the third commitment

quotes from living beautifully with uncertainty and change by pema chodron

the three commitments:

1- committing to not cause harm
2- committing to take care of one another
3- committing to embrace the world just as it is

"it's only when the fearful 'i' is not pushing and pulling at life, freaking out and grasping at it, that full engagement is possible. we become more fully engaged in our lives when we become less self-absorbed. as we have less and less allegiance to our small, egocentric self, less and less allegiance to a fixed notion of who we are or what we're capable of doing, we find we also have less and less fear of embracing the world just as it is."

"in the charnel ground, we meet both wretchedness and splendidness -- the totality of our experience as human beings -- and discover that we need both to be a genuine warrior. the splendidness of life lifts our spirits, and we go forward with enthusiasm. when we hear pleasant news or meet with inspiring teachers, when we enjoy the company of good friends or find ourselves in beautiful places, when we feel that everything is ideal and hunky-dory, then naturally we feel joyful and at ease. but should all of this good fortune make us arrogant or complacent or indifferent to the suffering of others, wretchedness humbles us. it cuts through any sense of superiority or entitlement, through any delusions that comfort is somehow our birthright. on the other hand, if there is too much wretchedness - too much misery and despair - it makes us want to collapse and never get out of bed. so the sweetness of life and the harshness of life complement each other. splendidness provides vision, and wretchedness grounds us. just when we're ready to give up, a kind word or the sight of the ocean or the sound of beautiful music can save the day. just when we're riding high and becoming arrogant, a sudden misfortune or bad news from the doctor or the unexpected death of a loved one can abruptly bring us down to earth and reconnect us with our tender heart.

when life is uncomfortable, when we're highly agitated and don't know where to turn, that's the most difficult time to stay present. but that's also the time when doing so can be the most rewarding. it's a challenge to practice staying present when we're despondent or distressed or overwhelmed, when our backs are against the wall. but right then, when we're in a tight spot, we have the ideal situation for practice. we can do something radical: accept suffering as part of our home ground, part of our enlightened mandala, and relate to it straightforwardly. we don't awaken in some paradise where the circumstances are made to order. we awaken in the charnel ground."

"wanting to escape pain is the reason that many people start on a spiritual path. it can be a good motivator, because it drives us to look for answers. the problem is, most of us spend our entire life going from one promise of relief to another, never staying with the pain long enough to learn anything from it.

but sooner or later, we all encounter intense emotion that we can't outrun. it may be fear that arises in a truly disturbing situation or the feeling of being very hooked and about to be swept away. one sign that you've already started charnel-ground practice, whether you realize it or not, is if you perk up when strong feelings come alone and then, instead of trying to get rid of them, you move toward them and get curious. when you're open to inviting difficult emotions to stick around long enough to teach you something, then you're already in the frame of mind to do this practice."

"if we're doing this practice in earnest, the emotions and habitual patterns we're working with can hit us with such force that it takes everything in us not to run. sometimes i felt like odysseus, lashed to the mast so i wouldn't follow the sirens' song. it was as if a giant magnet were trying to drag me away from staying present. i would just begin to sit with an intense feeling when a little voice in my head would start saying things like 'you'd better check to see if you turned off the stove' and 'maybe this is bad for your heart.' our old habits are worthy opponents. even if we're eager to have everything fall apart so we can do charnel-ground practice, when we actually do it, it puts us through a lot. we need strong motivation to stick with it because the desire to escape is so compelling."

the second commitment

quotes from living beautifully with uncertainty and change by pema chodron

the three commitments:

1- committing to not cause harm
2- committing to take care of one another
3- committing to embrace the world just as it is

"taking the . . . vow to help others implies that instead of holding our own individual territory and defending it tooth and nail, we become open to the world that we are living in. it means we are willing to take on greater responsibility, immense responsibility. in fact, it means taking a big chance."- chogyam trungpa rinpoche

"compassion is threatening to the ego. we might think of it as something warm and soothing, but actually it's very raw. when we set out to support other beings, when we go so far as to stand in their shoes, when we aspire to never close down to anyone, we quickly find ourselves in the uncomfortable territory of 'life not on my terms.'"

"opening the door reflects our intention to remove our armor, to take off our mask, to face our fears. it is only to the degree that we become willing to face our own feelings that we can really help others. so we make a commitment that for the rest of our lives, we'll train in freeing ourselves from the tyranny of our own reactivity, our own survival mechanisms, our own propensities to be hooked."

"we probably learn more from our mistakes than from our successes. we have to recognize when something doesn't work and - this is important - not take it personally. instead, we can follow chogyam trungpa's suggestion: live your life as an experiment. adopt an attitude of 'i'm not sure what will help in this situation, but i'm going to experiment and try this.'"

"the ending of a previously close relationship throws us right into the midst of fundamental uncertainty - and that definitely hurts. we've met our edge. we find ourselves caught up in behaviors we assumed we had outgrown years ago. sometimes just the thought of the person makes us close down. but often it is a seemingly irresolvable relationship that teaches us the most, once we're willing to be vulnerable and honest, once we're willing to connect with what chogyam trungpa called 'the genuine heart of sadness.'"

the first commitment

quotes from living beautifully with uncertainty and change by pema chodron

the three commitments:

1- committing to not cause harm
2- committing to take care of one another
3- committing to embrace the world just as it is

"the first commitment is about refraining from speech and actions that are harmful to ourselves and others. it liberates us by making us far more aware of what we're feeling, so that whenever the urge to lie or slander or take something that isn't given to us comes up - whenever we have the urge to act out our desires or aggression, or escape in any form - we refrain."

"refraining from harmful speech and action is outer renunciation; choosing not to escape the underlying feelings is inner renunciation. the precepts are a device to put us in touch with the underlying uneasiness, the fundamental quality of being alive. working with this feeling and the neurosis it triggers is inner renunciation."

"there's a practice in buddhism called sojong that gives us an opportunity to reflect on where we are in terms of refraining and, when we feel that we've really made a mess of things, to put that behind us and start anew. traditionally, sojong takes place twice a month, on the full and new moon days. the day before, each person reviews the preceding two weeks and reflects: what have i done with my body? what have i done with my speech? what about my mind: is it steady or all over the place and never present? as much as possible, we explore these questions without self-criticism or blame. . .

sojong itself is a little like the fourth and fifth steps in a twelve step program, which call for making 'a searching and fearless' self-inventory, recognizing where we've gone off course, then sharing this with another person. sojong is a kind of antiguilt process that allows us to assess ourselves honestly, acknowledge what we've done and where we are, then let go of self-judgment and move on. . .

you don't have to say this aloud to a group or another person, but most people find it easier to let go of self-judgment if they share their observations with someone else - a friend, perhaps, or a spiritual adviser. however you do it, the aim is to be fully honest and, at the same time, to shed feelings of guilt."

"nobody's perfect in keeping the commitment to not harm. but still, students often ask me, 'how can i make this vow with any integrity? if i'm going to break it at all, then what's the point?' patrul rinpoche, a buddhist master who lived in the eighteenth century, basically said there is no way to escape harming. he devotes an entire section of his book the words of my perfect teacher to all the ways we cause harm: countless being suffer from making the clothes we wear, from bringing us the food we eat. beings suffer even when we walk. 'who is not guilt of having crushed countless tiny insects underfoot?' he asks. our situation is inescapable because of our interconnectedness with all things. what makes the difference is our intention to not harm. on an everyday level, the intention to not harm means using our body, our speech, and our mind in such a way that we don't knowingly hurt people, animals, birds, insects - any being - with our actions or words."

"sakyong mipham recommends that as we sit down to meditate, we contemplate our intention for the session. our intention might be to strengthen the natural stability of mind by training in continually coming back to the body, to our mood right now, and to our environment. or our intention might be to make friends with ourselves, to be less stern and judgmental as we meditate, so we might train in noticing our tone of voice when we label and lightening up and not being too tight or goal oriented in our practice."

"it's a tricky business - not rejecting any part of yourself at the same time that you're becoming acutely aware of how embarrassing or painful some of those parts are. what most of us have been doing is gearing our lives toward avoiding unpleasant feelings while clinging to whatever we think will make us feel good and feel secure. from a conventional point of view, this makes perfect sense. but from the vantage point of remaining with our direct experience, the vantage point of opening to the tentativeness of life, this strategy is self-defeating, the very thing that keeps us stuck.

there's an exercise that can help us reflect on this knee-jerk tendency to cling to what makes us feel good and push away what makes us feel bad:

sit quietly for a few minutes and become mindful of your breath as it goes in and out. then contemplate what you do when you're unhappy or dissatisfied and want to feel better. even make a list if you want to. then ask yourself: does it work? has it ever worked? does it soothe the pain? does it escalate the pain? if you're really honest, you'll come up with some pretty interesting observations."

"pleasure and pain drive us all the time. the attraction is simple: we want pleasure; we don't want pain. our attachment to them is very strong, very visceral at either extreme. we can get that clenching-in-the-gut feeling of being hooked both when we crave something - when we're consumed with wanting or needing - and when we're averse to something and try to push it away."

"this has been going on through the ages. they criticize the silent ones. they criticize the talkative ones. they criticize the moderate ones. there is no one in the world that escapes criticism. there never was and never will be, nor is there now, the wholly criticized or the wholly approved." [shakyamuni buddha]

resurrection

excerpt from freshwater by akwaeke emezi

the ada's surgery happened the spring after asughara's failed attempt, just five months later. before then, we used to think of the body as belonging truly to the ada, as something that we were only guests in, something that the beastself could borrow. but now that we had been spurned from the gates, now that we were sentenced to meat, it was time to accept that this body was ours too.

. . .

when ewan left and asughara allowed saint vincent to take the ada's body and start binding her chest -- all of these things were in preparation for a shedding, the skin splitting in long seams. the first time the ada wore the binder, she turned sideways in a mirror and saint vincent laughed out loud in relief, in joy, in the rightness of the absence. the ada was wearing faded purple jeans, and the soft of her belly swelled out from under the cutting bottom edge of the vest. but she could endure that, even the sharpness around her armpits. the flatness was worth it. the ada pulled a short-sleeved t-shirt over the vest and ran her hands up and down the mild curve. it felt like armor, like we were bulletproof, like saint vincent was being built up in layers of determined fiber. the ada wore the binder every day and washed it by hand in her small bathroom sink. once, she made the mistake of putting it in the dryer, weakening the elastic. saint vincent suffered with each fraction of looseness she had caused, so she was more careful after that.

before asughara put us in the emergency room, we had been searching for doctors to alter the ada, to carve our body into something that we could truly call a home. saachi finally realized, in her panic over the ada's suicide attempt, exactly how much of her daughter actually belonged to her, which was to say, not much at all. the ada was slipping from the human mother to us, to a freedom saachi didn't trust. after all, how could she keep the girl safe if the girl wouldn't listen, wouldn't obey, if the girl was us? we were grateful that saachi had at one time cared for the ada, had kept her alive as a baby and been an excellent guardian as far as she could, but what did she know of graces or beastselves or ugly, unwelcome embodiments or the sacrifices a snake must go through to continue its timeline, the necessity of molting, the graves built of skins? we ignored her as gently as we could -- this body was ours, not hers; this girl was ours, not hers, she had to understand where her jurisdiction ended and how pushing further was blasphemy.

the ada used a therapist to assist with our carving plan and we discovered that humans had medical words - terms for what we were trying to do - that there were procedures, gender reassignment, transitioning. we knew what we were planning was right. even the things that the ada used to dislike about her body had mellowed out once we let saint vincent run. then, the broad shoulders and the way they tapered down to narrow hips and small buttocks finally fit. men's clothes draped properly on this body -- we were handsome. we considered removing the breasts utterly and tattooing the flat of her chestbone, but that decisiveness still felt wrong, one end of the spectrum rocketing unsteadily to the other end -- it wasn't us, not yet. so we chose a reduction instead of a removal; we cut down the C cups of blatant mammary tissue to small As, flat enough to not need brassieres, to not move, to be a stillness. the ada wanted to include her human mother in the carving and we allowed it because, we supposed, vessels are loyal. but saachi was against the surgery -- she called the doctors and threatened them till they pulled out; she fought with the therapists, fought to have us seen as unstable, sick. she called saul, who she never spoke to, not since the divorce, and told him, outed us to him.

"your daughter is trying to cut off her breasts," she said.

the ada was furious but we remained calm. we understood what was necessary -- humans often fail at listening, as if their stubbornness will convince the truth to change, as if they have that kind of power. they do, however, understand forceful things, cruelties -- they obey those. so we terminated saachi's contact with the ada doctors, we excluded her, exiled and excommunicated her. this was when she stopped being an emergency contact; this was why she had no access to the ada's doctors when asughara tried to kill the body. for a woman who looked to drown her loneliness in her children, it was a brutal thing to do, to push her out. but we had to strip her of power, to remind her that a mere human could not thwart us, that she stood no chance. we do not return your children until it suits us, if ever.

when we found the next doctors, the human mother knew nothing about it. the ada brought in pictures of small chests, small enough to where we didn't think of them as breasts, small enough to where we could feel reverted to a time when we weren't capable of biological things, when we were neutral like we should have been.

. . .

saachi arrived the next day and said nothing about the surgery, asked no questions. we approved of her decision. she accompanied the ada to the post-op appointment, to the clean, organized waiting room, then back to the exposed brick of the ada's apartment and her yellow kitchen. she helped the ada change the dressings and caught her arm when the heat from the shower made our body faint. it was a relief; we were grateful for the reprieve, not for us, no, but for the ada. malena was there as well, witness as she always was, and the ada smiled to see her mother share heinekens and dominican cigars with this her saintridden friend. as for us, we were fascinated by the white tape that hid the cuts, by the fine stitching, by the new body. we juggled the ada's chemistry and decided to purify her: we ran through her cells and rejected alcohol, meat, dairy, processed sugars; we made them cramp her stomach, hurt her head, and twist her intestines. this was our body and it would become what we wanted, now that the reconfiguring was done.

before the surgery, the ada had told her friends that she couldn't wait for when she could wear dresses again. they were confused. they stared at her bound chest and boy clothes.

"why would you go more feminine without boobs?" they asked. "most people get it done to be more masculine."

the ada shrugged and we moved in her shoulders. it was simple how we saw ourself, dresses creeping up the thigh, gashing open at the front to show chest bone -- tulle and lace and clouds of clothes. just like how having long hair weighing down our back made us want to wear buttons up to our throat, men's sleeves rolled up our biceps, handsome, handsome things. none of this was a new thing. we had been the same since the first birth, through the second naming, the third molting. to make the vessel look a little more like us -- that was the extent of our intent. we have understood what we are, the places we are suspended in, between the inaccurate concepts of male and female, between the us and the brothersisters slavering on the other side.

after our first birth, it took only a short time before we realized that time had trapped us in a space where we no longer were what we used to be, but had not yet become what we were going to be. it was a place that always and never moved. the space between the spirits and the alive is death. the space between life and death is resurrection. it has a smell like a broken mango leaf, sharp, sticking to the inner rind of our skin.

the prophecies that came later, from malena and others, they explained this -- the shifting, the quick skinnings and reshapings, the falling and revival of the scales. but by then it was too late for the ada to do anything except try to keep up with us, try not to be drowned in the liminal fluid we swam in. it tasted sharp as gin, metallic as blood, was soaked in both, down past the red into the deep loam. ogbanje space. we could rest in it like the inside curve of a calabash; we could turn in on ourself, wind back to our beginning, make those final folds. sometimes they call this the crossroads, the message point, the hinge. it is also called flux space, the line or the edge -- like we said, resurrection.

morning cleanse

from how to meditate by pema chodron

"when you say 'everything is a dream,' another way to say that is, 'there is just so much room.' we have an enormous amount of room to move around in. our minds are really vast. we're not constricted by anything. but the opposite is our habitual experience. our experience is usually quite claustrophobic, and we carry with us a very strong sense of burden, of things being solid. if we can loosen the grip of our thoughts, regarding them as dreams, we've just made the world and our ability to experience this world evermore larger."

"the instruction i've been giving for years is: when you're meditating, and even in your everyday life, notice when you're hooked. notice when you're triggered or activated. that's the first step: you acknowledge that emotion has arisen.

next, i advise students to drop the story line and lean in. just pause, and for a second connect in with spaciousness, with openness. i call this the 'pause practice.' it's like taking a time-out for yourself. then you lean in to the quality or the texture or the experience, completely touching in to the emotion, without the story. how does the sadness feel? how does the anger feel? where is it in your body? you let the feeling of the emotion become the object of your meditation. and the reason that i've been so committed to teaching on this is emotion itself is a radical and very potent way of awakening.

without a doubt, this is where everyone loses it. we have so much fear of our emotions, so much aversion to them. you get caught in the momentum of the emotion, and it sweeps you away as if you were in its control. but i've found that we can take another approach, which is to enter the emotions that arise in our practice. emotions are actually very empowering; i call working with the emotions 'accelerated transformation.' when you experience difficult emotions in your sitting practice, and you let go of the words and the story behind the experience, then you're sitting with just the energy. and yes, it can feel painful to do this."

"one of my granddaughter's conclusions was that we're changing all the time; everything about us is always changing. my granddaughter said, 'when you hold a fixed idea of yourself, you have to leave out all the parts that you find boring, embarrassing, difficult, or sad. you leave out the emotions you don't want to feel. and then when you do that, when you leave out all those parts, when those parts are not acceptable, then it eats away at you underneath. these unacknowledged parts are like a hum in the background that's eating away at you, and you have to find an escape to get away from that. and my mother's escape was alcohol.'

in order for us to be fully present, to experience life fully, we need to acknowledge and accept all our emotions and all parts of ourselves -- the embarrassing parts as well as our anger, our rage, our jealousy, our envy, our self-pity, and all these chaotic emotions that sweep us away. looking for an exit from experiencing the full range of our humanity leads to all kinds of pain and suffering. meditation gives us the opportunity to experience our emotions naked and fresh, free from the labels of 'right' and 'wrong,' 'should' and 'shouldn't.'"

breaking the fast

by naomi shihab nye, from red suitcase

1.
japanese teacher says:
at first light, rise.
don't hover between
sleep and waking,
this makes you heavy,
puts a stone inside your heart.

the minute you drift back to shore,
anchor. breathe.
remember your deepest name.

2.
sometimes objects stun me,
bamboo strainer, gray mug,
sitting exactly where
they were left.

they have not slept
or dreamt of lost faces.

i touch them carefully,
saying, tell what you know.

3.
cup of waves,
strawberry balanced
in a seashell.

in morning the water seems
clear to the bottom.

no fish blocks my view.

pure silence

quotes from lost paradise by cees noteboom

"the gallery owner must have told him something, because he stood there before me without saying a word, whether out of shyness or because his thoughts were miles away i couldn't tell. and i still can't. sometimes i think he doesn't see me, that even when he touches me or has sex with me, i am invisible to him, someone without a soul, a mere shape or figure - and he is right about that - as if what we do has no substance, as if his pre-announced departure can be felt in everything, in his long silences, his stillness, his refusal to see me although i am dying to be seen and know i won't be - i knew all that the moment i saw the painting."

"after a few days in port willunga we went to a strange place, a reserve in which we played at being aborigines. it sounds awful, and it was. i don't know why he took me there, but at least i now know how to find food in the desert and have seen how pure silence can turn you into silence yourself. no one was surprised to see me, so perhaps he had brought others there before. i shrugged off the well-meaning nonsense and practised withdrawing into myself - i'm good at that. it was not his mob, and since they spoke english to him, they did not come from the same language group either. i did see him smile, but not at me. i considered telling him what had happened to me that week, but my black cloud could never be his. i would take it with me when i left, incorporate it into the rest of my life, as if one cloud could cancel out another. we'll see. it is our last night together. i rub my hand over the dirt floor of the cabin. it feels hard and dry, like paper. everything in this country is different from mine. outside, the dawn's early light flows out over the world with such violence that it almost hurts my eyes. red paint. blood. i roll over and look at him. he is still asleep. he too just a shape. i wish i could lift him up and fly away with him, over the vast emptiness of this country, to the place he comes from, to the place he belongs and i do not."

i'm pretty comfortable, but i could be a little more comfortable

short story by lydia davis, from can't and won't


i'm tired.

the people in front of us are taking a long time choosing their ice cream.

my thumb hurts.

a man is coughing during the concert.

the shower is a little too cold.

the work i have to do this morning is difficult.

they have seated us too close to the kitchen.

there's a long line at the shipping counter.

i'm cold sitting in the car.

the cuff of my sweater is damp.

the shower is weak.

i'm hungry.

they're quarreling again.

this soup doesn't have much taste.

my navel orange is a little dry.

i didn't get two seats to myself on the train.

he is keeping me waiting.

they have gone off and left me alone at the dinner table.

she says my breathing is incorrect.

i need to go to the bathroom, but someone is in there.

i'm a little tense.

the back of my neck feels prickly.

the cat has ringworm.

the person behind me on the train is eating something very smelly.

it's too hot in that room for me to practice the piano.

he calls me when i'm working.

i bought sour cream by mistake.

my fork is too short.

i'm so tired i won't do well at my lesson.

this apple has brown spots on it.

i ordered a dry corn muffin, but when it came, it wasn't dry.

he chews so loudly i have to turn on the radio.

this pesto is hard to blend.

the wart on my thumb is growing back.

i can't have anything to eat or drink this morning because of the test.

she has parked her mercedes across the end of my driveway.

i ordered an oat bran raisin muffin lightly toasted, but it wasn't lightly toasted.

my tea water takes too long to boil.

the seam in the toe of my sock is twisted.

it's too cold in that room for me to practice the piano.

he doesn't pronounce foreign words correctly.

my tea is too milky.

i've been in the kitchen too long.

there's cat saliva on my new sock.

my seat doesn't have a back.

the blender is leaking at the bottom.

i can't decide whether to go on reading this book.

i missed the view of the river from the train because it got dark.

the raspberries are sour.

the pepper grinder doesn't grind very well.

the cat has peed on my telephone.

my band-aid is wet.

the store is out of decaf hazelnut coffee.

my sheets get all twisted in the dryer.

the carrot cake was a little stale.

when i toast the raisin bread, the raisins get very hot.

the bridge of my nose is a little dry.

i'm sleepy, but i can't lie down.

the sound system in the examining room is playing folk music.

i don't look forward very much to that sandwich.

they have a new weatherman on the radio.

now that the leaves are off the trees, we can see the neighbor's new deck.

i don't think i like my bedspread anymore.

in the restaurant they are playing a loop of soft rock music.

my glasses frames are cold.

there is st. andre cheese on the platter, but i can't have any.

the clock is ticking very loudly.

space and ancestors

from m archive by alexis pauline gumbs

soon she was shaped like a ghost. had it always been so? she had noticed that in crowded places people always seemed to find her to be the route of least resistance. there was space where she was standing. she was space for other people's journeys. no one could see all there was to her. it made her feel small. she poked her elbows out and broadened her shoulders, she wished she had a retractable fan that popped out of her vertebrae like a dinosaur. she wished she had huge angel wings to slap the faces of the unseeing everyone. nobody thought she was such a big deal.

or

wherever she was there was space and ancestors came through. they were drawn to her like they had been drawn to all the shores and like water they began to shape the stone of her back into sand. she recognized the shape of stardust, she breathed deeper to feel them moving. it didn't take long (only eternity) for the evidence in her side abdominals to show the work of breath, the depth of working. her movements became dance for landing light. her offering to the heaviness of heaven. she cultivated fluid-nuanced hips to stretch the follow-through of being. her bones decided not to know their limits. the space around her shone with beckoned peace.


*                                 *                               *                              *

when the memories started to come back we were sleeping. not quite dreaming but regenerating our cells. almost dreaming that we were regenerating cells. on the verge of regenerating the cells that would let us dream deep enough to remember.

we didn't know about the liver cells that could sing. the stomach lining kaleidoscopes. the geometric worlds in our larynxes. we had explored our bodies like battlefields and colonies. never like funhouses or arboretums. until our days became boardwalks on a rising sea and the nights we could sleep became worth saving, like named and labeled trees.

when the memories started to come, we were untrained. we didn't even know how to tell each other what was happening. eventually we would learn to share what went on while we were sleeping with all the specificity we had reserved for waking life. but at that time, when the memories came back, we were only starting to know.


*                                *                                 *                             *

when they cut us down they found our layers, obvious as orbit. there was the year with the blood in the groundwater. there was the year of the sulfur in the sky. there was the year of bark turned blue with freezing (in the middle) in the middle of july. there was the time we focused on waiting. there was the time we warned them with lines. there was the season of not enough ozone and way too much sunshine.

when they cut us down they found us open to what they easily could have known if they had paid attention to any one of those seasons through which we had grown. we offered ourselves to their breathing. we offered ourselves to their homes. we offered ourselves to their dull admiration, their need for protection, their forehead intuition, the walks they walked thinking they were alone. we chipped into pieces to soften their playgrounds, we bent in strips to ferment their drink. we made every component of their housing except the kitchen sink.

we watched and grew thick with the knowing, we bent with the load of their love. it's not easy to be resilient when you feel from below and you see from above. we broke in the middle so often we thought we'd evolve past hearts. and we'd offer ourselves for release (but we want to see the next part).


*                              *                              *                                *

what we wanted was to want to. not to have to do anything. and the problem was we forgot after all these years of force what wanting was.

want was not getting, nor was it having. wanting was not needing. wanting was not having to have or needing not to need. it was not. and there was a wideness in wanting that didn't quite fold in on itself. it deepened and rose up and radiated out and touched softly to itself with warm warning.


*                             *                                *                                *

there is compelled. and then there is compelled.

that was the other time we had gotten to the edge of everything. war had become the question impossible to answer and then the empty appeared with their swallowing want. (we didn't know.)

you have to know that we were shedding ourselves. you have to know that we felt alien in our hearts. you have to know that we already felt it. that never enoughness gnawing at our spirits. this is the only way we could have ignored the prophets and our own knowing for so long. you have to know how deeply we had given up, to trust ghosts to take you away. we lied and told ourselves that maybe across was a better place. and then we nailed ourselves to crosses here.

i don't have to tell you. but we were wrong.

flying

from m archive by alexis pauline gumbs

they were addicted to things like hydrogenated soybean oil and mutant chicken. their memories were linked to the tastes of things the studies said were poison. and so they bought other things, things that felt older to them. but they continued to trust the source of the studies, which was also the source of the earlier poisons. we can only understand this through the concept of addiction, which was an ancient condition of being that was characterized by lying to oneself and others in order to continue behavior that was repeatedly harmful to oneself and others.

they really thought they knew what home tasted like. what healthy was. how to cleanse their palates. there were brilliantly marketed packages that disavowed the past which were very attractive to people trying to distance themselves from the mistakes of their parents but who didn't have the bravery to distance themselves from the system that created their parents. they ate these new and different things while they pretended not to be their parents.

they thought they were tasting the future (which for some people tasted like cardboard and for other people tasted like sugar), but they were not. they were avoiding the necessary bitter tastes of the most accessible greens. to say the general palate was unbalanced would not be quite saying it. how could they have known what this would mean after?

the only one who made it had a direct connection to those women who craved the crunch of eating dirt. who sensed their need for iron. and acted.


*                            *                                 *                                *

they dug in their memories for the one day. for some of them it was a couple of days per month. rock-bottom days. the days in their lives when the world had already ended. they thought back. and asked:

what did we each do then? on the day that everything went wrong. when transportation and communication technologies conspired against us individually. when we personally couldn't get out of bed, dehydrated with crying. when we didn't ask for help. when we hurt the people we loved. when the sun died. when we lost everything. when we lost exactly who we needed to save. when we knew there would be no tomorrow. what did we each do then? how did we keep breathing past it  (because we are the ones that did). they dug for those memories and stacked them in a row.

that's how. that's how we learned to get through this.


*                           *                                    *                               *

at some point the work of pretending we weren't going to die, that our children weren't going to die, that our deaths and lives weren't going to be forgotten, became unsustainable. it was hard enough to just breathe and metabolize. to find something to metabolize. to find people to metabolize near. now some people call it the true end of whiteness, when the world could finally operate based on something other than fear of blackness, of being, of death. but at the time all we knew was the story had run out. all the stories. of staying young to cheat death. of thinking young people wouldn't die. of immortality via "making a difference." of genetic imprint as stability. of stacking money and etching names on buildings. people used to do those things before. not to mention that they would not mention death and would hide the dying away and strive to protect the eyes of the children who already knew everything.

at some point. all the dead being here anyway and all of us here being obviously doomed, we let go of that particular game. and started breathing. and saw our hands.

we let go.

i felt like i could fly.


*                           *                                 *                                  *

on a screen the size of a wall there was a gif of amazon warriors cutting off each other's breasts to better hold the weapons they needed.

through the speakers audre lorde's voice was on loop. the only recorded reading of the cancer journals.

she looked at her reflection, lit by candle in the small pool, and thought back to yesterday when her sister comrades had surrounded her singing, i'm gonna lay down my burdens. . .

she blew out the candle and began to pray. may that which is not mine fall away. may that which hinders my love leave of its own accord. may that which blocks my circulation dissolve in this moment. may who-i-am-not run through this river back to the ocean. may who-i-am emerge clear as birth.

she cried during the hours she was in there. she squatted, sweated, moaned. she bled and defecated and urinated and screamed. she scrubbed off layers of her skin. she pulled out most of her hair. and at some point she blacked out, exhausted. and the dark room held her.

the next morning when they came she looked rather like a baby bird. tufts of hair, raw skin, swollen eyes, dark red and naked. the midwives stung her with tea tree and she gasped. they wrapped her in cotton and she sighed. they sprayed a mist of jasmine over her and she knew.

she knew she could fly.

the teacher

from start where you are by pema chodron

"first we'll consider the teacher. in the lojong teachings the teacher is referred to as the spiritual friend, the kalyanamitra. the teacher is like a senior warrior, or a student warrior who's further along the path. it's somebody who inspires you to walk the path of warriorship yourself. looking at them reminds you of your own softness, your own clarity of mind, and your own ability to continually step out and open. something about them speaks to your heart; you want to have a friendship with this person as a teacher. trust is an essential ingredient: if you enter into a serious relationship with a teacher, you make a commitment to stick with them and they make a commitment to stick with you, so you're stuck together.

lest one romanticize the relationship, i'd like to repeat something that trungpa rinpoche once said: 'the role of the spiritual friend is to insult you.' this is true. it isn't that the spiritual friend phones you up and calls you names or sends you letters about what a jerk you are. it's more that the spiritual friend is the ultimate juan. all your blind spots are going to come out with the spiritual friend. the only difference between the spiritual friend and everybody else in your life is that you've made a commitment to stick with him or her through thick or thin, better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in death. we're not too good at keeping commitments these days; this isn't an age where commitment is honored very widely. if you enter into a relationship with a spiritual friend, you're really asking for it. rather than the cozy, nurturing situation you might have imagined in the beginning - that the teacher is always kind and will replace the mother or father who never loved you or is finally the friend who has unconditional love for you - you find that in this relationship you begin to see the pimples on your nose, and the mirror on the wall isn't telling you that you're the fairest of them all. to the degree that anything is hidden in this relationship, you begin to see it."

quotes from the wisdom of no escape by pema chodron

"when people start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, they often think that somehow they're going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are. . . but loving-kindness - maitri - toward ourselves doesn't mean getting rid of anything. maitri means that we can still be crazy after all these years. we can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. the point is not to try to change ourselves. meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. it's about befriending who we are already."

"why do we resist our energy? why do we resist the life force that flows through us? the first noble truth says that if you are alive, if you have a heart, if you can love, if you can be compassionate, if you can realize the life energy that makes everything change and move and grow and die, then you won't have any resentment or resistance. the first noble truth says simply that it's part of being human to feel discomfort. we don't even have to call it suffering anymore, we don't even have to call it discomfort. it's simply coming to know the fieriness of fire, the wildness of wind, the turbulence of water, the upheaval of earth, as well as the warmth of fire, the coolness and smoothness of water, the gentleness of the breezes, and the goodness, solidness, and dependability of the earth. nothing in its essence is one way or the other. the four elements take on different qualities; they're like magicians. sometimes they manifest in one form and sometimes in another. if we feel that that's a problem, we resist it. the first noble truth recognizes that we also change like the weather, we ebb and flow like the tides, we wax and wane like the moon. we do that, and there's no reason to resist it. if we resist it, the reality and vitality of life become misery, a hell.

the second noble truth says that this resistance is the fundamental operating mechanism of what we call ego, that resisting life causes suffering. traditionally it's said that the cause of suffering is clinging to our narrow view. another way to say the same thing is that resisting our complete unity with all of life, resisting the fact that we change and flow like the weather, that we have the same energy as all living things, resisting that is what's called ego."

the euphoria of discoveries

excerpt from quesadillas by juan pablo villalobos

in the united states there was no rubbish; everything gleamed, just like on tv. the people weren't dirty; they didn't leave their rubbish in the street; they all put it in the right place, in these brightly coloured bins for sorting waste. a bin for banana skins. a bin for red fizzy drinks cans. a bin for kentucky fried chicken bones. a bin for toiled paper covered in shit. some enormous bins for old objects that had gone out of fashion and become an embarrassment to their ex-owners. it was so impressive that even people like us, who were only on holiday, didn't leave our rubbish in the street.

what's more, it was impossible to get ill from eating in a restaurant there. it wasn't like here, where you went to get tacos and they gave you dog-meat tacos and the taco seller wiped his armpits with the same hand he picked up the tortillas with. there were restaurants in the states where you paid for a drink and then served yourself as many times as you liked. it was unbelievable: you had eighty coca-colas for the price of one. and they gave you free sachets of ketchup, mayonnaise, barbecue sauce; little sachets you could take back home to give as presents to your friends or to that poor little kid next door you'd been dying to humiliate because he'd never even been to leon, the peasant.

but you had to speak english. yes siree, even though there were fuckloads of mexicans over there, the important thing was to speak english so they knew you were on holiday and wanted to spend money, because the gringos knew perfectly well how to tell the difference between invaders and tourists. you could see their expression change when your dad got out his wallet full of dollars, because one thing's for sure, they weren't racists. it didn't matter if you were dark-skinned, the only thing that counted over there was money: if you were hard-working and had earned lots of money they respected you. that's why they were a proper country, not like here, where everyone was trying to screw you over the whole time.

to my disappointment, it turned out that rich people liked routine too. i knew we poor people were condemned to repeat every day the programme of events that guaranteed the greatest economic efficiency, but i had supposed that rich people's days were devoted to surprise, to experiencing continually the euphoria of discoveries, the frisson of first times, the optimism of new beginnings. i hadn't imagined the force of attraction imposed by the need to feel safe: a second law of gravity, the power of inertia calling its children to the warm bosom of boredom. in short, jarek liked to do the same things every day; the afternoons we spent together were identical. we played on the atari, had a snack, he talked about america, about puerto vallarta or his friends from silao. of all the disappointments of this friendship, the most depressing was that jarek turned out to be a couple of years behind me in terms of hormonal confusion. his world was still one of toys and cartoons, his insipid pranks those of an overgrown child.

my visits to jarek's house were a bottomless well of worries for my mother, who was terrified i would wreak havoc like i did at home, getting us into debt with the neighbors in similar proportions to the country's foreign debt. every time i set off for jarek's house she would warn me, 'don't break a vase, please.'

she didn't know that our lack of motor coordination and absent-mindedness, the source of so many domestic accidents, were not personality traits but rather the consequences of our family's chaotic interactions. our tendency to disaster was existentialist. i had never broken a vase, because we didn't have vases at home, but my mother had seen that kind of thing happen lots of times on tv, on programmes and films that use people tripping over as a gimmick to get a laugh. who knows why the reckless seem to be interested exclusively in vases when there are so many other receptacles and ornaments made of fragile materials that are fond of getting smashed to pieces.

in actual fact, don't break a vase was the metaphor my mother had chosen to disguise her innermost fears. behind this innocuous phrase lay a literal cruelty, the words my mother didn't dare say to me: don't steal anything. don't embarrass us. don't humiliate us.

on my mind, for the last week

and today: the poet has died.

october

by mary oliver

1

there's this shape, black as the entrance to a cave.

a longing wells up in its throat

like a blossom

as it breathes slowly.

what does the world 

mean to you if you can't trust it

to go on shining when you're

not there? and there's 

a tree, long-fallen; once 

the bees flew to it, like a procession

of messengers, and filled it

with honey.

2

i said to the chickadee, singing his heart out in the 

     green pine tree:

little dazzler,

little song,

little mouthful.

3

the shape climbs up out of the curled grass. it

grunts into view. there is no measure

for the confidence at the bottom of its eyes ---

there is no telling

the suppleness of its shoulders as it turns

and yawns.

                      near the fallen tree

something -- a leaf snapped loose

from the branch and fluttering down -- tries to pull me

into its trap of attention.

4

it pulls me

into its trap of attention.

and when i turn again, the bear is gone.

5

look, hasn't my body already felt

like the body of a flower?

6

look, i want to love this world

as though it's the last chance i'm ever going to get

to be alive

and know it.

7

sometimes in late summer i won't touch anything, not

the flowers, not the blackberries

brimming in the thickets; i won't drink

from the pond; i won't name the birds or the trees;

i won't whisper my own name.

                                              one morning

the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,

and didn't see me -- and i thought:

so this is the world.

i'm not in it.

it is beautiful.

the gifted child part three

quotes from the gifted child by alice miller

chapter 3: the vicious circle of contempt

"what child has never been laughed at for their fears and been told, 'you don't need to be afraid of a thing like that'? what child will then not feel shamed and despised because they could not assess the danger correctly? and will that little person not take the next opportunity to pass these feelings on to a still smaller child? such experiences come in all shades and varieties. common to them all is the sense of strength it gives the adult, who cannot control their own fears, to face the weak and helpless child's fear and be able to control fear in another person."

"for the person who, as a child, had to hide her true feelings from herself and others, this first step into the open produces much anxiety, yet she feels a great need to throw over her former restraints. the first experiences do not always lead to freedom but quite often lead instead to repetition of the person's childhood situation, in which she will experience feelings of agonizing shame and painful nakedness as an accompaniment to her genuine expressions of her true self. with the infallibility of a sleepwalker, she will seek out those who, like her parents (though for different reasons), certainly cannot understand her. because of her blindness caused by repression, she will try to make herself understandable to precisely these people - trying to make possible what cannot be."

"during her therapy, linda, forty-two, fell in love with an older, intelligent, and sensitive man, who nevertheless had to ward off and reject everything - except for eroticism - he could not understand intellectually, including psychotherapy. yet he was the one to whom she wrote long letters trying to explain the path she had taken in her therapy up to this point. she succeeded in overlooking all signals of his incomprehension and increased her efforts even more, until at last she was forced to recognize that she had again found a father substitute and that this was the reason she had been unable to give up her hopes of at last being understood. this awakening brought her agonizingly sharp feelings of shame, which lasted for a long time.

one day she was able to feel this shame deeply in the session and said: 'i feel so ridiculous, as if i've been talking to a wall and expecting it to answer, like a silly child.' i asked: 'would you think it ridiculous if you saw a child who had to tell their troubles to a wall because there was no one else available?' the despairing sobbing that followed my question gave linda access to a part of her former reality that was pervaded by boundless loneliness. it also eventually freed her from her agonizing, self-destructive, repetitive feelings of shame.

only much later could linda dare to connect this experience of 'a wall' with her own childhood history. for a time this woman, who was normally capable of expressing herself so clearly, described everything in such an extraordinarily complicated way and at such a precipitate speed that i couldn't fully understand it. she went through moments of sudden hate and rage, reproaching me for indifference and lack of understanding. linda could hardly recognize me anymore, although i had not changed. in her estranged feelings she now discovered the estrangement of her mother, who had spent the first year of her life in an orphanage and could not give her daughter any tenderness or closeness. linda had known that for a long time, but it was only intellectual knowledge. moreover, compassion for her mother's sad life history had hindered linda from feeling her own plight, the image of the poor mother had blocked her feelings.

it was not until she could make her reproaches, first toward me and then toward her mother, that the core of her despair became conscious: her lifelong search for closeness and contact that had never been met in infancy and had become repressed. repressed memories of the shy, distant, absent mother produced in the daughter the feeling of a wall, one that later separated her from other people in such a painful way. she was finally released from a compulsion to repeat that had consisted of constantly seeking a partner who had no understanding of her and then allowing herself to settle into an arrangement where she would feel helplessly dependent on him."

"an infant must learn that there are things about them for which the mother has 'no use.' she will expect her child to control their bodily functions as early as possible. on the conscious level the parents apparently want the infant to do so in order not to offend against society, but unconsciously they are protecting their own repression dating from the time when they were themselves small children afraid of 'offending'."

"many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents' expectations. this feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight they might have, that it is not a child's task or duty to satisfy the parents' needs. no argument can overcome these guilt feelings, for they have their beginnings in life's earliest period, and from that they derive their intensity and obduracy. they can be resolved only slowly, with the help of a revealing therapy.

probably the greatest of wounds - not to have been loved just as one truly was - cannot heal without the work of mourning. it can be either more or less successfully resisted and covered up (as in grandiosity and depression), or constantly torn open again in the compulsion to repeat. we encounter this latter possibility in obsessive behavior and in perversion, where the mother's (or father's) scornful reactions to the child's behavior have stayed with them as repressed memory, stored up in their body."

"as the child grows up, they cannot cease living their own truth and expressing it somewhere, perhaps in complete secrecy. in this way a person can have adapted completely to the demands of their surroundings and can have developed a false self, but in their perversion of their obsessions they still allow a portion of their true self to survive - in torment. and so the true self lives on, but underground, in the same conditions as the child once did with their disgusted mother, whose memory in the meantime they have repressed."

"what is unconscious cannot be abolished by proclamation or prohibition. one can, however, develop sensitivity toward recognizing it and begin to experience it consciously, and thus eventually gain control over it. a mother cannot truly respect her child as long as she does not realize what deep shame she causes them with an ironic remark, intended only to cover her own uncertainty. indeed, she cannot be aware of how deeply humiliated, despised, and devalued her child feels, if she herself has never consciously suffered these feelings, and if she tries to fend them off with irony."

"every child forms his first image of what is 'bad' quite concretely, by what is forbidden - by their parents' prohibitions, taboos, and fears. the child will have a long way to go before they can free themselves what what they have believed to be 'badness' in themselves. they will then no longer regard it as 'depraved' and 'wicked,' but as a comprehensible latent reaction to injuries they had to repress when a child. as an adult, they can discover the causes and free themselves from this unconscious reaction. they also have the opportunity to apologize for what they have done to others out of ignorance, blindness, and confusion, and doing so will help them to avoid repetitions of acts they no longer wish to continue."

"often a child's very gifts (their great intensity of feeling, depth of experience, curiosity, intelligence, quickness - and their ability to be critical) will confront their parents with conflicts that they have long sought to keep at bay by means of rules and regulations. these regulations must then be rescued at the cost of the child's development. all this can lead to an apparently paradoxical situation when parents who are proud of their gifted child and who even admire them are forced by their own suppression to reject, suppress, or even destroy what is best, because truest, in that child."

"to put it another way: many people suffering from severe symptoms are very intelligent. they read in newspapers and books about the absurdity of the arms race, about exploitation through capitalism, diplomatic insincerity, the arrogance and manipulation of power, submission of the weak, and the impotence of individuals - and they have given thought to these subjects. what they do not see, because they cannot see them, are the absurdities enacted by their own mothers when they were still tiny children."

"political action can be fed by the unconscious rage of children who have been misused, imprisoned, exploited, cramped, and drilled. this rage can be partially discharged in fighting 'enemies,' without having to give up the idealization of one's own parents."

"therapeutic effects (in the form of temporary improvement) may be achieved if a strict conscience can be replaced by the therapist's or the group's more tolerant one. the aim of therapy, however, is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient to confront their own history and to grieve over it. the patient has to discover early memories within themselves and must become consciously aware of their parents' unconscious manipulation and contempt, so that they can free themselves from this."

"the contempt shown by many disturbed people may have various forerunners in their life history, but the function all expressions of contempt have in common is the defense against unwanted feelings. contempt simply evaporates, having lost its point, when it is no longer useful as a shield - against the child's shame over their desperate, unreturned love; against their feeling of inadequacy; or above all against their rage that their parents were not available. once we are able to feel and understand the repressed emotions of childhood, we will no longer need contempt as a defense against them. on the other hand, as long as we despise the other person and over-value our own achievements ('he can't do what i can do'), we do not have to mourn the fact that love is not forthcoming without achievement. nevertheless, if we avoid this mourning it means that we remain at bottom the one who is despised, for we have to despise everything in ourselves that is not wonderful, good, and clever. thus we perpetuate the loneliness of childhood: we despise weakness, helplessness, uncertainty - in short, the child in ourselves and in others."

"contempt as a rule will cease with the beginning of mourning for the irreversible that cannot be changed, for contempt, too, has in its own way served to deny the reality of the past. it is, after all, less painful to think that the others do not understand because they are too stupid. then one can make efforts to explain things to them, and the illusion of being understood ('if only i can express myself properly') can be maintained."

"then there are the people who can seem very friendly, if a shade patronizing, but in whose presence one feels as if one were nothing. they convey the feeling that they are the only ones who exist, the only one who have anything interesting or relevant to say. the others can only stand there and admire them in fascination, or turn away in disappointment and sorrow about their own lack of worth, unable to express themselves in these persons' presence. these people might be the children of grandiose parents, whom they as children had no hope of emulating; but later, as adults, they unconsciously pass on this atmosphere to those around them.

quite a different impression will be given by those people who, as children, were intellectually far beyond their parents and therefore admired by them, but who also therefore had to solve their own problems alone. these people, who give us a feeling of their intellectual strength and will power, also seem to demand that we, too, ought to fight off any feeling of weakness with intellectual means. in their presence one feels one can't be recognized as a person with problems - just as they and their problems were unrecognized by their parents, for whom they always had to be strong.

keeping those examples in mind, it is easy to see why some professors or writers who are quite capable of expressing themselves clearly will use language that is so convoluted and arcane that their students of readers must struggle angrily to acquire ideas that they then can make little use of. the students may well experience feelings similar to those their teacher was once forced to suppress in relation to his parents. if the students themselves become teachers one day, they will then have the opportunity to hand on this unusable knowledge like a priceless jewel (because it has cost them so much).

it greatly aids the success of therapeutic work when we become aware of our parents' destructive patterns at work within us. but to free ourselves from these patterns we need more than an intellectual awareness: we need an emotional confrontation with our parents in an inner dialogue."

"consciously experiencing our legitimate emotions is liberating, not just because of the discharge of long-held tensions in the body but above all because it opens our eyes to reality (both past and present) and frees us of lies and illusions. it gives us back repressed memories and helps dispel attendant symptoms. it is therefore empowering without being destructive. repressed emotion can be resolved as soon as it is felt, understood, and recognized as legitimate. being detached from it becomes possible and this is totally different from repression."

"a person who can honestly and without self-deception deal with their feelings has no need to disguise them with the help of ideologies. . . individuals who do not want to know their own truth collude in denial with society as a whole, looking for a common 'enemy' on whom to act out their repressed rage."

hayden

by amaud jamal johnson from red summer

what did i know, what did i know
of gazing silences and terrored stone

brilliances; beauty of what's hardbitten
the auroral darkness which is god

then you arrived, meditative, ironic
my head gripped in bony vice

mouth of agony shaping a cry it cannot utter
what did i know, what did i know

of a changing permanence
the stains and dirty tools of struggle

weaving a wish and a weariness together
years before your time. years and years

i gaze through layered light
within the rock of the undiscovered suns

i see, i walk with you among
the landscape lush, metallic, flayed

behind us, beyond us now
the very sunlight here seems flammable

an ecstatic accident

excerpts from bluets by maggie nelson

4. i admit that i may have been lonely. i know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke - take your pick - an apprehension of the divine. (this ought to arouse our suspicions.)

8. do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. "we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it," wrote goethe, and perhaps he is right. but i am not interested in longing to live in a world in which i already live. i don't want to yearn for blue things, and god forbid for any "blueness." above all, i want to stop missing you.

28. it was around this time that i first had the thought: we fuck well because he is a passive top and i am an active bottom. i never said this out loud, but i thought it often. i had no idea how true it would prove, or how painful, outside of the fucking.

44. this particular conversation with the expert on guppy menopause takes place on a day when, later that afternoon, a therapist will say to me, if he hadn't lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is. she is trying to get me to see that although i thought i love this man very completely for exactly who he was, i was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is.

58. "love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing" (leonardo da vinci)

72. it is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. loneliness is solitude with a problem. can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it? -- no, not exactly. it cannot love me that way; it has no arms. but sometimes i do feel its presence to be a sort of wink - here you are again, it says, and so am i.

100. it often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise. but really this is like hoisting a harness onto an invisible horse. "there is simply no way that a year from now you're going to feel the way you feel today," a different therapist said to me last year at this time. but though i have learned to act as if i feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven't really changed.

104. i do not feel my friend's pain, but when i unintentionally cause her pain i wince as i hurt somewhere, and i do. often in exhaustion i lay my head down on her lap in her wheelchair and tell her how much i love her, that i'm sorry she is in so much pain, pain i can witness and imagine but that i do not know. she says, if anyone knows this pain besides me, it is you (and j, her lover). this is generous, for to be close to her pain has always felt like a privilege to me, even though pain could be defined as that which we typically aim to avoid. perhaps this is because she remains so generous within hers, and because she has never held any hierarchy of grief, either before her accident or after, which seems to me nothing less than a form of enlightenment.

125. of course, you could also just take off the blindfold and say, i think this game is stupid, and i'm not playing it anymore. and it must also be admitted that hitting the wall or wandering off in the wrong direction or tearing off the blindfold is as much a part of the game as is pinning the tail on the donkey.

157. the part i do remember: that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. as one optics journal puts it, "the color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue." in which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.

181. pharmakon means drug, but as jacques derrida and others have pointed out, the word in greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. it holds both in the bowl. in the dialogues plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint. plato does not call fucking pharmakon, but then again, while he talks plenty about love, plato does not say much about fucking.

187. is it a related form of aggrandizement, to inflate a heartbreak into a sort of allegory? losing what one loves is simpler, more common, than that. more precise. one could leave it, too, as it is. -- yet how can i explain, that every time i put a pin in the balloon of it, the balloon seems to swell back up as soon as i turn away from it?

199. for to wish to forget how much you loved someone - and then, to actually forget - can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. i have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting "the fundamental impermanence of all things." this acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. often i feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).

215. it often happens that we treat pain as if it were the only real thing, or at least the most real thing: when it comes round, everything before it, around it, and, perhaps, in front of it, tends to seem fleeting, delusional. of all the philosophers, schopenhauer is the most hilarious and direct spokesperson for this idea: "as a rule we find pleasure much less pleasurable, pain much more painful than we expected." you don't believe him? he offers this quick test: "compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten."

238. i want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when i would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; i would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

finding our own true nature

excerpt from the wisdom of no escape by pema chodron

in one of the buddha's discourses, he talks about the four kinds of horses: the excellent horse, the good horse, the poor horse, and the really bad horse. the excellent horse, according to the sutra, moves before the whip even touches its back, just the shadow of the whip or the slightest sound from the driver is enough to make the horse move. the good horse runs at the lightest touch of the whip on its back. the poor horse doesn't go until it feels pain, and the very bad horse doesn't budge until the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones.

when shunryu suzuki tells the story in his book zen mind, beginner's mind, he says that when people hear this sutra, they always want to be the best horse, but actually, when we sit, it doesn't matter whether we're the best horse or the worst horse. he goes on to say that in fact, the really terrible horse is the best practitioner.

what i have realized through practicing is that practice isn't about being the best horse or the good horse or the poor horse or the worst horse. it's about finding our own true nature and speaking from that, acting from that. whatever our quality is, that's our wealth and our beauty, that's what other people respond to.

once i had an opportunity to talk with chogyam trungpa, rinpoche, about the fact that i was not able to do my practice properly. i had just started the vajrayana practices and i was supposed to be visualizing. i couldn't visualize anything. i tried and tried but there was just nothing at all; i felt like a fraud doing the practice because it didn't feel natural to me. i was quite miserable because everybody else seemed to be having all kinds of visualizations and doing very well. he said, 'i'm always suspicious of the ones who say everything's going well. if you think that things are going well, then it's usually some kind of arrogance. if it's too easy for you, you just relax. you don't make a real effort, and therefore you never find out what it is to be fully human.' so he encouraged me by saying that as long as you have these kinds of doubts, your practice will be good. when you begin to think that everything is just perfect and feel complacent and superior to the others, watch out!

dainin katagiri roshi once told a story about his own experience of being the worst horse. when he first came to the united states from japan, he was a young monk in his late twenties. he had been a monk in japan - where everything was so precise, so clean, and so neat - for a long time. in the u.s., his students were hippies with long, unwashed hair and ragged clothes and no shoes. he didn't like them. he couldn't help it - he just couldn't stand those hippies. their style offended everything in him. he said, 'so all day i would give talks about compassion, and at night i would go home and weep and cry because i realized i had no compassion at all. because i didn't like my students, therefore i had to work much harder to develop my heart.' as suzuki roshi says in his talk, that's exactly the point: because we find ourselves to be the worst horse, we are inspired to try harder.

at gampo abbey we had a tibetan monk, lama sherap tendar, teaching us to play the tibetan musical instruments. we had forty-nine days in which to learn the music; we were also going to learn many other things, we thought, during that time. but as it turned out, for forty-nine days, twice a day, all we did was learn to play the cymbals and the drum and how they are played together. every day we would practice and practice. we would practice on our own, and then we would play for lama sherap, who would sit there with this pained little look on his face. then he would take our hands and show us how to play. then we would do it by ourselves, and he would sigh. this went on for forty-nine days. he never said that we were doing well, but he was very sweet and very gentle. finally, when it was all over and we had had our last performance, we were making toasts and remarks and lama sherap said, 'actually you were very good. you were very good right from the beginning, but i knew if i told you that you were good, you would stop trying.' he was right. he had such a gentle way of encouraging us that it didn't make us lose heart. it just made us feel that he knew the proper way to play the cymbals; he'd been playing these cymbals since he was a little boy, and we just had to keep trying. so for forty-nine days we were really worked hard.

we can work with ourselves in the same way. we don't have to be harsh with ourselves when we think, sitting here, that our meditation or our oryoki or the way we are in the world is in the category of worst horse. we could be very sympathetic with that and use it as a motivation to keep trying to develop ourselves, to find our own true nature. not only will we find our own true nature, but we'll learn about other people, because in our heart of hearts almost all of us feel that we are the worst horse. you might consider that you yourself are an arrogant person or your might consider that someone else is an arrogant person, but everybody who has ever felt even a moment of arrogance knows that arrogance is just a cover-up for really feeling that you're the worst horse, and always trying to prove otherwise.

in his talk, suzuki roshi says that meditation and the whole process of finding your own true nature is one continuous mistake, and that rather than that being a reason for depression or discouragement, it's actually the motivation. when you find yourself slumping, that's the motivation to sit up, not out of self-denigration but actually out of pride in everything that occurs to you, pride in who you are just as you are, pride in the goodness or the fairness or the worstness of yourself - however you find yourself - some sort of sense of taking pride and using it to spur you on.

the karma kagyu lineage of tibetan buddhism, in which the students of chogyam trungpa are trained, is sometimes called the 'mishap lineage,' because of the ways in which the wise and venerated teachers of this lineage 'blew it' time after time. first there was tilopa, who was a madman, completely wild. his main student was naropa. naropa was so conceptual and intellectual that it took him twelve years of being run over by a truck, of being put through all sorts of trials by his teacher, for him to begin to wake up. he was so conceptual that if somebody would tell him something, he would say, 'oh yes, but surely by that you must mean this.' he had that kind of mind. his main student was marpa, who was famous for his intensely bad temper. he used to fly into rages, beat people, and yell at them. he was also a drunk. he was notorious for being incredibly stubborn. his student was milarepa. milarepa was a murderer! rinpoche used to say that marpa became a student of the dharma because he thought he could make a lot of money by bringing texts back from india and translating them into tibetan. his student milarepa became a student because he was afraid he was going to go to hell for having murdered people - and that scared him.

milarepa's student was gampopa (after whom gampo abbey is named). because everything was easy for him, gampopa was arrogant. for instance, the night before he met gampopa for the first time, milarepa said to some of his disciples, 'oh someone who is destined to be my main student is going to come tomorrow. whoever brings him to me will be greatly benefited.' so when gampopa arrived in the town, an old lady who saw him ran out and said, 'oh, milarepa told us you were coming and that you were destined to be one of his main students, and i want my daughter to bring you to see him.' so gampopa, thinking, 'i must be really hot stuff,' went very proudly to meet milarepa, sure that he would be greeted with great honor. however, milarepa had had someone put him in a cave and wouldn't see gampopa for three weeks.

as for gampopa's main student, the first karmapa, the only thing we know about him is that he was extremely ugly. he was said to look like a monkey. also, there's one story about him and three other main disciples of gampopa who were thrown out of the monastery for getting drunk and singing and dancing and breaking the monastic rules.

we could all take heart. these are the wise ones who sit in front of us, to whom we prostrate when we do prostrations. we can prostrate to them as an example of our own wisdom mind of enlightened beings, but perhaps it's also good to prostrate to them as confused, mixed-up people with a lot of neurosis, just like ourselves. they are good examples of people who never gave up on themselves and were not afraid to be themselves, who therefore found their own genuine quality and their own true nature.

the point is that our true nature is not some ideal that we have to live up to. it's who we are right now, and that's what we can make friends with and celebrate.

the gifted child part two

quotes from the drama of the gifted child by alice miller

from chapter two: depression and grandiosity

“although the outward picture of depression is quite the opposite of that of grandiosity and has a quality that expresses the tragedy of the loss of self in a more obvious way, they have many points in common:

-a false self that has led to the loss of the potential true self

-a fragility of self-esteem because of a lack of confidence in one’s own feelings and wishes

-perfectionism

-denial of rejected feelings

-a preponderance of exploitative relationships

-an enormous fear of loss of love and therefore a great readiness to conform

-split-off aggression

-oversensitivity

-a readiness to feel shame and guilt

-restlessness”

“depression consists of a denial of one’s own emotional reactions. this denial begins in the service of an absolutely essential adaptation during childhood and indicates a very early injury. there are many children who have not been free, right up from the beginning, to experience the very simplest of feelings, such as discontent, anger, rage, pain, even hunger – and, of course, enjoyment of their own bodies.”

“Beatrice was not physically mistreated in her youth. she did, however, have to learn as a small infant how to make her mother happy by not crying, by not being hungry – by not having any needs at all.”

“today I would say: only a child needs (and absolutely needs) unconditional love. we must give it to the children who are entrusted to us. we must be able to love and accept them whatever they do, not only when they smile charmingly but also when they cry and scream. but to pretend to love an adult unconditionally – that is, independently of his or her deeds – would mean that we should love even a cold serial murderer or a notorious liar if only he joins our group. can we do that? should we even try? why? for whose sake? if we say that we love an adult unconditionally, we only prove our blindness and/or dishonesty. nothing else.”

“as adults we don’t need unconditional love, not even from our therapists. this is a childhood need, one that can never be fulfilled later in life, and we are playing with illusions if we have never mourned this lost opportunity. but there are other things we can get from good therapists: reliability, honesty, respect, trust, empathy, understanding, and an ability to clarify their emotions so that they need not bother us with them.”

“although ann could see and understand what had happened to her, she was able to feel the rage and indignation only toward her partners, not toward her father. as she wrote in her letter, she still ‘loved’ and respected him.”

“everyone probably knows about depressive moods from personal experience since they may be expressed as well as hidden by psychosomatic suffering. it is easy to notice, if we pay attention, that they hit almost with regularity – whenever we suppress an impulse or an unwanted emotion. then, suddenly, a depressive mood will stifle all spontaneity. if an adult, for example, cannot experience grief when they lose somebody dear to them but tries to distract themselves from their sadness, or if they suppress* and hide from themselves their indignation over an idealized friend’s behavior out of fear of losing their friendship, they must reckon with the probability of depression (unless their grandiose defense is constantly at their disposal). [*suppression is a conscious act, in contrast to repression.]”

“this ability to grieve – that is, to give up the illusion of their ‘happy’ childhood, to feel and recognize the full extent of the hurt they have endured – can restore the depressive’s vitality and creativity and free the grandiose person from the exertions of and dependence on their Sisyphean task. if a person is able, during this long process, to experience the reality that they were never loved as a child for what they were but was instead needed and exploited for their achievements, success, and good qualities – and that they sacrificed their childhood for this form of love – they will be very deeply shaken, but one day they will feel the desire to end these efforts. they will discover in themselves a need to live according to their true self and no longer be forced to earn ‘love’ that always leaves them empty-handed, since it is given to their false self – something they have begun to identify and relinquish.

the true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality – the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.”

“it is precisely their oversensitivity, shame, and self-reproach that form a continuous thread in their lives, unless they learn to understand to what these feelings actually relate. the more unrealistic such feelings are and the less they fit present reality, the more clearly they show that they are concerned with unremembered situations from the past that are still to be discovered. if the feeling that begins to arise is not experienced but reasoned away, the discovery cannot take place, and depression will triumph.”

“paula, age twenty-eight, wanted to free herself from her patriarchal family in which the mother was completely subjugated by the father. she married a submissive man and seemed to behave differently from her mother. her husband allowed her to bring her lovers into the house. she did not permit herself any feelings of jealousy or tenderness and wanted to have relations with a number of men without any emotional ties, so that she could feel as autonomous as a man. her need to be ‘progressive’ went so far that she allowed her partners to abuse and humiliate her, and she suppressed all her feelings of mortification and anger in the belief that her behavior made her modern and free from prejudice. in this way she unconsciously carried over into these relationships both her childhood obedience and her mother’s submissiveness. at times she suffered from severe depression, so she entered therapy, which enabled her to feel how much she suffered because of the passiveness of her mother, who tolerated the abusive father without the slightest opposition. confronting the pain of not having been protected by her indifferent, defensive mother eventually helped paula to stop creating her mother’s self-destructive attitude in her own relationships with men and to allow herself to love people who deserved her love.”

“the child must adapt to ensure the illusion of love, care, and kindness, but the adult does not need this illusion to survive. they can give up their amnesia and then be in a position to determine their actions with open eyes. only this path will free them from their depression. both the depressive and the grandiose person completely deny their childhood reality by living as though the availability of the parents could still be salvaged: the grandiose person through the illusion of achievement, and the depressive through their constant fear of losing ‘love.’ neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact.”

after the end of the world

excerpt from m archive by alexis pauline gumbs

the question for the neuronationalists was how to wash out the trauma without wiping away the skills we had built around all that hurt, all that longing, all that loss. and when they figured that out. well you had no chance. but we still had to live with the consequences.

so they went in like the eternal sunshine movie, like our brains were video-game landscapes, and they hunted. they could chart the steady erosions of certain regions of our minds where we thought of you and what you had done. well not directly. the easiest thing was to find the places where the skills we had built to survive what you had done made hatch marks on our lobes. ruts, you might say. the depth of our resistance, the evidence of your erstwhile irrevocable presence.

during the time when we win no matter what. this is your last survival. how winning how we win still hurts from you.



it was no longer a matter of sex.

this new molecular relationship made distance and intimacy words
that tangled.
or to say it another way.
we were all close.
beyond close.

not knowing where one person ended and another began was no longer love-song advertising or evidence of codependency.

it was a real issue. so then identity (x = x) was no longer technically true. the previous energetic reality of how we are not whole and change each other and are not ourselves except in the most limited version of our imagination became impossible to ignore on the physical level.

so love was not about merging or finding exceptional moments when we could die enough to shrug off the pain of individuality. it was just a certain sound, a vibration, and when we achieved it, it was really all of us.

the gifted child

quotes from the drama of the gifted child by alice miller

from chapter one

“in my work with people in the helping professions, I have often been confronted with a childhood history that seems significant to me.

-there was a mother* who at the core was emotionally insecure and who depended for her equilibrium on her child’s behaving in a particular way. this mother was able to hide her insecurity from her child and from everyone else behind a hard, authoritarian, even totalitarian façade. [by ‘mother’ I here refer to the person closest to the child during the first years of life. this need not be the biological mother, or even a woman. in the course of the past twenty years, many fathers have assumed this mothering function.]

-this child had an amazing ability to perceive and respond intuitively, that is, unconsciously, to the need of the mother, or of both parents, for the child to take on the role that had been assigned to them.

-this role secured ‘love’ for the child – that is, their parents’ exploitation. they could sense they were needed, and this need guaranteed them a measure of existential security.

this ability is then extended and perfected. later, these children not only become mothers (confidantes, comforters, advisers, supporters) of their own mothers but also take over at least part of the responsibility for their siblings and eventually develop a special sensitivity to unconscious signals manifesting the needs of others. no wonder they often choose to become psychotherapists later on. who else, without this previous history, would muster sufficient interest to spend the whole day trying to discover what is happening in other people’s unconscious? but the development and perfecting of this sensitivity – which once assisted the child in surviving and now enables the adult to pursue their strange profession – also contain the roots of their emotional disturbance: as long as the therapist is not aware of their repression, it can compel them to use their patients, who depend on them, to meet their unmet needs with substitutes.”

“one such consequence is the person’s inability to experience consciously certain feelings of their own (such as jealousy, envy, anger, loneliness, helplessness, or anxiety), either in childhood or later in adulthood. this is all the more tragic in that we are concerned here with lively people who are often capable of deep feelings. it is most noticeable when they describe childhood experiences that were free of pain and fear. they could enjoy their encounters with nature, for example, without hurting the mother or making her feel insecure, reducing her power, or endangering her equilibrium. . . these people have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can experience their feelings only when there is someone there who accepts them fully, understands them, and supports them. if that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother’s love or the love of their substitute in order to feel, then they will repress their emotions. the child cannot even experience them secretly, ‘just for themselves’; they will fail to experience them at all. but they will nevertheless stay in the body, in the cells, stored up as information that can be triggered by a later event.”

“when a woman has had to repress all these needs in relation to her own mother, they will arise from the depth of her unconscious and seek gratification through her own child, however well-educated she may be. the child feels this clearly and very soon forgoes the expression of their own distress. later, when these feelings of being deserted begin to emerge in the therapy of the adult, they are accompanied by intense pain and despair. it is clear that these people could not have survived so much pain as children.”

“several mechanisms can be recognized in the defense against early feelings of abandonment. in addition to simple denial, we usually find the exhausting struggle to fulfill the old, repressed, and by now often perverted needs with the help of symbols (cults, sexual perversions, groups of all kinds, alcohol, or drugs). intellectualization is very commonly encountered as well, since it is a defense mechanism of great power. it can have disastrous results, however, when the mind ignores the vital messages of the body.”

“accommodation to parental needs often (but not always) leads to the ‘as-if personality.’ this person develops in such a way that they reveal only what is expected of them and fuses so completely with what they reveal that one could scarcely guess how much more there is to them behind this false self. they cannot develop and differentiate their true self, because they are unable to live it. understandably, this person will complain of a sense of emptiness, futility, or homelessness, for the emptiness is real. . . the integrity of the child was injured when all that was alive and spontaneous in them was cut off. in childhood, these patients have often had dreams in which they experienced themselves as at least partly dead.”

“the difficulties inherent in experiencing and developing one’s own emotions lead to mutual dependency, which preserves individuation. both parties have an interest in bond permanence. the parents have found in their child’s false self the confirmation they were looking for, a substitute for their own missing security; the child, who has been unable to build up their own sense of security, is first consciously and then unconsciously dependent on their parents. the child cannot rely on their own emotions, has not come to experience them through trial and error, has no sense of their own real needs, and is alienated from themselves to the highest degree. under these circumstances they cannot separate from their parents, and even as an adult they are still dependent on affirmation from their partner, from groups, and especially from their own children. . . unless the heir casts off their ‘inheritance’ by becoming fully conscious of their true past, and thus of their true nature, loneliness in the parental home will necessarily be followed by an adulthood lived in emotional isolation.”