Love Poem

by John Logan




Last night you would not come,

and you have been gone so long.

I yearn to find you in my aging, earthen arms

again (your alchemy can change my clay to skin).

I long to turn and watch again

from my half-hidden place

the lost, beautiful slopes and fallings of your face,

the black, rich leaf of each eyelash,

fresh, beach-brightened stones of your teeth.

I want to listen as you breathe yourself to sleep

(for by our human art we mime

the sleeper till we dream).

I want to smell the dark

herb gardens of your hair--touch the thin shock

that drifts over your high brow when

you rinse it clean, for it is so fine.

I want to hear the light,

long wind of your sigh.

But again tonight I know you will not come.

I will never feel again

your gentle, sleeping calm

from which I took

so much strength, so much of my human heart.

Because the last time

I reached to you

as you sat upon the bed

and talked, you caught both my hands

in yours and crossed them gently on my breast.

I died mimicking the dead.

again

Binghamton is a town in mid-state New York that you wouldn’t be familiar with if you hadn’t already been there. The rain is omnipresent, the cold is acerbic and time moves in a decades-long lag. Its strip malls and chain restaurants and dive bars are perhaps not that indistinguishable from any other mid-state haunt… its claims to fame to date have been more unpredictable: a great university, Rod Serling, a world-class opera company, spiedies. You’ll be forgiven for having driven through on your way to New York City, and not remembering much.

But I did think there was a chance it would linger on the front page of the papers, even if only below the fold, for at least five days after the largest mass killing in the U.S. since Virginia Tech. Thirteen people died on Friday; yesterday there was a story about a letter believed to be from the gunman in the New York section of the Times: page A20. Today: nothing at all.

So the reporter in me wants to know why that happens in the case of Binghamton, and not Virginia Tech. Sheer numbers? Location? Amount of scintillating evidence left behind by the shooter? Lack of controversy surrounding law enforcement response? The fact that most of the victims were immigrants? Or that Obama was in Turkey, or surprised the troops in Iraq? And why, always, does the murderer get more ink than his victims?

I heard from a dear old friend on Saturday that someone we knew was killed. The mother of a well-loved family of ten kids that grew up on the South side, like us…a veteran substitute teacher, wife to an ENT doc, apparently a grandmother of 17. Didn’t know that ‘til I went searching for news about her: Roberta King. A personality so distinctive, effusive, genuine and kind that after not having thought about her for a good fifteen years, I could see her face as soon as her name was mentioned – hear the halting, steady lilt of her voice. She is what’s made this entry so difficult to write. That such a golden person can be and is too often taken so quickly from this world is now viscerally painful. To tell other people about her, to think of her kids and what they must be suffering through… it’s a deep, tearful sadness that I wasn’t expecting somehow.

The stone I’ve been turning over in my mind is whether or not it should even matter that I knew her. Is it not the same tragedy that she was one of twelve people that shone brightly for their families, their communities, their countries? To take the full compassionate view, is it not the same tragedy that a man was so desperate and deluded and insane that he thought the way to happiness was murdering people he may not have even known? Or even that it’s so easy to get a gun that this story gets repeated over and over and over and over and over again. The disgusting, exhausting, inconceivable cycle that we cannot seem to break.

I’d like to blame my lack of ideas about breaking this cycle on the little time I have left to write this. But in truth, I’m just at a loss. I know in the cosmic web of our un-separateness, I am connected to this violence: we are all connected to, part of, responsible (?) for this violence. All forms of aggression vibrate at the same frequency; even what we turn only towards ourselves gets deposited in that mammoth swamp of destructive energy. I think my teachers would say to not give power to anger, not to run away: to send out love to everyone that’s died, everyone that will be affected by this for the rest of their lives. I imagine it’s most important to keep our hearts open at the very moments we’d rather shut down. It feels risky and vulnerable and I’m not sure I’m brave enough to do it. But it’s worth a shot. I am unambiguously positive about that.

ever green

.i don’t want to go back. .i’ve spent too much time learning from the furious swings of feeling nothing to feeling everything, desperate to destroy myself but craving the experience of everything. .maybe it’s the tease of spring that makes me think so much of adolescence… winter holding on like that boyfriend you went out with for two weeks, who stalked you for the next two years because he couldn’t believe you broke up with him after such a deep love, spring playing like the shirt falling off her shoulder was an accident, and just because she talked to you for a whole hour yesterday doesn’t mean you’ll even see her in the hallways today. .so the frantic rocking rolls on, between a settled numb – a paralyzed hibernation of nothing doing, festering in guilt and lethargy, escaping into someone else’s stories – and a clamorous itch, like .i want to rip through my own skin, bust up through cement, be warm and fast and full again. .i didn’t respect it then, but when my thoughts were more reckless, overflowing, unhinged, what .i put down on paper (remember paper…) cut much closer to the raw.
.like this:

there was a kiss, sweltering, slow, under matchbook moonlight
on a warm spring barefoot jacketless night,
our hands and hands all over,
mine tangled in curls
from fear of falling down your neck,
our clothes on – but I can still feel you
hard, trembling, lunging, pulsing into me,
our tongues like simmered syrup rain
immersed and coming up for air, eels out of fog,
tasting salt wine and dandelion milk.
you can walk away and smile,
wiping my flower water off your damp chin
with your unbuttoned sleeve, but
i stumble to bed tasting you…
even if the kiss is a lapsing look
..i can feel it on my eyelids
like the moon stealing into my open window,
and too many nights I’m sweating, going to bed in love –
waking up thirsty


don’t worry mom and dad, it was a dream. .but it makes me think hard about everything that .i protect when .i write. .the best teacher .i’ve ever had shepherded that poem and countless others with a mantra .i knew was solid gold, but still with an innocent perspective: be true to yourself.
.be honest with, devoted to, expressive of all the murk and glow and flush and tweak of your multitudinous self. .there was a force behind that part of ourselves that ran full speed into idiocy – saved by luck and congratulated with hubris – there was a strength to the angst of forming and transforming, werewolves at nightfall, that .i’ve only started to appreciate now. .can .i be more at peace with who .i am, and still touch that nerve…? .can .i fucking write this thing in all lowercase letters without being corrected by Word or having to put periods in front of everything? .can .i rip the lid off all the theatres .i’ve built to show the world only the packaged and rehearsed?

.one step closer today. .already .i’ve had a recurring dream involving a life-or-death chase through a hospital with a little black girl in my care and an older woman, a reporter, who let me drive her truck but the pedals were so far away and hard to push down .i had to brake 2 minutes before each light, learned that spinal tap is going on tour again and that there’s a new uber-detailed book about columbine, eaten two bowls of cereal. .the editor brain .i was born with is currently refraining from deleting this paragraph because .i can’t fathom how anyone needs or wants to know any of that. .the dramatist, also an immutable presence, wants to end with a flourish. .like an idea that we could all have a moment of silence for those years that were marked by gimpy rituals and mystifying rules… we could all breathe in what it felt like to thirsty… we could look at each other and see the vulnerable parts that haven’t caught up to our ages and nod like we’re all part of the same secret society: misfits and seekers and rebels and gods. .worth all the trouble we are.

the smallest form

breathing is dearest
left in sweet neglect
or craved when spare and fleeting

II. Love

Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished?
The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it. Nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds. –Victor Hugo


Our bodies feel pain at the site of injury. They also block the surrounding muscles from repeating any actions that might reproduce that pain. We are hardwired to protect ourselves, preserve life and limb and everything between. We can also consciously retrain our defense mechanisms to surrender to new patterns, and reclaim the actions and reactions we’d shut down. Intervention is an appropriate way to think about creating that healing: breaking the cycle of what we expect, and what, some would say, we create.

The Law of Attraction isn’t the first philosophy to claim it, but its potency is current and worth weighing. “Whatever you’re thinking about is …like planning a future event. When you’re worrying, you’re planning.” Now you can worry about all your worrying actually being planning… Or put a Buddhist twist on it and train yourself to observe what arises in your parcel of mind stream, let go of what’s negative, and feel powerful about manifesting the positive. No matter how many times you hear that your external experience is only a reflection of your internal universe, there’s always some rational, practical counterargument on the objective nature of reality (war sucks, chocolate’s delicious). But do we need to change the world, or our experience of the world?

A few folks sent some wisdom on this: Man on the Mountain wrote of last week’s question re: fear and love, “Who is the asker? That guy under the tree said find the answer and fear disappears on its own.”

Who is it that's thinking the thoughts in your head?

“If the Buddha was right then there's nothing at our core that we need to protect. And if there's nothing to protect nothing can scare you.

If there's nothing to lose there's nothing to fear. Or as Chugyam Trungpa Rinpoche wrote in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, you are king precisely because you are nothing but a grain of sand. The universe is yours because you have let everything go, even the false idea of the permanent self.”


Row Ashore wrote about a longstanding fear of flying. Her aunt told her "I'm not afraid of flying because I'm not afraid of dying." Row realized the root of fear is “often anxiety about loss, and we wouldn't be anxious about loss if there were not things that matter to us to lose. So now when I am able to look fear in the face, I try to use it to examine and celebrate the thing that I love that matters to me.”

m2 wrote a keen parable about the characters Karate Chop Anderson and La Grincha, drinking cups of life from the river one day. They sampled myriad ambrosial flavors, but the most unpleasant and acrid of them all was fear.

It was a pity that such a wonderful drink had such an unpleasant kick to it, they could both agree on that. But as Karate Chop, who was well taught and thoughtful about such things, continued to drink in slow and steady sips from the sup, he began to notice that he grimaced less and less the more he drank in, and that the taste of the fear, while still not all that appealing, actually began to diminish as he went. In fact, to his amazement, a certain euphoric buzz seemed to follow every time the bitter taste disappeared, and he began to even welcome the taste a little, as he knew that without it the rest of the flavors would not taste as vibrant as he drank them. He slowly began to realize, as he finished his first cup, that fear was as much a part of the drink as electrical wiring is to a robot stegosaurus, and without it the rest of the drink could not exist. And he smiled at that and then took another cup.

La Grincha, on the other hand, couldn’t get over the taste, and stopped drinking entirely. m2’s moral is that fear can either determine who you are, or who you aren’t. And it leads me to the crux of this debate: the opposites – fear and love.

My husband doesn’t agree that they’re opposites, although he didn’t explain why. But he implicitly encouraged me to share what I’m learning about opposites. Yin and Yang teach us best, even or especially through the ubiquitous symbol that we learned to take for granted as teenagers but can revisit until our dying day: there is always the seed of one in the other. They don’t exist without the other. They depend on one another; they are so close to each other that they make up a whole (lotta nothin’...) So if at the core of fear is the closing of our hearts, a loss of trust in the universe – at the core of love and just around the corner from fear is an open and vulnerable and powerful heart. A trust in the universe that’s so great that nothing is defined as bad or good, but all is seen as learning. Pema Chodron taught me in the book Start Where You Are that it’s easy to drown in the manure of our lives… but that muck and grime is also fertile ground for the seeds of awakening. And I’m hard pressed to think of anything more beautiful or inspiring than loving oneself and the universe so much that no matter what happens, you keep dancing with that indomitable pair, keep tipping over, keep returning to the wide-eyed terrifying reward of waking up.

I. Fear

I said I didn’t want it to be the dominant emotional vibration in my life, that it wasn’t that “useful”. He said fear is the reason humans exist on this planet: an evolutionary necessity that saved our hides.
I had to question my choice of the word “useful”.

Is there a difference between making decisions based on fear – of what might happen as a result of our actions or inaction – and the understanding of what consequences result from our actions or inaction? Thirty-year olds don’t put their hands on hot stove tops. Because they fear the impending sensation, or know it?

Or remember it…? Unclear as to whether the initial feeling of fear that surrounded learning the sensation of burning skin is separate from the seemingly uncharged knowledge we currently own; few of us sweat when approaching our cooking appliances. That would potentially change drastically if we were approaching the rubble of a building that was bombed while we were inside it. I’ve only begun to dig into research on this - parts of the brain involved in fear-based learning, fear’s role in our development. But apart from the science of it, there must be some insight we’ve gained from experience: how valuable is fear?

The word itself has many synonyms (courtesy of thesaurus.com:)
abhorrence, angst, anxiety, awe, bête noire, chickenheartedness, cold feet*, consternation, cowardice, creeps, despair, discomposure, dismay, disquietude, doubt, dread, faintheartedness, foreboding, horror, jitters, phobia, presentiment, recreancy, reverence, revulsion, scare, suspicion, terror, timidity, trembling, tremor, trepidation, unease, uneasiness, worry…

Some clue us in to the multifaceted nature of fear (foreboding…), some are hard to believe (reverence?). It’s comforting that it isn’t all definable as cowardice, which brings to mind the spectrum of experience on which we can learn to recreate a physiological or behavioral response of confrontation or avoidance. I don’t feel jittery about failure, but I know the angst of its potential advent has foiled many a hobby, performance, story. Hardly advantageous. Not knowing where my next job was coming from at NPR elicited dread, worry, anxiety. I did everything I could to change that situation, but the eventual acknowledgement that it’s beyond your control is paralyzing. Can not say it was beneficial, considering the conventional mantra there (“Something ALWAYS works out.”) proved true, and my nerves were already threadbare.

However – fear has always been a great teacher, in that the more I recognize it, the more determined I am to not let it stop me, control me, or shake me from my center. It consistently challenges me to discover where my boundaries are, and why my mind has the habit of seeing a limitation as solid when it is illusory. It shows me the line between courage and carelessness (a friend’s book on Hawaii reminds travelers not to fear the water, but their bad judgment). It urges me to question what is rational and what isn’t; it illuminates and clarifies the depth of my desire and determination. And in deference to perhaps the most crucial part of our evolution: it is the contrast, the antonym, the opposite of love. Fear is an immediate reminder that love exists, and -I would argue- is much more powerful.

Agree?

insipid ruin

The granite island was never pristine, but it’s been sullied with the detritus of a shipwreck for too long… the floating crumbs of sesame seeds shed from bagels and flecks cast away by bread crusts are tiny, stubborn, and are still visible in the murk of grey and black…that is the least offensive garbage, except that they multiply overnight like swarms of shrimp, and all the scooping away is futile. The provisions are sad: two glass jars made in Italy, one with a pile of stiff tri-colored pasta, the other with a layer of brown rice that barely coats the bottom. Behind them floats a plastic doll the size of a palm, a pink strawberry girl with a square head of tofu; she was made in Japan. She stares with slanted eyebrows at the serpents, untangling themselves for a breath, snarling in and out of portals. Green, white, black, blue. Cannot be controlled.

There is a radio that survives… it tells the time, announces the news, soothes with music, annoys with silence. The navigation systems still blink with lights, some still – some fervent. A grass green bird perches on them – nature’s dippy effort to conquer silicon chips with feathers, a heartbeat. Most likely the bird will starve there if it doesn’t escape. We needed these machines, although not for survival… and now they take up more space than the food. They are not beautiful.

At first, the people nearby searched the wreckage… At night, the ghosts pilfer, unsatisfied. A set of keys, waterproof colored pens, a pack of gum, some newspapers that no longer belong to the day. All feel powerless to clear the scene, for lack of clarity on what is refuse and what should remain. Emerson sent Thoreau to find Margaret Fuller’s floating manuscripts; instead he found bones, and a button.* * *



Spring will decide. She has the vision, the impetus, the artful solution to bail out the landscape. Unfettered by tragedy, buoyed by possibility. That the ruin of a journey is waiting to be discovered as treasure by the next traveling fool…


* * *



*From “A Button and a Few Bones” in Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake, published by Penguin Compass in Arkana, 1999.

snow going

Dear Gerry Lopez,

My name is Athena. I saw you - at least moving images of you - at a screening of Warren Miller's "Children of Winter". You sealed my fate; I knew after that that I had to learn how to snowboard. This is the story.

I went surfing for the first time this past summer, on my honeymoon. My husband Chris and I went to Kauai and Maui, and signed up for a lesson in Lahaina. As we walked from the shop to the beach, our instructor described his transition from snowboarding competitively out west to teaching surfing in Hawaii. There are only so many mornings you can wake up and not move from the pain of the last trick you learned, and do it all over again he said. Water's softer than land. We paddled out our jumbo soft tops (I got rashes on my arms from it; I'm 5'2" and 95 lbs soaking wet and I could barely get my arms around the board), and I got up on my second wave ever, and that was it. Hooked. Like everything in my life before had led up to that moment. I didn't know how, but I knew I'd just have to make more of those moments happen, come hell or high water...

Which is a bit hard to come by where we live. Cambridge, MA isn't far from the ocean, but you have to drive at least 45 minutes on a good day (to our humble North Shore) or an hour + to New Hampshire, Rhode Island, the Cape. I went every chance I could in the fall, and even determined to buy a winter wet suit for the colder months. But after checking the umpteenth surf report and resigning myself to the flat - ankle high pronouncements, I sort of gave up. Very disappointed in myself, but I hoped I could pour all my energy into a couple trips to warmer places. And then I saw that movie, and it was all clear. I live in New England: if I can't surf, I can do the thing that comes closest on some frozen waves.

Needless to say the first day I tried snowboarding (in Sutton, Canada), I couldn't find the surfing analogy to save my life. No "getting up" the second time, no heroin-like realization that I needed more, no dangling of legs in the water, killing time 'til the next wave. Falling, falling, falling, falling. Or rather: crashing, clashing, slamming, jarring, jolting. Tailbone to brain. My dear husband, a big skiier who'd snowboarded once, kept telling me I just needed to rock from my heels to my toes. We marveled at how easy it looked when others whizzed by. I wondered where all my tai chi and meditation and yoga and working out prep had gone. At least by the end of that day, I did know how to fall a little bit better, and I could get down the bunny slope with some dignity. Okay, dignity's overreaching here; I could get down.

Insert immediate dunking in hot tub, hours of stretching, taking arnica, drinking wine. Then the second day, I had a teacher. A supremely nonchalant, good-humored teacher. There's nothing natural about locking your feet into a board and winding your way down a mountain, he said. You have to train yourself to resist your inclination to always lean back on your heels. Try turning and facing the mountain on your toes. That was the day I discovered how much faith it takes to make the subtlest of movements in a counterintuitive space. To be going at a speed, looking up the slope, not seeing what's behind you at all. But the light bulb burst when I did it... a tiny pop, and some sputtering through the rest of the day, and I realized even though you start pretty low in snowboarding, your progress comes quick.

The third day, a different, sweet teacher - who really broke down each little movement and its purpose. And I started to feel the surfing analogy reprise. I started to put all the pieces together: look where you want to go, lead with your shoulders, flex and extend around the turns. Some of my turns were even smoother than my falls. And by the fourth day I could make tiny jumps (not over anything in particular) and do 360s (not in the air, and not without coming to a standstill at the end). My muscles burned on the flats and the steeps, and I'm certain nothing will ever replace surfing. But I am hooked. I know I'm just knocking at the door of my snowboarding fun. Someday soon it's going to be FUN, and it makes me feel super happy that I can take advantage of my beautiful New England home, its abundant winters and small but earnest mountains. And ever important is the repeated confirmation that there are so many things out there that teach us we can only experience control when we fully let go.

So... thank you. Feels like so little to say for the gift of inspiration, but I mean it with all my heart. I aspire to your grace and relaxation in whatever groove you're riding. And I wish for you that all the beauty and elegance of the universe continues to be reflected on your path.

Yours,
Athena

get on up

In quasi-lunar cycles I remind myself that exercise is like food. Going on Spring Break three days ago facilitated the resumption of this daily need; I went to the gym. Thought nothing of being there… mounted the elliptical with the best view of the MIT pools below, fussed with the sad plastic boxes that connect you to one of six different tvs or uninspiring satellite stations, spaced out for a good 10 minutes before I noticed that 20 people dressed in full fatigues and sneakers were jumping into the pool holding machine guns. A luckier handful were standing on the five meter platform with black knit caps pulled over their faces, their instructors describing to them exactly where the edge of the concrete was. No one else was watching on my side of the glass, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the gap between these routines: our earnest but luxurious exercise, their terrifying and inconsonant training. All of us pushing ourselves beyond what desks and cars require, all of us compelled by internal or external drill sergeants. Harder to say if any one of us enjoyed what we were doing.

Those of us who seek that simplest kind of locomotion do so for reasons ranging from the most practical to the hedonistic. A vestige of chasing our food, perhaps, the stirring that acknowledges the necessity of action – and evidence of evolution, our need to swoosh and wriggle and jump and careen. We’re so committed that we hurt ourselves to keep going. I thought about that briefly while watching Jiri Kylian’s improbably wonderful ballet ‘Black and White’ . The audience remains captivated in the ease and flow of what these dancers convey; we hardly contemplate the strains and bruises that carried them to the stage.

One could argue that regardless of the venue, we’re driven to measure our motility’s worth. Heart rates raised, dunks slammed, moguls conquered, opponents thrown: the push and pull between play and ambition.
You could blame it on our capitalist values, or our type-A programming - or an innocent misunderstanding.
Fell in love with surfing in Hawaii last August, and proceeded to employ my typical m.o. to getting that “done”. That works until the ocean reminds you that little comes from struggling with weather and waves, and if every day is going to be a good day, you might as well plan at the last minute, give up all expectations and have fun every possible second you're out there.

I promise to yield to the mountains I’m about to meet: Gerry Lopez inspired me to take full advantage of my New England home and go snowboarding while our Atlantic waters warm (piss poor googling booty on video of Lopez snowboarding, but if you find some let me know…). No matter the terrain, I wonder if we love it all for the chance to let our brains be guided by our bodies. They teach our thoughts how the balance between making happen and letting go really works. They're efficient, free (arguably), and wiser than we know. And they might even be happier when we let them loose on the world.

tu te souviens :

memory : prisoner and guard of muscle and grind, warp and sway : you spirit through the shutters of ice that grip the light and twist it : helix and trial, victory and crush : you grant insight like a batch of meat, sow dry bones by nightfall : : :
to harness you was eminence when youth was standing still : intractable the pull of your release : leading me through oceans of whim and gold : your daughter met me at the shore and shook my lungs : : : : : she glowed a million bulbs of current, daybreak for the denizen : but your shadow alighted, and we were bound in weeds : swarming my plains ‘til your threads grew my wheat : we lurch through seasons still : : : : awake my marrow pulses, knows : whose edict lies matters less than truce : we both at once were queens

more or less

Newton had an elegant proposition: every action is met by an equal and opposite reaction. Generation X has seen that principle through the prism of unprecedented economic expansion, followed by a fair share of contraction. That sense of stricture is understandably uncomfortable – not least for those who started with little. But in characteristic (commendable? condemnable?) style, we want to do more with this less. Arguably, very necessary. Still a riddle that leaks through the seams of our withering security blankets.

In politics, the rhetoric sounds hyperpractical and uberefficient. Technology pats itself on the back for inhabiting just that role on its best days; sustainability yearns to convince every last human that this process is just, and true. At work, it means one does the work of three, without compensation, and in leisure, it nudges us to turn off the tv and pick up a book.

Poor people have been riding such transformations for eons. Although class structure is relative and imperfect, doing more with less seems the very definition of a family of four living on an income of $45,000. The New York Times found bankers and brokers who might relate, because they’re “not yet rich”; they “work hard and get paid a lot for working hard”, and warn that anyone suggesting their bonuses be taxed is a socialist. (My husband suggests that socialism might also be defined as a government giving money to a business so that it can give bonuses to its employees.) If $625,000 is less, can’t we still call it more?


We could just walk around our own cities and towns to gain insight into the alchemy we seek. Traveling affords us that learning in a centrifugal spin. My friend Kim inspired me to pay attention with a beginner’s mind through her vision of Guatemala. (You'll have to guess on i.d.-ing the pictures, I'm too ludditic to arrange them correctly...) Cartagena, too, is full of examples of comical practicality, endearments of sharing, and beauty that persists through tenacity or default.


Necessity and creativity have long been siblings; they bicker in boom times and scheme in the rough. I hope they remind us to be bold with our play, be it new ways of seeing or choices we’re unaccustomed to making. We might trick ourselves into getting what we truly want with some artful magic.

S I g n a l T r a n s d u c t I o n

In the laboratory of my mind, I’ve been researching communication. Internal, external…anthropologist Clifford Geertz says culture itself is comprised of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Being sick and traveling to Cartagena gave me insights on both these loops.

My microbiology professor said that if she had to choose one phrase or process to describe the secret of life and the universe, it would be “signal transduction”. In the sciences, that means cells receive signals and translate them into another kind of signal – which usually results in a cascade of events that sets off another signal, and the beat goes on. It’s a means for any organism, no matter how small, to interact with its environment. But even one single cell is an environment in its own right, and by extrapolation, each human body is a universe of environments that requires the stalwart transduction of signals to maintain homeostatic balance.

Illness is an upset of that balance, and it’s therefore a really good place from which to observe how the internal dialogue changes, both in nature and in tone. My sore throat and unquenchable thirst and phlegm-y head and dry cough nagged me only a little at first; they turned up the volume until it dawned on me that in fact I was sick; I started taking herbal medicine, resting more, getting more acupuncture, drinking twice as much water. I saw that those were important signals to send my body: I would give it all of the tools at my disposal to support its amelioration. From the grander interventions to the subtler choices, I was saying This is the direction I want to go in… and hoping it was a quick ride.

My mind’s part in the “Are we there yet?” script started booming in bold: Have we reached our goal? I almost never get sick. Aren’t I supposed to heal quickly? I’m scared I won’t get better for a long time. The stories we tell ourselves… what reality was I creating, or not creating, through that conversation? Or better yet, how did those messages jive with the ones I was sending myself through my actions? Did the crossing of signals create static, or harmony? Was one louder and therefore more powerful than the other?

Physicist Fritjof Capra trumpets the Santiago theory : that communication isn’t a transmission of information, but instead a coordination of behavior through mutual structural coupling. The theory proposes that that coordination isn’t determined by meaning but by the dynamics of the dialogue, be it between birds, pets and their owners, or humans. And that’s what makes me wonder what happens between “Rest a while” and “Hurry up and get better”. Is that an effective way of coordinating behavior between my 75 trillion cells? What is the true goal?

No more pertinent question to ask when I’m attempting to communicate in Spanish - a language I started in college, assumed I spoke because I got A’s, and promptly handed my ass to me on a platter when I arrived in Cuba and faced the reality of uncontrolled interaction. Chaos. I spent seven months on that island, not giving equal weight to the complicated conversations I could have by the time I went home, but clinging morosely to the story line that I had failed: I had not realized my potential to be fluent, and most things that came out of my mouth weren’t good enough.

So the first night I arrive Cartagena, my husband arranges dinner with one of his students. The restaurant is strange and cold, but the people are bright and funny and laid back. At first, I cruise along and my short, well-worn sentences sound good… and then when I have to really explain something or tell a story, I devolve. My mind searches the database of what I can’t say. This does not strike me as an encouraging developmental utensil. It’s like being tasked to feed a bumping crowd of starving villagers, looking in the storeroom and reporting: Okay, we don’t have any steak. We also don’t have milk… hell, we don’t even have rice. Lemme see if I can find a bag of saltines…

The faucet turns decisively to the right, the flow freezes, and I stutter until I just stop. Later, when I’m more relaxed, I’ll replay the conversation and I’ll think of three different ways I could have said _______ with my nascent stock of goodies. It’s not Voltaire, but it would work. And that begs more questions: What signals am I sending when I shut down? To whom? How are they received? Does it matter?

At least I can answer the latter inquiry with a resounding yes: it matters if the goal is connection. The true meaning of that word goes beyond a simple registering of signals from sender to receiver. I believe it means that the energy between the two parties flows together in harmony. Harmony, not in a naïve or idyllic sense; think of it in a musical sense. You don’t have to be able to sing it to hear it: discord is palpable. Harmony is sweet. And it’s the perfect example because it doesn’t imply the notes coming together are the same, or even that the most experienced musicians can always predict what it’ll sound like. It might require Capra’s beloved coupling. But that seems right. Fun, even. A millisecond of that is worth a lifetime of noise.

sayoshi

turn around and
i will dance with you
again

i was small when we first spun -
my heart was noisy with
fear,

the outline of you
was a pheromone that
buzzed into the gap

then time tampered

with our compromiso

and distance ruled

memory trumped -

real transformed to
story,

phantoms paced

until the curve was rounded
and the
atoms of you alighted

the imprint revealed
nothing ever
disappears

CONFESSIONS OF A RETREAT VIRGIN

It took a whole year to get up the courage to do a meditation retreat. I’d dabbled in Zen sitting – I’d taken classes with Tibetan nuns – and I couldn’t sit still for more than ten minutes. I knew if I were going to be serious about meditating, I’d have to learn how to sit for longer. I thought a retreat would mean intensive study of a solid technique and a guarantee that I’d do it regularly. I was worried I’d be blowing my vacation time on something that resembled a bad acid trip. But I’d been through too much to deny the reality that I could go anywhere in the world and I’d never escape the trappings of my mind.

The summer of 2001 began with my last grandparent dying. Three of my best friends were going to get married. I was put on month-to-month contracts at NPR, and didn’t know what my next permanent position would be. I also found out federal taxes were never taken out of my NPR paychecks, and I owed the IRS thousands of dollars. It was no longer good enough to hope that my boyfriend would love me someday; we broke up the night of the first wedding, and I’d moved out by the end of the summer. Fall had barely arrived by the 11th of September. I was a walking, barely waking, open wound.

I devoted myself mostly to work and Buddhism. And by January some of the numbness had given way to determination. So I set out for northern Massachusetts in the shelter of winter to do a ten-day retreat at the Vipassana Meditation Center.

According to the Center’s website, “Vipassana is one of India’s most ancient meditation techniques. Long lost to humanity, it was rediscovered by Gotama the Buddha more than 2500 years ago. The word vipassana means seeing things as they really are.” Ambitious; time tested. I liked that.

I clicked on the section called “Code of Discipline”. No killing, no stealing, no drugs, no dinner (no dinner?), no exercise, no writing, no reading, no eye contact, no mixing of men and women, no music, no television, no outside contact, NO TALKING. It was becoming clear that they probably called it a retreat because most mortals would run away from this, screaming.


I felt pretty brave just showing up at the Center. I chuckled with cockiness as the staff locked up my cell phone, my pens, my journal. I can stand anything for ten days, I concluded. That first night, sixty of us piled our shoes at the doors of the main hall, grabbed as many pillows and blankets as we could, and sat down. Cross-legged, in neat, silent rows – we had absolutely no idea what was going to happen in this place where we would spend 17 hours of each day wrestling our minds to the ground.

~ * ~

At 4:00 the next morning, we heard the hollow gong of the bell – the same bell that would signal breakfast time, rest time, another meditation session or lights out at 9:30. I was surprised that it didn’t take more than a couple days to get used to the silence I thought would be so ominous. At first, you’d feel uncomfortable sitting directly across from someone in the dining hall, hearing only the steady clink of spoon against bowl, the hiss of hot water melting a tea bag. Where do you look? And if someone looks at you, can they tell you’re actually certifiably insane when you’re not hiding behind social graces?

Eventually you realize you have nothing to say to the person across from you anyway, and you feel more relieved than stifled. And who needs conversation anyway when you can finally hear all that nonstop noise going on in your head… the Elton John song you tried to forget two weeks ago, the mini-series you’d pitch about a shady character from the Witness Protection Program hiding out at the Vipassana Meditation Center, the ex-boyfriend you were sure you’d forgiven, the way your mom got angry at you for taking your braids out at school when you were eight, the fact that you’d better clean your plate well because this morning you got one with a carrot sliver stuck to the side. There is no thin line between crazy and normal, I’d think to myself. It’s the distractions that fool us into buying that distinction. And we cling to those with the strength of life itself.

With so much inaudible thinking, it was nice to hear someone else’s voice every once in a while. The teacher, S. N. Goenka, lives in India - so the Center plays his teachings on tape. Meanwhile, two supremely mellow assistant teachers sat in front of the group on soft white cubes. You were allowed to ask them questions, but only about the techniques we were learning. For the first three days, we learned how to focus our attention on the feeling of inhaling and exhaling air through our nostrils. This helped us to distinguish between subtle and gross sensations (the tickle of a strand of hair vs. the ache of a stubbed toe). The real vipassana training began on the fourth day. That was the day they asked us not to squirm or fidget or wiggle during the sessions – we were supposed to try not to move at all. That way we could turn our awareness on the entire body – scanning each part from head to toe for the subtlest of sensations.

The point of that was to learn how to make all sensations “equanimous”: to train ourselves to refrain from feeling aversion to pain or craving pleasure. We were to just let all the sensations arise and then fade away. I didn’t have such a hard time letting go of the pleasurable feelings – but after an hour and a half of sitting completely motionless on my bony ass (the five pillows underneath it might as well have been sheets of toilet paper) on a concrete floor, it was pretty much impossible to not be averse to the pain. The pain in the lower half of my body was so unbearable that I would spontaneously burst into tears. In my mind, I was absolutely certain that I’d reached my limit, and that if I continued to sit there with this pain, I would die. There was no way something that hurts this much can be good for me, I’d tell myself over and over again.

And then that magical moment came when I decided to try sitting still for just one moment longer, just to see what would happen, to see whether I’d die or pass out or go crazier. And I didn’t. In one negligible fraction of a second, EVERYthing changed.

~ * ~

The images of previous “impossible” moments rolled through my mind in a furious wave. Was I wrong? About ALL of them? The next time I sat and reached that threshold of pain, I had an entirely new anticipation: that my mind would attempt to convince me I couldn’t take it. And I needed to follow the experiment through: if it were just my mind convincing my body, couldn’t my body be convinced of something new? My reactions to the pain started to became less powerful. I went from shaking and crying to thinking it was really uncomfortable to thinking it was just another sensation. And what our teacher was saying started to make real sense: we only give pain and pleasure so much importance because we’ve developed the habit of doing it. We’re used to labeling those sensations “good”, or “bad”, and we either want more or less of them to make us happy, or at least maintain the status quo. The retreat was an extreme example of what it feels like to shift into neutral – where you give yourself the time and space to just notice the feelings without becoming attached to them.

Was it, therefore, the best or the worst kind of example?

Seven years later – I’m still trying to figure that out. I’ve learned enough about Buddhism that I see the fool’s errand I’d normally take on, of trying to recreate that retreat experience, trying to return to some place that was moving and changing even when I was there. It was, more than all my beach vacations combined, the most relaxed I’ve ever felt. And my struggle to sit for 20 minutes every day seems both epic and juvenile in comparison. Most of the time it feels like faith to sit down in the first place. So I guess I haven’t learned so much about Buddhism that I’m free from the desire to want more. More relaxation, more time, more deaths of the impossible. More of the courage I had for a split second to see what happens.