive parts of plants are dormant. The eye, says John O’Donohue, is the mother of distance.

You need a spade to plant a flower.  You need a spade to dig one up.

To obtain understanding, the Buddha exposed himself recklessly to the elements.  This made him, for us, a translator of the elemental.  He’d be sitting here right now, if it were still his era, transfixed by the parade of life in front of him.  And with his butt firmly committed to the ground beneath him, he’d surely feel the trembling of the bulbs and blades, as they discern the time to move towards the light.

time to

Cruddy Bows

“At its simplest and most essential, faith is that willingness to continue to move forward.”–Patricia Walden & Jarvis Chen

window of opportunity

I am walking hurriedly along the snow-shushed avenues of Park Slope towards the Gowanus Canal, the only body of water that can’t manage to sparkle.  Little ice globes drop from the trees like arboreal sighs.

The crud in me bows to the crud in you, I holler to the canal.

Blah, the canal answers.

Right-o. The drawbridge is covered in salt.  It would give Lot’s wife a panic attack, all these tiny crystals meant to melt the frozen skin of the earth.  I look down into the flat, gray water, then up at its dance partner, the flat, gray sky.  They seem to recognize each other.  As Brené Brown– researcher-storyteller and compassion-cowgirl– says, “Only when we know the darkness in ourselves can we be present with the darkness of others.”  Pellets of ice fall like punctuation.

I’m going to see R, who can speed-dial what some yogis refer to as source with her eyeballs: by looking right at you, while she kindly coaxes your pain to come out and play in the fresh air.   And your pain goes: Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee. What really seems to matter for healing to take place is that “your” pain, and the subtle layers of connective tissue that bind it to “your” joy, be seen.  That the other person doesn’t look away, not even if your nose runs all over your upper lip.  After all, in a staring contest with God, God’s got all the time in the world on her side. 

I think of Brene’s digest of Pema Chodron, champion of compassion: “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded.  It is a relationship between equals” (16).  Got that right, sistah!  The sky may be infinite, but the water can contain the infinite.  Same same.

left hand right hand parity

Swamped

At the swampy street corners, I suspend my quick pace just long enough to strategize about where to put my foot down next: alleys of icy slush? Tall, dirty snowdrifts?

Where is a safe place for the next step?

This is a spiritual as well as practical question.  And where do you put your foot, ultimately?  The only place it can go.  Which is usually exactly what you were trying to avoid: the deep, wet part.

It’s the recurrent winter koan:  how do you step in a puddle without stepping in a puddle? Pass through without suffering from passing through?

Exactly.

The cars zoom through the crosswalks.  They mean it.  Even in this bad weather–schools closed, walking iffy– when pedestrians are unusually compromised and the acuity of most people falters, the cars are tough.  And they don’t care that it’s their speed or your pants.

In New York, when the weather is at its worst, garbage amasses.  Normal collection schedules are forfeited.  Bins and bags rise, topsy-turvy, out of the snow like renovated Deities, patched together from the shit we tried to get rid of.   The result is a collaboration between nature and our detritus which forms shapes awkward, imposing, and random.  If this were Wednesday of Genesis Week, the Lord might begin to doubt his scheme.  Take up a new hobby, like paintball or knitting.

I pass an older Chinese woman, hair in a rough ponytail, sorting through blue plastic bags stuffed with trash, moving them from one garbage bin to another and back.  She observes her work then shakes her head, stamps her feet in their stiff boots, and wipes her thick gloves on her equally plastic pants. Repeat.  It’s as if she’s auditioning for the part of an Urban Sisyphus.  Nothing, really, happens.

nothin' flowers all over

“–Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,/
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?”—Juan Ramon Jiminez

If The Sock Fits

Just when I’m cruising, my left boot floods completely, the way an eye fills spontaneously with tears when someone says I love you. For the next mile, I’m in my own private puddle, which seems even colder than the already cold outside temperature.  What we take personally really does go to the bone.

I have ten minutes before my appointment, and my tears brim over; sadness practices that martial art of quiet, invisible presence.  Emotion, like Jackie Chan, is always crouched to pounce.  And when it does pounce, I try the remedy that (sometimes) worked when I was small: call my parents.

Since I’m near his workplace, I try my Dad on the phone:

Dad, do you happen to have an extra pair of socks at your office?

Never mind his feet are double the size of mine: warm plus dry equals perfect.

Let me look, he says kindly.  And proceeds to look nowhere, because he knows he doesn’t have what I need. I can hear him looking nowhere; through the phone it sounds like nobody is doing anything.

Sorry, he says.

I pass by the fascist yoga place: why not?  I go in and stand, dripping, on the plastic bag laid down as a weather-guard in front of the door.  Here, at least, I might receive low-grade pity and good cheer.  My boot immediately lets out a ring of water around me as if it has just peed.

The two people at the desk look at me, a cloth diagram of the chakras dangling behind where they sit.  They are always ready for yoga.

heartily spinning

Hi, I say. Do you, by any chance, sell socks?

The student receptionist cuts me a smile like she’s been saving it for me all day and measured it precisely to fit my face.  Yes! She says.

I’m going to have to rethink my assumptions about fascist yogis who are also fortuitously sock vendors.  The gods can assume any form the human mind can imagine.

Mine are drenched, I say.  I’m not going to walk into your studio.

She squats by the lucky bin on the lowest shelf.  The socks she retrieves are fitted for sports, whiter than white, the N in nylon, with plastic dots for traction on the soles.  They are marked with the insignia HSP, “Health Smile Peace”—in primary colors, as befits the building blocks of your own well-being.

A little Smiley Guy, emblazoned into the arch of the sock, smiles up at the wearer forebodingly.  He is meant to remind you that it’s better to be you, however wet and miserable, than a Smiley Guy, pathologically cheerful, merged with cheap fabric and sweaty feet, so just get on with it, smile and feel your innate health and peace.

I can hear Smiley Guy talking to me through the plastic wrap like a furious guru:

Do you feel peaceful?

No, I say.  I feel wet and childish and….

But do you feel peaceful? The Smiley Guy interrupts forcefully, as if only a dummy would stop at those adjectives.

I think he should meditate on his face before someone sewed him on.  But we’re about to be intimate, he and I.  So I extend my credit card compassionately.

I’m taking you home with me, I tell him.  And your lovingkindness.  I used to have goldfish.  Now I have you.

She sells me the socks right in the doorway.  Sixteen dollars.  Perfect.  Just what I was hoping to pay for some crappy socks with poor design and a weird bump in the back so you’re sure to get a blister should you wear them with shoes.  Instructions on the package warn: do not sterilize these in boiling water!  Well, duh!  Because there is a dude on them!  But, O.K. Check.

I’m not even going to sterilize you, I try to convey to Smiley Guy with body-language alone.

As I leave, and the yogis settle down, it occurs to me that you really don’t know where relief lies or how it will come—or your own capacity to find peace in the throes of discomfort.  Even Smiley Guy has to concede this point.  Once you are a being in the world, you are not protected—no plastic wrap, no instructions on how you should be used, no specifications for washing.  But you are connected—and it is incumbent upon you to figure out how.

Weighing In

the one i'd been waiting for

As it is, R lets me put my sopping Maggie Moo socks on her whistling office radiator to dry, and I step into the crosshairs of her caring gaze barefoot.  Outside her office door in the dimly lit hallway, two stooped old men are taking turns weighing one another on the medical scale.  Neither of them can see the register.  We hear them muttering and laughing.  Through the window, I can see the ice religiously laying down its slippery film: over the confusion, over the elation.  Nothing, really, happens.  But it’s a tremendous kind of nothing; if you put it on the scale, even stripped of its wet socks, it would grate against the very depths.

bowl at the depths

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” –MLK Jr.

inescapability

I’m more often than not in a stupefied silence on the Monday dedicated to MLK Jr.: a man who knew how to use his words, to pack them with an indomitable spirit.

That “single garment” he speaks of is our true—albeit metaphysical—receiving blanket when we come into this befuddled world.  His accuracy squeezes out of me a tiny, Monday prayer: may we have the ability to recognize what surrounds and connects us.

Speaking of.  At the crowded Food Co-op, where no one is, in fact, cooperating, I spend most of the afternoon making up a missed shift.  This involves wearing an unsexy green smock and unloading other people’s shopping baskets.   It means I get to touch a lot of vegetables.

like these european counterparts

A kid with wind-burned cheeks and messy hair holds up her would-be dinosaur and roars at the check-out worker, who pays no attention.  She digs the creature’s mouth into her dad’s butt, through his coat. RRRRRRRRRRRRRR, she exclaims, emoting for the glutivore.

Yikes, I say, you brought your dinosaur!  That thing is scary and it looks hungry!

Excuse me, says the little one.  It is not a dinosaur.  Someone left it at my door this morning.

Well, what is it then? I ask, always ready for a new fact from a young person.

Not a dinosaur, she insists.  So don’t call it a dinosaur!

Ah: to call a thing what it is is a delicate art.  She lets out a great roar, while the co-op members mostly keep their own inclination to roar quieter than persimmons.

Being Fruitful

Keats said:  I feel more and more, every day as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds.

Do you too sense the thousand realms nested inside this one or inside which this one is nested?  Winter shakes its fists, holding its mood-rings up to the dim light, and the realms knock into one another like Matryoshka dolls.

In the center of the dolls, in the center of the realms, is the tiniest, carved from a single piece of wood, which cannot be opened further: an amaranthine infant, eternally fresh.

It Ends with a P

My goddaughter, M, sneaks into the guestroom just before dawn.  I have a candle lit, as I have already done a little practice in the throaty dark, and awaited the interruption of her bare feet and four-year old pajama’d squint.

M stands in the doorway with one hand on the knob.  She’s all business:

Can we do what we do when I get in bed with my Mommy and my Daddy in the morning? She’s at the age and height where her eyes are level with most doorknobs, and so everything is an opening.

Of course, I say.  What’s that? I pull her into the room.

Pretend that I’m being born. M is precise, as if tracking a blueprint for play in her mental toy box. I’m in Mommy’s tummy and then I come out.

from the cover of BIRTHING FROM WITHIN. a ladder i long to climb.

We climb onto the futon agreeably to embark on the adventure of birth.

Why do you have a candle? She asks.

To prepare for your birth, I tell her.  And because it is so nice and cozy.

O, she gives an appreciative nod.

She doesn’t know that I’m a parturition junkie, always, somewhere, in a fetal state of mind.  Is it the bursting forth? So, do you want to get under the covers in a little ball and we can pretend you’re in Mommy’s belly?

Yes, she say, as royally as Marie Antoinette accepting Louis’ giddy, misguided proposal.

Do you want me to show you what we did when you were in Mommy’s belly?

What did you do? She says from under the covers.  To feign a time when you only half-existed is—apparently—instantly exhilarating.  She’s already drunk from spelunking in the womb.

We talked to you, I say, just like this. I put my mouth close to the curve of her back and call: Come on out, little baby, it’s the end of August, we’re ready to meet you, come see us out here in the world!

She giggles. I feel her belly shake through the connective tissue of the sheets and blankets.  O.K. M agrees, much more quickly than she did before labor, her voice muffled by the bedding. I’ll come out now!

Your Mommy pushed and pushed you out, I tell her.  Mommies work very, very hard to help babies come out.  And babies work really hard too.  Everyone is excited.

She nods as her head slips through the invisible cervix, as if this was all very obvious.

dilating post facto

We talk about her first hours in our company in the hospital room, while Ernesto the Hurricane spat rain all over the city and pawed at the trees. I run an APGAR test on her, which she passes with flying colors: but her grip is the grip of one who is already familiar with the world, and its sometimes-partings, and the slightest flavors of uncertainty.

M leaves no self-stone unturned, inquiring about what we did on her first night in the hospital (um, slept?), when had grandpa arrived, how babies know how to eat.  We make it all the way through her first months of life in about ten minutes, as dawn is showing some muscle between the slats of the lowered blinds.  Lots of diaper changes happen lickety-split, with no fuss and no mobiles offering their rotating solace.

When you were a baby, sometimes it was difficult for you to poo. I tell her. So we helped you by rubbing your belly just like this. I make gentle circles on her tummy with three fingers.  Her gaze rolls to the right, where memories of babyhood live behind her ear like a barrette, the deep temporal zone.

Her little eyes light up with digestive glee.  You squirmed a lot, I say.  But when you could finally poo, you felt better.

Can I ask you something? She wants to know, with all the openness of a tabula rasa.

I prepare myself for a whopper while she contemplates her budding question—Where do babies come from?  Why do people die?  Why is there a hair on your chin, are you turning into a man?

Instead, she asks: Why do you say ‘poo’ instead of ‘poop’?

O, I reply, caught off guard, sure we were about to veer into the realm of the kinks in the mortal coil.  Well, they are really the same thing.  Sometimes I forget the ‘p.’  It’s like a nickname.

A fecal one?

Well, can you just say ‘poop’? She requests, solemn eyes like synchronized full moons.

Of course, I say.  But if I forget, I need you to correct me.

O.K., she says.  POOP.

Since life must go on, we go on.

allies in continuance

Going On

Before this year, I’ve had an allergic hatred to this season, where you can feel extinction in your bones like a stone in congee: inarguable and hard.

windowscapes

If that picture isn’t proof then…

But now, I’m making it my business to practice absolute loving-kindness towards winter.  When I can do this successfully, a kind of meteorological metta, I notice that winter is not so bad at all.   And since weather, like other humans, is a complex thing ultimately out of your own control, to extend goodwill towards an unbearable season bears fruit.  Strange fruit.

Look: there is ample light behind the clouds.  Sure, it has to push through a bunch of gray to be counted in the census.  But.

I return from the Park, where I am gradually teaching myself to jog by asking, “What would Gandhi do if the End of Suffering were just one lamp-post further?”

Keep going.

Sweat beads roll beneath my layers.  The Buddha-fairies in the shrubs chuckle: Dude, End of what?  The Four Noble Truths pull on their cross-trainers with arch supports and their maroon, nylon track-suits.  They jog beside me with perfect form and their shoe-laces, unlike mine, never, ever come untied.  The park yawns.

Dusk.  Park Slope families are dragging sleds back to their houses for the dinner hour.  The sound of plastic over salted sidewalks. The kids, by and large, are trudging dramatically.

Approaching me on the street is a man in full snow gear, his head covered in double hoods.  On one side of his chest, a tiny baby is prone, protected from the weather by a tan onesie made of animal hide and pelt.  The man is stepping so softly along the sidewalk, as if each fat snow boot is asking the ground for permission before its tread touches down.  Not to wake the baby. The baby rests the way only a held creature can.

To be held like that.

a lap as big as a mind

“For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.”

–William Stafford,  A Ritual To Read to Each Other

(reprinted without permission).

prayer for what comes through

A Light Jog

Whoops, there goes the solstice.  The light shows more and more of her fleeting backside to the incoming bug-eyed night.

And the Night is all wolf-whistlin’: Yes, yes you can!

And the Light is all: Watch me, then.

And the Blizzard, looking forward to a quieter city, dumps all over Brooklyn.

Snowful

In the snow-slicked entrance to Prospect Park, one little boy turns to another: No, use your sled as a surfboard, come on!
And the other little boy, reservedly: That may work for you, but that doesn’t work for me. His sled is a perfect vertical line from his mitten to the ground.  He prefers things as they are.

Ah, self-understanding at a young age.

On Prospect Park West, an archaic city dump truck, looking like technology Dr. Seuss invented when he was weary of grinches, picks up a huge clawful of dirty snow, turns, and deposits it onto a parked car.  Ho-hum. Right intention, wrong action.

And this morning, with the flip of the year, the light came roaring in the bedroom windows.  Like it just couldn’t wait, and screw the planetary schedule.

I dream I am driving a van through the backwoods of Maine with J & B, both of whom know more about snow and cars than I do. There are two streams to ford. The first one is solid ice. I drive over it as if it were interstate.  The second one is active and raging. I plunge into it and can hardly force the van to sputter out the other side.  I wake up thinking: What streams are running through my life? What IS four-wheel drive?

My best, Wikipedia-less guess: Four-wheel drive has something to do with the relationship of the back of the vehicle to the front, and the amount of traction you can gain on the surface of your life.

So four-wheel drive is a car-cousin of yoga.

Vroom.

Fruity Dudes

B buys a durian at the tiny market in Chinatown, having vowed that if we walk with him in the wet cold, he will eat the most disgusting thing we can find.  In Chinatown that leaves you a lot of options.

When I inquire, how much for this? and point at the dinosaurian fruit suspended from hooks, the attendant, a small Chinese woman bundled up in a hoodie and drinking tea from a paper cup, raises her eyebrows, pleased at our choice.

Seven dollars and fifteen cents!

Which would have been my entire allowance when I was ten.

Durian has great notoriety as a fruit—aphrodisiac? Emetic?  It is often compared for better or worse (get ready) to a vagina, especially in its…. smell.  I didn’t make that up, as this is a fact-based blog.  Now, Durian is awesome and unforgettable and vaginas (yes) are awesome and unforgettable; beyond that, the energy of the comparison wanes.

breaking into light

B carries it home on the subway in its mesh bag, inside another red plastic bag.  This particular durian, “Mon Thong”, has won a fruit prize: a blue ribbon and medal with two antlered deer in cameo, who look as if they are about to make-out with each other.  Its fetid odor is not easily contained by plastic or anything else.  If you want to gain personal space on the subways, Durian is your friend.

B can’t wait to cut it open, but the very first small bite he spits out in the toilet immediately.  Then J, my bro-in-law, wants to try too. What? He says, defending the monstrosity.  It’s not so bad, it tastes like onions!

Onions? B is doubtful.

In Thailand, they are often banned in offices, hospitals and many (finer) hotels.   These institutions can’t permit burps that smell like…the Goddess’ nether-parts.

Netherophilia

Split open, with great fanfare, the durian halves look like the hemispheres of the brain, but yellow as the center of a hardboiled egg, viscous and meaty.  Maybe in two thousand years science will reveal that our oldest ancestor is neither an amphibian nor an amoeba but an obnoxious, deliciously repulsive fruit.

And we, if split open at our core?  Not tidy, not succulent, we would prove equally repulsive even to our own kind.  All the goop of organ and tissue, far more disorganized than polite anatomy texts admit.  Our smell, too, would become quickly unbearable.  And yet we are so fooled by the appearance of skin, which does for the internal stew of the body what snow does, albeit briefly, for the city: makes it beautiful, hauntingly, for as long as it lasts.

The rest of the durian goes in the garbage and we go out to celebrate the turning of the year into…

Oneness.

Numen, Numerical

1-1-11.  The 24 hours when oneness becomes blatently numerical as well as a spiritual ideal. What symbolism can we smush onto this arbitrary alignment?  I’ll try, still in a Durian-tizzy: This is the time wherein we stand beside each other and face whatever is coming, whether it is more light, more dark or something that defies both.

a bundle of ones

this train is bound for

Training Artists

A young man with a cap and pencil-thin, short dreads passes through my train car with handfuls of what look like pamphlets.  He holds them out, fanning them.

I wrote these! He trumpets, leaning over so he is at eye-level with the passengers.  Here, you can look at it! He extends his mini-book, back-jacket side up.  His dreads shake like a bowl full of jelly on a Lazy Susan.

I am loaded down with bags—even a mule would laugh.  Returning home from a week in Boston with root vegetables, family and friends.  Among my equipage, big, empty, mason jars.  This is just in case of an ER requiring a sealable lid.

I can feel the mucus race down my nasal passages.  Humans can make a quart of the stuff per day.  Though I could use his papers as tissues, I try to look disinterested in his autobiography.  Luckily, he is interested enough for everybody.

He puts a booklet directly in front of my eyes.  I wrote this, he says again, a marketing strategy he seems to trust.  And you can buy it. He is nimble.

I’m not going to, I say, but that’s awesome.

Many things are awesome. I’m not sure his book is one.  But his good cheer is welcome.

This guy also wrote a book but I haven't read it yet

O.K., he says. And you have fun in the woods.

What, did my knit hat confuse him?  My dirty rainproof jacket?

I’m not going to the woods, I say.  But maybe you could try selling your books there.

To some cows? He asks.

Do woods have cows?

Sure, I say.  You’d have to give them a little context though.

O, He laughs.  You could do that for me.

So now I am his agent?  Because I didn’t want to buy his two-dollar book but talked to him about it anyway?  I think this similar to how the publishing world really works.

I’m going to Brooklyn, I say.

He leans against the subway pole and flashes a big smile. It’s his E-Z pass.  He has all his teeth but looks like he’s missing them; so naked and small do his pearly-(off)-whites seem so when his lips pull back.

Where are there Woods? He asks.  I don’t even know where there is A Wood!

One wood? I think about it.  You should start in the Park. I say. And see from there.

O.K. He nods happily.  I will.

He gets off at the next stop and moves on to the neighboring car.  Same gig.

The woman beside me pulls her purse strap out of the way of my arm with great dramatic flair.  I know—it’s contagious, this communication.  And I could have bed bugs.

I’m trying to figure out how to bring my own writing into the world and I wonder if I should follow the young man’s example: Photocopy it by the dozen, whore it on the subway and ask for money with a big smile?   To do this you have to be more than O.K. with getting a “No”—but can’t let the “no” turn into a clot.  It’s our duty to keep the bloodstream of art in motion.

sometimes art even has a nice ass

Other artists make other choices: they share their work with anything that lives, for no price at all.  Telling their stories to trees, ivy, the vermin in dumpsters.

The 2 train screeches horribly along its tracks, grating at my nervous system.  I have so many bags that my fingers can’t reach my ears to plug them, so I hum madly.  The woman beside me perfects her expression of annoyance.  Like Prometheus’ face when he registered that he’d been nabbed for stealing the fire for mankind.  He was annoyed about pyrotechnics, she’s annoyed by the proximity. I look towards the adjacent car.  I can see the writer there, arms outstretched, his story prickling at his fingertips.

What I feel like when art happens

But what was the question?

stop, go, nevermind

Showing Not Telling

As I write this, winter is laying down its first cards.  Ace of spades?  You’re going to play that in November?

I show my deuce:  I found both mittens on the first try, I say to winter. Finger-mittens. This year is going to be different. And winter just smirks, the way only a very seasoned thing can.

Whereas welcoming the warm weather feels instinctive, welcoming cold takes practice.  In Prospect Park, Peace Be Upon Thee, of Brooklyn, New York, a huge tree, a thing worth worshiping, has dropped all its leaves; it’s birthday suit time already!  Among its roots,  yellows, oranges and biting reds accrue.  There, shooting straight up towards the barrenness, long-stemmed purple flowers—a deep purple—have broken open over the weekend.  These latecomers know how to take just the right amount of food from the light in order to blossom.  As J says over the phone, “It’s their time, now.”

On the way home from PA along Route 80, peak foliage peaking, frost ebbing off the car wind shield, we stop for gas and I fill up my tea mug in the Smart-Mart.  The gas station clerk, who sincerely does not mind if I take some hot water says to me, M’am, where are you from?  And my mother and I, in unison: Brooklyn!  And the clerk: I thought yous’n Europeans! And me: Why?  Because I talk funny? The clerk: No, because of how you’re dressed! Was it the black champion leggings and orange 60’s dress with the unraveling hem that gave me away?  The mushed-up winter hat and knit scarf and sweater-t and vest and layers that add up to bulk but not protection?  I smile: 100% Brooklyn.

And now we go back in time, before Fall Fell, to a different journey.

Face Place

somethin' pastoral

If the United States were a face, Michigan would be the forehead.  In the bygone days of the 1500s, when phrenology was hot and scientific and sewers were open, a large forehead indicated particular intelligence.

Many eastern traditions locate our third eye as lodged in the center of the forehead.  This eye sees into the transcendent nature of the self.  It knows where all our metaphorical oil wells lie.

Our physical eyes may present a more direct line to the soul but the forehead is equally charged.  It’s where we register emotion, cognition, aging.  It is largely ignored as facial feature—not the main event.   But its space and skin has a lot of information for us, if we look.

Michigan has suffering the same fate, this large but neglected feature of our United  Face.

Road Worthy

J and I are on a road trip in the NorthWest of the State.  To the Leelanau Peninsula, hooking around Traverse City, the Cherry Capital of the World, and up, up and away to the U.P.  Then back to Hubbard Lake and the little white house, where the red pines will be obstinately not pining for us, the hummingbirds whipping their wings at the feeders.  The objective is for me to see Michigan, beyond what I already have.

Because it is the fruit bowl days of August, anyone with three planks and soil has set up a farm stand; peaches, raspberries, blueberries.  Every few miles, sloppy and uneven lettering announces homemade pies and bushels of new produce.  This keeps things sweet.  We don’t stop for the blueberries, which feels like an offense.  J’s mom calls the seasonal bounty “what’s up now.”

bluer than the eye can apprehend

In response to the signs, I’m: Blueberry, blueberry, BLUEBERRY!– my juicy mantra. Blue: the color of  my body when my mother delivered me, hidden in a confused rush of membrane. For me, what the earth makes—its pro-duce—soothes the anxiety that comes with being a living thing.  You’re born dangling from it.  When the cord is cut, the angst shrivels right up and moves into your belly, with the honky-tonking gastro-bacteria.  Frequently and often before sleep, I can feel it creeping around, like the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, trapped in the great room of the body, where the windows are all open but to no avail.

The huge fields roll out on either side of the road, stately and vigorous green, interrupted by neat bales of hay.  Old, cavernous farms deteriorate on the hillsides, their wood peeling back and falling in, a conversation with gravity.  The dairy cows lie on their sides, bellies showing.  Among the herd, new calves are just beginning the great game of biology.  It requires lots of naps.

Stop looking at me like that! The cow shouts.  Or I’m going to milk you!

Roger.

barnicle

Spelling Conditionally

Nearing the 45^th parallel, a hair or two closer to the North Pole, the marquees exhibit poor orthography.  Do deliberate mistakes whet the appetite?  Up ahead on the expressway lies –ta-dah!– “Kuntry Kubbard.”  It’s got phonetic food for the famished traveler.  In a 3^rd grade classroom, these errors would be corrected with a red pen and a kind smile.

O Gosh, J, could we stopp there for a liddle soop? I’m sooo hungry.

listening is an art

Or maybe I’ll just nosh on this superiority complex I brought with me.  Eventually, to squash all that, Lake Michigan appears, glorious, close to the roadside.  First a mere sliver through the bordering pines, it then planes outward, monopolizing the periphery, a sharp, oceanic blue.  Slits in its surface are filled with regular daylight.

tale of two pretties

Along the drive, neglect is rife.  Some signs are missing letters, the advertisement’s equivalent of lettuce-on-the-front-tooth: “WEL OME!”, calls the motel parking lot. It’s been twenty years, perhaps, since that “Welcome” was posted, time in which the other letters have weathered and faded.  The proprietor still hasn’t gotten around to replacing the “C.”   Or perhaps he knows that the brain reliably compensates for obvious missing pieces.

Which is also what love does.

Trippping

We repeatedly pass banners for ALL U CAN EAT Friday Fish Fry, slung across store lots that are mostly empty of cars. Yum: like a drinking contest of aquarium run-off.  Each town has its prized joints.  I want to know exactly how much fish fry a person could eat before the bubble bursts.  Occasionally, a numbed human stands out front, staring into the inevitable patch of wood behind the restaurant, as if remembering that nature, too, has a voracious appetite.

I think that these establishments—most of which look empty of all but the invitation to feast—assume their patrons to be Grizzly bears, newly awakened from hibernation.  Metabolism roaring back to action, the body so hungry that it forgives even verbal shortcomings.  Stuffing yourself is possible only on Fridays; extra cause to mourn the unsurpassable Wednesday-ness of the moment.

In the small almost-towns, where other signs of commercial activity are absent, hair—like the grass– continues to grow.  This stimulates the economy marginally; poor, little economy.   It has sleep apnea.  “Sheer Difference Haircut” petitions us. J’s hair is shaved off.  Mine is hopelessly long.  Rapunzel’s is everlasting. We don’t slow down for this one-shop wonder, nor the fish fry enclave beside it.

Modular Mentality

ponderable

We pass through Ponderosa, which sounds like something weighty, important, stable: settled.  But here advertisements for Modular Homes abound—take it apart, put it together again.

The billboard appears so frequently that it begins to feel like an acquaintance.   One greets it with friendly recognition:  Oh, it’s you again, Modular Home Hawker!

Billboard: Yep.

Me: That’s all you got, ‘yep’?

Billboard:  Listen, Spanky.  Some of us are working, not vacationing.

Me: Sitting on your ass for three days in a car isn’t work?

Billboard: Hey, I’ve also got a lot of rhetorical questions on my resume.

Me: Do you?

Billboard: Yep.

Me: Are you of the Gertrude Stein school that ‘There is no repetition, only emphasis’?

Billboard: Nah.  Definitely, nah.

These modular homes are easily and conveniently transported to the place of your choice with the assistance of a very big truck.  We see a new implant, which has not yet gelled with its plot of land.  Can land reject a structure, like a body can reject an organ?

The house has an elevated door with no steps leading to it.  You’d have to take a flying leap to get in, stand on a ladder to use your key.  The houses are long and pale.   They hardly catch the eye, but encourage the eye to keep going.

I think about our modular existences; discrete selves, a rat’s nest of different identities.  But the self is also like a great expressway: when you are along for the ride, you neither see nor sense its beginning or end.

On Rt. 23, along Lake Huron, we are the only car for miles and miles and miles.  J reflects that this region once would have only been known to those willing to explore it on foot, along trails.  Intimacy of sole, arch, toes.

The Billboard makes a curious face when we are no longer looking but I catch it in the rearview mirror, where it is closer than it appears.

Advert, Adverse

A long time in the car makes it easy to play amateur ethnographer: to think you know something of a place because of what you can see. J is driving, preferring not to talk about anything that requires too much thought.  He has one hand thrown up on the wheel and his eyes trained where road and cloud merge.

and big L said, LET THERE BE

It’s McDonald’s that strikes up the flirtation first: $1.  Ahhhhhhh-some.

Really, I could have your crappy drink for four small quarters?  O joyful noise!  But in the slashing sunlight, I’m busy counting my unhatched chickens, imagining the faces of baby daughters I might or might not ever bear.  Mircea Eliade’s yoga tome lies in my lap.  I don’t need McD’s low cost beverage when I have the waters of consciousness—non-carbonated, but hey– for free.

“Even Mother Nature has an agent!”  Proclaims the next enigmatic billboard.  Beneath it, the tall weeds and milk thistle pods have no opinion.  The fat clouds suck in their breath.  Nature doesn’t need to sell itself—it’s just awesome, and you can take it or leave it.

ahhhhhhh-some-r.

We go through the outskirts of Luddington, a name suggestive of Poo Bear Honey-Makers and Devout Luddites. In Cheboygan, there is Yeck Farm Drive-Through and AllCock’s kitchen.  Where they cultivate and then serve penis with potatoes?

In Ocquecoc, Rosa’s “Squeeze Inn” has vacancies!  So, not such a squeeze after all.    Pathetic Puns are king in these out of the way places, still stamped with their Native names—names so beautiful they sound like secrets. We’re towing the scamp, so we don’t care if there are rooms available.  We’re like disjointed turtles, our home just slightly behind our back.

the mirror of awareness

On a cross-section of a tree, a shingle for “Open-Soon Café.”  The building stands in an otherwise empty lot; its windows have been sloppily and indefinitely covered with white-out.

“Eat or die,” says Jim Harrison, poet and diviner.

“Eat and die,” says Sara Nolan, observing her surroundings.

In a wide alfalfa field littered with un-baled hay, a Chihuahua stands at attention.   The landscape could swallow it whole.  It seems an act of mercy that any detail should stick out.   If this scene were a 500+-piece jigsaw puzzle, and a single, central piece were missing, the Chihuahua would be eliminated.   But these pieces are all there.  The tail is mute, the yaps drowned by speed.

In Lachine, an old man in a sunhat in the spotlight of high noon runs his tractor into a baby tree, planted in a perfect round of soil in the middle of his huge front yard.  He backs the tractor up, straightens his straight hat, and repeats.  Oddly, the tree doesn’t react.

Just when we’re really beginning to feel a part of the whole, the McDonald’s advertisement reminds us:  It’s good to be on top of the food chain. Yeah: fuck all you low-down critters, the sign adds, sub-textually, to the cows that loiter not too far beyond, where the grass is trimmed by their molars.  They don’t call it a chain for nothing.

fill up at the X

At Roger’s City Mobile Station, the twinkle-and-shine of stars is displaced by the neon awnings at the wide intersection: “Pulled Pork is BACK!” reads the sign at the cross-roads.  Someone is terribly excited by this news.  Horace, B.C.s: With my friend returned to me, I go mad with joy.  Perhaps at this very moment, a pulled-pork lover is having a porcine orgasm just imagining the chewing & swallowing & chewing & swallowing.

over here

O How the Mighty

Lake Leelanau is shallow as far as you can walk.  The wind smacks up the water.  Warnings are posted about sharp zebra mussels on the bottom: swim shoes advisable.

No Fun Allowed, I shout to the kids at the playground on shore.

JH arrives to join us from Milwaukee on the slow overnight ferry, which burns coal as it crawls across the huge, star-gulping mass of water.  J meets her in the jeep, brings her back to our scamp-site on the edge of Lake Leelanau, where the ducks look on and the morning bangs us over the head.  The brightness is so sharp it is as if it were just invented.

No more monkeys jumping on the bed.

coping mechanisms

We make strong tea and thick-ground coffee on the little burners, drink at the picnic table kicking our feet and considering the great envelope of grief.  JH’s dad, after much struggle, had been taken into that sealed envelope a few months prior by a stroke.  She dreamed of him the night before his death, not knowing his condition.  In the dream, her family walked into the Black Forest, her parents holding hands, content.  He looked back at her and smiled.

No more monkeys jumping on the bed. A cardiac conclusion.

Orpheus had that idea, too.  The looking back.

When a friend is going through it, sometimes the only thing to do is to sit in quiet together.  Being the lone wolf in the cave: this is how Thea Elijah, wild practitioner of 5-elements Chinese Medicine, describes the most acute stage of grief, the reckoning with the metal element.  M rehashed it for me one night in Jamaica Plain.  We sat on the kitchen floor eating cornbread with ghee and cinnamon and weeping and laughing while summer jiggled the doorknob.

Scraps of the that conversation come back, as J reads aloud to us the poetry of Joseph Stroud and the lyre echoes from Andalusia.  JH has holes in the knees of her jeans that widen and narrow like an extra set of eyes adjusting to the light. Each of us a wolf.  Each of us staring into the fire.  Between us, immutable rock.

We may be wolves in broad noon-light, but these ducks are not afraid.  They bop past, in step with one another.  To them, all our human discourse is a bunch of foreign quacks.  It is just us and god and the nightingales we recall.

caveless

At nightfall, cooking in the small skillets, we turn on “scamp radio”—the battery-powered transistor, which blasts tunes from the 70s, 80s, and 90s into the jolly, bloated rectangle of the scamp.    This is the time of the egg recall, causing much speculation in the news.  It’s the opposite of Easter, as one farm in Iowa has gifted all the states with salmonella.  The Easter Bunny, waiting out spin of seasons until Spring, is smug: see, Cadberry Cream Eggs aren’t so bad for you! The weather is so hot even the eagles look dizzy.

I wonder when Big G will do the ego recall.  That well-tended egg of self, gestating something so precious it doesn’t even know what to call it.  Its hard shell, it’s slippery interior.  To have friends beside you and fresh air rushing through the miniature windows and the smell of people existing out of doors and warm hands to hold…it makes the waiting to be called—to be called home, as some traditions call it—bearable.

Meanwhile, J stacks wood to begin a fire.

surya assures ya

M.C. of the W.C.

The stars make their crisp mudras after we leave JH at the Ferry dock for her return trip.  It is too late to go take a shower in the common restroom but I trudge off, dirty, to brush my teeth and make shower noises—then, by my logic, I’m sufficiently washed.

The “closed for cleaning” sign, written hastily in magic marker, hangs in the doorway.  Perfect.  An older man comes out of the women’s bathroom with a broken mop in his hand, looking at it as if it has accused him of something.  The damn thing came apart! He says, miffed.

The same magic-marker notice redirects me to go to the Green Building restroom; I ask him where that is.  He volunteers to ride me over in his golf cart, as he needs to replace the mop.  Turns out he’s covering maintenance for his buddy.  I say it’s mighty late to be cleaning a bathroom.  No problem: After this, he tells me he’ll be on patrol.  He’ll run home, grab a few beers, and circle the grounds until one a.m.  Rest assured.  In a world of impermanence, the beer supply dwindles.

Beers? I ask.  That’s one hell of a patrol.

I think it makes me sharper. He says.  I’ve been known to stop and socialize a bit, too. Knock back another beer or so.  People know me.

We laugh.  The night laughs.  It’s all just a bowl of cherries.

Bathroom, Part Deux

The next morning in the clean bathroom I see a little boy dawdling outside the showers.  He leans against the wall, examining his toes in his sandals.

Boy: Hi.

Me:  Hi.

Boy:  Do you like my eyes?

S: Yes.  Do you like my eyes?

Boy:  I like your eyes but I don’t like you.

S: Oh?  That’s too bad for me.

Boy: I like Kristen.

S: Where is she?

Boy:  Up North.

S: That’s a bummer.

Boy: She’s UP NORTH!

Mom [from shower]: Andrew?  Andrew?

S: No problem– we’re just flirting out here.

Andrew follows me to the sink where he glares at me as if the force of his eyesight could transform me into Kristen.  I remain distressingly me.  He blinks in disgust.

“Friday Lake Perch Yum.”  A nonsense Interval.

My not-quite haiku:

Torch Lake.

Cherry Juice

Concentrate.

“Brethren That Way”, they say?   The scarecrow intertwines his arms and sticks his big toe out in the direction of true North.

Well, “Don’t worry what people think.  They don’t do it very often.”  A quote I cannot place.

Post Facto

so much depends

At the U.P. Fort Algonquin Trading Post on the old Mackinac trail, Warren Hagen, a big-boned, big-fleshed clerk who is also third generation Tribal, tells us they carry the best sweet-grass in the world. You want to get yourself killed, he says, go down and pick some as a white man.  You’ll get yourself killed fast.  That wasn’t part of our afternoon plan, but we take a few braids from the string from which they suspend.  The braids are firm and flexible.

J and I had hunted for sweet grass in the old horse pasture on the family property, then again in the clearing of the back acres.  His Dad had smelled it first while driving the mower, but couldn’t pick out the plants.  We snapped blades of grass in two, sniffed them—nope, this one just smells like plain old grass.  We put our faces close to the earth.  The grass glared back.  We just want to invite the gods in, I say.  But the grass must think we failed to notice the small gods, who don’t need to be invited because they never leave.

In the cluttered shop, J and I both fixate on the native flute, hanging from the low ceiling just above where the eye-level.  A small bear, carved from the single piece of wood, perches on the shaft.  A single feather graces the tip.  J asks permission, then blows a few notes.  It’s what tree and wind would say to one another in our absence.  He’s obviously going to buy it, eyes narrowed to the point where the cleft of the bear’s ass shows.  O, yes.

The trading post is brimming with trinkets and knick-knacks—many of them brought from Mexico or even Peru.  Made in China, one miniature says.  So is my underwear!  Sacks of black rice squat on the shelves.  Colossal scalloped shells turned empty-side up, innards shining, to be used for ceremonies.  This area is known for its Petosky stones, J says, as I pick up a small one. They are the remnant of when this place was under sea, so many tumbled fossils.

When Warren rings up our purchases, he adds, plus five dollars that I give to the governor, to keep her off my back.  He writes out the receipt by hand in script, runs the credit card through an antique looking machine.  One day the credit card itself will be that obsolete.  I look at the knives, the sage bundles propped everywhere, the baskets and brass bracelets.  You can make an offering out of anything if you’re willing to let it go.

Objectionable

map, territory, enh?

We make a brief stop in the Baude Amerindian Museum, housed in a converted garage, on our way out.  Among the documents on display are the illegal legal Totally Unfair Treaties made with the Tribes by Andrew Jackson et al, ceding huge amounts of land in exchange for protection.  Protection of the sort a piece of toilet paper offers you from a sudden hailstorm.

Andrew:  Hey, can you sign this thing?  Yeah, it says some stuff about stuff, land and stuff.  Here, isn’t this bead pretty?  You want it?  O.K., then sign this.  I know you can’t write.  Any mark will do fine.  Great, let’s go get drunk. That was more or less the government promise, disguised by jargon.

Objects of something very lost are kept here.  A canoe—alternately, canoo, canno—made from burnt out logs, scrapped with flint knives and shells.  Pipes, rescued from Climax, Minn.  A Tomahawk, used to execute those who committed crime against the tribe.

A garrulous woman stands at the front counter, reminding visitors that the museum is free.  We cut short her chatter, saying we have little time to stay.  She gives a slight nod: “Well, I’ll see you on your way out, unless spirits get you.”

Yes, Unless.

Whose Woods These Are I Think I ….

Eventually, we roll up to J’s home, Hubbard Lake, the jeep seats dented in the perfect cast of our butts.  It’s so good to be back I want to hug the dirt and dock and arugula sprouts by the waterfront.

In the woods, the animals know we’re coming and get upset.  Even when we tread softly and enter only with best intentions, the creatures are irritated—we’re a disruption.  They know us for who we are even if we don’t: predatory animals who have forgotten we’re animals.

When we remove our shoes and walk barefoot, we’re forced to step lightly because who wants to step on Unidentifiable Woods’ Stuff?  There is a certain decorum you must practice in the woods.  If you want to see anything, you must go slowly.  Luckily, J knows this and knows it well enough for two of us—from a lifetime of respecting the arrangement.   There is a language of the woods to be learned.  For me, it is a foreign tongue.

A deer makes what sounds like a sneeze-bark.  J says she smells us but can’t yet tell where we are.  The owls call and then pause, teenage bards loafing around in the twilight—they move from tree to tree, excitedly bored.  The nearby squirrel who, in turn, can’t find the owls but knows they are close, vocalizes distress.   Pin-wheeling in the dark, all of us.

At the trading post, Warren told us that the Native Americans played their flute tones by following the rise and fall of the tree-line.  Whatever they saw, they played.  Landscape conducted the melody.  No doubt who is in charge of the music.

We find feces, places where feral pigs have rooted.  Some days I’d rather be a feral pig, nothing more exciting than digging in dirt for more dirt.  We’re under the dazzle of pines, breath spent, respiratory piggy-bank cracked open from sprinting up and down the hills as fast as we can, hopping ferns and logs.

The spider webs catch on our faces.  Occasionally, we stop short before wrecking a creation: the warning comes from a bead of dew suspended in the middle of the threads, like the single tear of the bodhisattva on a day when sentience seemed a particular bummer for the majority.

The early season apples in the clearing are fattening by the day, tempting just about every living thing in the region to nibble them.  Eve is last in line, dematerialized as most products of fantasy.  She lolls by the exploding milkweed, letting the other animals see what happens when you put knowledge in your mouth.   A tiny garden snake slithers over her toes.  Whatever.

The Long Way

I take two planes, a public bus, a subway, yet another bus, and a car, all to get from Michigan back to Long Island.  My carbon footprint has tendonitis, whines about oversized bones and too much movement.  I wait in midtown Manhattan for the last leg with all my bags and all the signs and all the roads and all the heavy lightness of transit.

86^th Street in gray hard joyous New York City.  A man in a rush brushes into a little girl.  Lets fly an expletive.

You don’t say fuck to a little four year old! Her mother yells quietly.

Your kid was in the fucking way! He justifies.

You’re the fuck! She says.

Either way you spin it, Righteousness does not prevail.

The function of man is to be happy. –Aristotle.

Or, spin it like a New-Yorker: The function of man is to be a happy fuck.

Baptismal

In Long Island, I put down my bags and plunge into the bay on Sammy’s Beach to cleanse off the hours of travel and to participate in the environment.  Not ten minutes later, freshly salted, swimming towards the channel where the plovers putter, I’m stung the length of my legs by a jellyfish, who is also participating in the environment.

I tear out of the water, run back along the beach, where sunset is amplifying the rocks and the gulls are picking through crabs they’ve cracked open.  My legs are stinging.  I pour white vinegar on them, then drop into the sand and stifle my skin.  A half-burial while the sea darkens.

holy disappearing

I have a late dinner with my parents, red wine and sea bass and tomatoes and greens and the tender conversation that signals arrival home after a significant journey.  My legs prickle and don’t quickly forget what a single tentacle can do.

The next day, when the temperament of sky has shifted, I walk down the road to the peninsula in hazardous winds.  The oaks and pines and runty new plants weave with the gusts.  I think, how do I stack up, when compared to this tree?  What have I made of myself that is more than this?

Over the phone, I ask Liz, 103, how she is, finally back from the hospital and reclining in her home-hospital bed, staging a protest against eating and even listening to her T.V. boyfriend, Charlie Rose.  I shout over the carousing on our porch, where my parents have company.  Beyond, the bay is pretending it is an ocean, churning up white-caps.  It’s a moot point. She says.

Right-O.

We stay on the phone, because that is what one does after cordiality has been razed.  It’s the kind of quiet that besets a pair at the end of a long road trip, in industrial territory, where things have ceased to be interesting or variable and are just themselves.  I can hear her breathing and clicking through her old brain for someone’s news to share.  This will either change or it won’t, she says.  Life just keeps going.

etcetera etcetera

unstill life with water

“When water solidifies, it is harder than a diamond.  Who can crack it?  When water melts, it is gentler than milk.  Who can destroy it?” –Dogen, Mountains and Rivers Sutra.

D’s collected works are in my lap.  The gigantic engines rev.

As the US Airways shuttle taxis on the runway at La Guardia, the stewardess reminds us that water-landings are extremely unlikely, but nonetheless.  Not far off, the ocean yodels under the onset of morning.  The direction of its flow is unapparent from here, but its general (co)motion is as constant as the squirms of a child who really has to pee. When asked what he knew, really knew for sure, Einstein replied: “Something is in motion” (or so J tells me).  Dr. E likely meant the whole picture, and the picture that lies beyond the picture.

I have confidence in the water, any water.

Sometimes It Leaves Without You

I miss the next flight.  I’m standing at the book kiosk in Ronald Reagan airport in D.C., reading our nation’s best-selling titles by people whose popularity is due to their titles selling the best.  These authors have some traits in common, namely a charismatic XY legitimacy.  Their tone is back-lit by a hardly restrained-snarkiness-cum-generosity.  The titles betray an alpha confidence.  I start with this one: “Everyone Communicates: No One Connects.”

In this case, being a member of everyone immediately subsumes you in the category of a no-one.  You’re at the base of the pyramid.  Above you are those who “get” it.  Topping off the pyramid is the big G, who also happens to be the container of the whole project.  God is wearing many hats, as she is also credited, in more than one text (can I call it text?), as the organizing principle behind the authorial assurance.   Apparently, God is really good at making the other person feel heard without trying at all.  Now it’s your turn.

sound of one tree clapping

No. Yes.

I flip through the books.  They are filled with successfully puréed stock phrases and stock phrases do what they’re meant to do: become soup.  The soup is palatable and tasty—that is, to someone’s idea of “most” people.  The books hereby generated are all slightly similar to one another like suburban homes.  They are meant to help us all acquire the habits, thinking strategies and social skill sets of Leaders.   This advice might even work.

But is that what we want, really?  Is it not also brilliant to tread on the quieter path, taking care to damage nothing, not even to crush the already-dead leaves under your feet as you go?  Neither disturbing nor disturbed by the bird calls which not only are not communicating with you, but quite likely are also not connecting with you?  Dogen talks about “leaving things as they are” as itself a form of giving or generosity, a form of vital interchange by which both mind and gift are co-transformed.  As a race, we categorically leave nothing as it is, if we can help it.    But could the other way be far sexier, even far more alpha for the wisdom it entails, to purposefully remain on the bottom of the pyramid and recognize the living world as forms all inexplicably in relationship, all dancing to the same music?

No. Yes.

I’ve gone selectively deaf.  The airline pages me—three times!  When I present my boarding pass at the gate at the hour of my theoretical departure, I’m told the flight to Michigan is gone.  Gone like gone? Literalism has always irritated me.  I run back to the desk.  But I was here the whole time, I say. Not even five feet away!

We paged you three times. Are you Sara Nolan?  My name gets passed around faster than premium cigars at a baby’s birth.

I THINK YOU WERE COMMUNICATING WITH ME BUT NOT CONNECTING, I try.

The plane is gone, the agent says.  She should work as an end-of-life chaplain, she’s so gentle.

Awesome.  Did I say awesome?  BUT I WAS IMPROVING MYSELF IN THERE! Is there nothing you can do?

Diogenes: “Before begging, it is useful to practice on statues.”

After self-help, then what?  You may feel like a budding leader, but your airplane still left you myopically meditating on its exhaust.

As far as I can tell, the end result of all this self-correcting the books engineer is: you make more money than you did and people like you more for it.  Or the guy who wrote the book makes money and you have the book, which makes you feel half way towards where you need to go.  And isn’t that better than feeling like, along with the hoi polloi, you need to reach for a book at an airport? Wouldn’t you rather have written it?

No.  Yes.

The airport knows you want “something” for the plane. And a credit card, as far as matter-in-action goes, is rather an elegant piece of equipment, so thin you could lodge it under a bra and not be too bothered.  One swipe of it, like one inhale, and you’re already on the road to improvement.  Or! you could just board the next plane without a plan for the rest of your life.

balasana considerations

Right As Rain

From the moment, I do the latter.  They rush me out with a VIP-esque urgency to a Philly-bound baby toy of aviation, virtually empty.  I puddle-jump from NYC to Washington to Philly and now, finally, to Detroit.  As Bill Cosby put into the mouth of Noah, when the lord commanded Build Me An Arc and Put Two of Everything In It: Riiiiiiiiiiiigght.

Right: I am on my third plane of the day.  The boy-men in the aisles across from me are playing video games with that special video-game look in their eyes.  You know the look.  It’s the kind of devotional attention one pays to little else.  One boy-man says to the other: When you’re hungry, your guy’s got to eat lots of guys! His friend grins.  The stout flight attendant, who manages to be both blond and brusque, admonishes: Those need to be turned off and stowed! But what if his guy gets hungry, I worry, and is stranded in the digitalized world of make-believe and human negligence with no other guys to eat?  Not even a virtual hors-de-oeuvres?  The boy-men put the video-games underneath the emergency pamphlet.  Their thumbs are twitching.  Now it’s roulette.  Whose guy will get whose guy is anyone’s guess.  The plane stutters as its roof pierces the first stack of clouds.

Dogen shouts from the snow of the 9^th century—perhaps to the other guys, perhaps to no other guys:

“Buoyant, I let myself go—filled with gruel, filled with rice./ Lively flapping from head to tail,/ Sky above, sky beneath, cloud self, water origin.”

And this joie-de-poem from a time long before airplanes were gestating in the great Uterus of Prakrti.

scope

Letting yourself go– not a leader or a follower but something even more expansive, paying allegiance only to a felt sense of rightness, which might boil down to standing with a cup of tea listening to the first rain crack over the city?

Memories get watered down quickly

The airplane is staggering a bit.  This is also what happens to the heart when one really starts to get openness.  Minor turbulence chucks about the Styrofoam cup of tea on the tray.  Mother-May-I-One-Two-Three. The boy-men are completely reabsorbed in virtuality; reality has been stowed for the duration of this belly-dropping journey.  It is easy to forget air can be a volatile place.

GOD HAS NOT FORGOTTEN ABOUT YOU. One of the books assures me—this one on the archetypal misunderstandings between men and women.

Of course not– because God is a relentless rememberer.  In the books I looked at, “God”, as a word and a “figure,” functions as an insta-tonic and a refresh button, something like: the world does not begin or end with my bigness or smallness, but no matter which way you spin it, I’m not insignificant.  Pshaw and Phew.

The word “god” could be the prism through which the paradigm splinters into an architecture of light.  In such an architecture, all the inhabitants are illuminated, because there are no dark spaces.  But too often for me “god” is hair in the drain: stops the water from flowing.  Backs up the system.

But let me back up.

God, in fact, may well have forgotten about me, at least momentarily in the D.C. airport.  The books at the kiosk which kept me from being airborne in a timely fashion are meant to give you a dose of something useful, the language simple enough—though not simplistic, so as to be insulting—to absorb even at cruising altitude, and perhaps especially so.  There, you’re temporarily on top of the world.  Whatever self you are when ground-bound gets a Time-Out, a free drink if you’re lucky, maybe even a bag of peanuts, which still grow abundantly and cheaply enough to be given away.

I take my time-out grandly.

Empty Jars.

going on

At the security line, at the beginning of this long day, I set off alarms.  I’ve worn a flower in my hair, hoping that if my quasi-Buddha nature doesn’t calm down these rule-abiders, then a cheery accessory ought to.  My backpack has the usual contraband—obscure teas, lavender oil, mountains and rivers innocuously compressed into a book, elderberry–but it is not my back-pack that stumps the screeners this time.  It’s a questionable container in my overflow bag (there is always overflow when your cup runneth, etc.).  The guard informs me he’s going to open it.

GUARD: I’M GOING TO OPEN THIS NOW.

My god, thank you, but this isn’t a pap smear.

I’d expect nothing less.

And the culprit who put security on alert?  My empty glass bell jar.  That’s right: I drank a smoothie in the car and stuck the yogurty remains in my carry-on.  So it’s not liquids that are making a problem here so much as: Nothing.

Nothing, the most loaded word around.

Guard:  You brought an empty jar?

Me:  It had my breakfast in it.  (Defending emptiness?)

Guard:  Your breakfast?

Is this Socratic?  Are we getting somewhere?

But he’s jocular:  There’s nothing in here!   That’s no fun!

It’s like some people’s definition of a self.

Me: Just keeping you on your toes. Potential liquids are so scandalous!

The truth is nothing can be hard and dangerous.  It’s also preposterously soft and welcoming.  It’s the diamond and the milk.  It’s the thing the other guy doesn’t even know he wants to eat when he’s hungry.  It’s rich.  It’s the most hotly debated spiritual concept.  Which is hilarious, because it is not really a concept.

We’re descending now into Detroit and I wonder, being a fast reader, what skills I might have acquired while this Republic Air Jet briefly skimmed the heavens, had I bought one of those bestseller books.  Could I have deplaned with the ambition of, say, Noah?  L, now 103 years and counting, when asked about Noah’s arc-n-crafts project, said to me, “It’s ridiculous.  How could anything be big enough to hold two of everything?”

I see what you’re saying, L.  And nothing is—except, well, nothing.

So it’s into this nothing that I want to step.  To face it, one has to be exorbitantly positive–maybe even exuberant beyond measure.  And I suspect the act of saying a radical yes to the possibility of nothing might make you a pretty joyous someone after all.  Ha, ha, and might I add, ha!

Thanks, Reagan.  I couldn’t have come to this realization without you.  If your name were spelled differently, it might even sound like an itinerant Japanese monk from centuries long, long since crushed underfoot.  Nonetheless, the moon smiles kindly upon you, and  the crass stars make forays across the sky as if they were trying to spell something helpful but lost the nerve.

finger phonetics