August 2010 – The Melting World

One benefit of having time off is that I can feel wholly myself again. I can wake up at midnight and write until 4am and not feel terrible the next day because–ah, it’s so lovely–I can take a nap in the middle of the day! I can dream freely and re-discover my passions and possibilities.

Somehow such a firm understanding of who I am gets lost when I am working that 8-5 shift without respite. Now I realize (again) that I need to reinvent my world–to return to my roots, to my calling, to my loves: this realization is always what I discover after having a few days off!

Another benefit of vacation, though a less obvious one because it is also painstakingly slow-going and also very exhausting, is to have the time to clean our home really well, which–for me– means to rearrange all the furniture, to sort and donate and throw out tons of objects and papers room-by-room, and then to bask in the very liberating results: a simple life.

While sorting through my desk papers, I came across a postcard from an art opening at the U (which T-chan and I had gone to 3 years ago), where an artist called Mica took photos of people holding up cards on which they checked off their ethnicity/race.

Curious to see if the picture of us that she had taken was online, I looked her website up tonight–and there we were!

[See http://www.pleasemarkonlyone.com/Gallery.html for more folks.]

Human beings, I wrote on our form, and remarkably, this answer still holds true today, three years later, despite a lot of ups-and-downs in our life here in Minneapolis, or maybe because of a lot of ups-and-downs here. My son and I remain both card-carrying members of the homo sapiens clan here on planet earth.

Which reminds me of my dear (though now lost) friend, Ines, who lived in a Buddhist nunnery (that’s another story, folks!) with me many moons ago. She and I had very similar (read: emotionally gifted) dispositions. She told me, in her Belgian-French accent, “Ree-bay-kah, we may not be able to control our emotions so easily, staying calm and cool like Katja [another friend in the temple]. We feel so much, when we are crying, when we laughing. Given a choice? To be like Katja? Pffffffff!”, she concluded dismissively, shrugging her shoulders, “We feel everything more deeply, the good and the bad! We are more alive!”

True, Ines and I are not those people you know with steel-nerves, with dry eyes, with calm voices. Sometimes I can be in that neutral state for a while–say at staff meetings–but it’s not the best option for me for long-term sanity or well-being. I’d rather express myself and feel than stuff my feelings in wool socks and seal off the tops with wire. Now that’s a weird image–but let’s leave it be!

People like Ines and me, we are not Buddhists like the typical stereotypical Buddhist you hear about in magazines: we cannot be detached or neutral about life. We are instead the fringe Buddhists, like Santoka, or Ryokan, or Issa! We cry, we laugh, we get hurt, we dream, we love life very, very much.

And I’m not wishing to be anything else, either, even when it’s rather uncomfortable or embarrassing when I’m boo-hooing around people who are very serious, calm, or controlled. I do know that my passion for life is a good thing, the best thing for me, even if other people don’t always think so–those who don’t agree with me are those who like wiring their own wool socks shut all the time.

I know by staying true to who I am that I can inspire people–whether students or strangers–and having passion and an insatiable curiosity for this chaotic mud puddle called ‘life’ helps me become a better writer, a better mother, and a better human being.

So, in the end, my dear friend Ines is right: being fully alive, taking the blows, and crying, and getting back on my feet, not living in the middle (waking dead) zone all the time, is so much more interesting. Living without a muzzle or a societal straightjacket–and really, freely being in the moment and making god-awful mistakes is another–just as valid–way to be a Buddhist. And maybe our way is the more enjoyable adventure.

I don’t care for manicured lawns, for their need for large amounts of fertilizers and pesticides that kill off both the good and the bad insects. The chemical, unnatural perfection of such lawns frightens me and I want to wash my feet and not breathe deeply after walking past it. I feel the same way about overdosing on perfume and thick layers of makeup.

I prefer running around in the wild grass, letting a few dandelions bloom, even if it means I also get a few burrs on my clothes and shoelaces. At least for me, life feels damn good on my side of the fence! At least when I’m on vacation and I have no need to be anyone, to pretend to be anyone, but me. Messy, occasionally drive-to-despair and frequently confused, but overall ulcer-free me.

The soldiers of my mind are pounding down my door. They knock with knuckles raw, shouting, Conform! Conform and come out unarmed! Dressed in slug-colored suits, these soldiers don masks so like the faces we face each day on Minneapolis streets, the ones who have seen you smile or have seen me trip, then skin a knee. These soldiers remain

professionals. They will not be swayed. They look right past. Their shoes soft as rubber rats would never bruise the ribs as swiftly as, say, steel-toed Gestapo boots would. But easy does it, I remind you, and myself, for thin-lipped soldiers’ slice and dice coolly what’s perceived as weak, or meek, with deer knives steaming in locked garages lacking heat.

The soldiers of my mind, and yours, too, sail in silent Chryslers through thunder, hail, and snow, to stand outside our door. They say they like me and admire you. They crave my heart, my odd, odd heart, and yours as well. They crave them both to be gutted, dangling from fresh, wet twine, to devour our brains’ left hemisphere, served chilled on ice.

With this thought, I’m wide-awake, and so are you. A pack of hounds tumble out from trunks and circle the house, hungry for an unprepared, raw flesh feast. It’s easiest, they bark and bite and snap, to devour and digest such hearts, exposed and wild, while the good people are fast asleep. In the morning when you and I, if caught, will have disappeared

without trace or note good-bye, the soldiers, pat their dogs, will soldier on, and model citizens will stretch their limbs and rise. One or two neighbors might glance around, wonder where those two weirdos went, a pair of shoulders shrug once, not twice, in a quick up and down dance. The morning bus arrives at dawn.

It carries inside its shell workers who work without a peep. Off they go! The motto is Safety First. They rest on rafts, in high tide or low, stitched to milk cartons and pig fat soap. They feed on cheese, ham, and crackers in cramped stalls of their own design, chew cud, daydream country lanes, tin-canned peas, and gated towns filled with faces they call their own.

They hum together songs they heard many years ago, but somehow never learned. A yellow bird, a tiny finch, flits by faster than the river flows, swifter than soldiers march. Thank God for it, and for you and me. We spot it. We hear it sing a song as tender as the soft flesh on dog throats, even as they bark, all teeth and whine. It and you and I escape

to the sky for warmer climes to a tropical land called vulnerability. It’s an island with a few living things, and, Thank God, there’s you and me. We live there, not safe at all, with furious fires that must be fed, where passion fruit drips down our chins. We wear our best

organs on our sleeves. We tore them out and sliced them open all by ourselves, we did it willingly. It’s beautiful to see yours and mine, side-by-side, in palms held out, exposed, lush as pomegranate seeds. The strangest fact in this land we found is not how you, the bird, or I

survive, or even how we thrive. It’s that our island has some soldiers on it, how they stumbled in one day, tattered and broken, how they finally knelt down and cried. We removed their ashen, threadbare clothes. They sleep like babies. We love them as their mothers had. We love

them that much. You and I. We kiss their eyelids, gaze at them for stretches at a time. We sing a lullaby we like a lot, despite its bloody past:

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

With silver bells, and cockle shells, and pretty soldiers all in a row.

The yellow finch we had spotted and, Thank God, had heard in time, is a sharp-eyed star that dives and darts. It no longer serves as guide. From a blossoming branch of olive tree, it chirps to you, to me, to the heartless and heart-filled things:

All in a row. All in a row. All in a row…one, two, three! Where do we go from here? No one knows!