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.”

putting makeup on space

quotes from living beautifully with uncertainty and change by pema chodron

"it's not impermanence per se, or even knowing we're going to die, that is the cause of our suffering, the buddha taught. rather, it's our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation. our discomfort arises from all of our efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness. when we resist change, it's called suffering. but when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that's called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness. another word for this is freedom -- freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human."

"what it means to be in denial: you can't hear anything that doesn't fit into your fixed identity. even something positive -- you're kind or you did a great job or you have a wonderful sense of humor -- is filtered through this fixed identity. you can't take it in unless it's already part of your self-definition.

in buddhism we call the notion of a fixed identity 'ego clinging.' it's how we try to put solid ground under our feet in an ever-shifting world. meditation practice starts to erode that fixed identity. as you sit, you begin to see yourself with more clarity, and you notice how attached you are to your opinions about yourself. often the first blow to the fixed identity is precipitated by a crisis. when things start to fall apart in your life, as they did in mine when i came to gampo abbey, you feel as if your whole world is crumbling. but actually it's your fixed identity that's crumbling."

"in my stroke of insight, the brain scientist jill bolte taylor's book about her recovery from a massive stroke, she explains the physiological mechanism behind emotion: an emotion like anger that's an automatic response lasts just ninety seconds from the moment it's triggered until it runs its course. one and a half minutes, that's all. when it lasts any longer, which it usually does, it's because we've chosen to rekindle it."

"chogyam trungpa had an image for our tendency to obscure the openness of our being; he called it 'putting makeup on space.' we can aspire to experience the space without the makeup. staying open and receptive for even a short time starts to interrupt our deep-seated resistance to feeling what we're feeling, to staying present where we are."

"as you're meditating, memories of something distressing that happened in the past may bubble up. it can be quite freeing to see all of that. but if you revisit the memory of something distressing over and over, rehashing what happened and obsessing on the story line, it becomes part of your static identity. you're just strengthening your propensity to experience yourself as the one who was wronged, as the victim. you're strengthening a preexisting propensity to blame others - your parents and anyone else - as the ones who wronged you."

"all of our habitual patterns are efforts to maintain a predictable identity: 'i am an angry person'; 'i am a friendly person'; 'i am a lowly worm.' we can work with these mental habits when they arise and stay with our experience not just when we're meditating but also in daily life."

"the three commitments are three levels of working with groundlessness. underlying them all is the basic instruction to make friends with yourself -- to be honest to yourself and kind. this begins with the willingness to stay present whenever you experience uneasiness. as these feelings arise, rather than running away, you lean into them. instead of trying to get rid of thoughts and feelings, you become curious about them. as you become accustomed to experiencing sensation free of interpretation, you will come to understand that contacting the fundamental ambiguity of being human provides a precious opportunity - the opportunity to be with life just as it is, the opportunity to experience the freedom of life without a story line."

folie a deux

from mr. fox by helen oyeyemi

"he says's he's fine and he acts as if he's fine, but he's in a bad way. i don't blame him for not being able to tell; he doesn't do sane work for a living. and i have been sleeping with him, eating with him; we took a bath together last tuesday -- so i'm in a bad way, too. i've seen and heard a woman he made up. i know what this is called - a folie a deux, a delusion shared by two or more people who live together. it was such a strong delusion, though. like being on some kind of drug. nobody warned me how easily my brain could warp a sunny morning so fast that i couldn't find the beginning of the interlude. one moment i was alone, the next. . . i was still alone, i guess, and making the air talk to me."

///////////

"i came to him without substance, and six years later i'm still the same. sometimes i say terrible things to him because i don't want him to know i'm sad; sometimes i fly off the handle to hide the fact that i don't know what i'm talking about. and other times - too often, maybe - i don't dare have an opinion in case it upsets anyone. i'm too stupid for him.

have you ever heard a note in someone's voice that said 'this is the end'? i heard it in the next words he said to me, and i stopped listening. have you ever wanted to try and cross an ending with some colossal revelation - 'there's something i never told you. i'm a princess from the kingdom atop mount qaf,' for example - 'my family live in eternal youth, and if you abide with me, you will, too. i kept this secret from you to see if you would cherish me for who i am.' have you ever wished, wished, wished. . .

my head got so heavy, it sank down onto my chest. so say whatever it is you think you've got to say, st. john. that you're not in love with me. that you need to be alone. say it. i'm not going to like it, no, i won't like it at all. but i'll be all right.

i told him that i loved him. i've never, ever, said that to him before, because i just didn't know how he'd take it. i love you. i mouthed the words because there didn't seem any point in interrupting him just then. i don't know if he saw. i hope he did, because i don't believe it's the sort of thing a woman can tell a man more than, say, three times in their life together. it's only really appropriate in the event of a life-threatening emergency, 'i love you.' it means a different thing to us than it means to them. god knows what it means to them. god knows what it means to us.

'. . . start again, d. let's start all over again,' my husband said. he rested his hands on my shoulders for a moment, then took them away. 'can we?'

start again? nice in theory, but what was he really trying to say? how far back would we have to fall? all that undoing. . ."

some basics

quotes from taming the tiger within by thich nhat hanh

"the energy of mindfulness contains the energy of concentration as well as the energy of insight. concentration helps you to focus on just one thing. with concentration, the energy of looking becomes more powerful. because of that, it can make a breakthrough that is insight. insight always has the power of liberating you."

"in taking good care of yourself, you take good care of your beloved one. self-love is the foundation for your capacity to love the other person."

"when you make another suffer, he or she will try to find relief by making you suffer more."

"punishing the other person is self-punishment. that is true in every circumstance."

"in true love, there is no pride. you cannot pretend that you don't suffer. you cannot pretend that you are not angry. this kind of denial is based on pride. 'angry? me? why should i be angry? i'm okay.' but, in fact, you are not okay. you are in hell. anger is burning you up, and you must tell your partner, your son, your daughter."

"when you understand the situation of the other person, when you understand the nature of suffering, anger will vanish, because it is transformed into compassion."

"when you are carried away with your worries, fears, cravings, anger, and desire, you run away from yourself and you lose yourself."

"when we understand that we cannot be destroyed, we are liberated from fear."

"true love is made of understanding -- understanding the other person, the object of your love; understanding their suffering, their difficulties, and their true aspiration. out of understanding there will be kindness, there will be compassion, there will be an offering of joy."

quotes from how to fight by thich nhat hanh

"we need to reconcile within ourselves before we can reconcile with someone else. we recognize and embrace all our feelings and emotions. we see that the cause of our suffering lies within us and not in the other person -- they have only touched the seed of suffering already inside us. understanding this, we can see our own part in the difficulty that has arisen, and compassion can be born.

when you have reconciled and are at peace with yourself, it is much easier to go to the other person and say, 'i know you have suffered a lot. i know i have also contributed to your suffering. i haven't been very mindful or skillful. i didn't understand your suffering and difficulties enough. i may have said or done things that have made the situation worse. i'm sorry. i didn't mean to hurt you. your happiness, your safety, your freedom, and your joy are important to me. because i have been caught in my own suffering, i have been unskillful at times. i may have given you the impression that i wanted to make you suffer. that's not true. so please tell me about your suffering so that i will not make the same kind of mistake again. i know that your happiness is crucial to my own happiness. i need your help. tell me about your fear and despair, your difficulties, your dreams, so that i can understand you better.'"

"sometimes we receive a large amount of praise. we do need to be praised from time to time, but we want to be careful not to become too proud because of the praise. so you say to yourself or aloud: 'you are partly right.' it means: 'yes, i do have that gift but it's not just mine; it has been handed down to me by my ancestors. and everyone has talents and gifts of some kind.'

sometimes we are criticized. we do need a certain amount of feedback in order to help us progress, but it's important not to be caught in the criticism and become paralyzed by it. you can say the mantra to yourself or out loud, 'you are partly right.' it means: 'yes, i do manifest that unfortunate characteristic sometimes, but i am much more than that. this is something that i have received from my ancestors and i am in the process of transforming it, for their sake and for mine.'"

naked if i want to

by casey kwang, from copia

listening to cat power
on repeat at 4 a.m.
curled up
in the dark
on the floor
like a starfish
drunk with loneliness
& dripping from the rain.




///////////////////

.

by layli long soldier from whereas

a poem about writing, bo-ring. says my contemporary artistic companionate, a muscular ob-
servation and i agree. a poem about writing poems, how. boring as it is, it asks me to do. i
couldn't any other thing tonight. i sat i wrote about writing. i write i sit about writing. i'm
about to write about it, writing and sitting. i will write and sit with my writing.

defamiliarize your writing then, somebody says okay i'm not sitting then i say to somebody.
i'm chewing at a funeral and. i'm nibbling my pulp knuckles. i'm watching a man with a stain
on his. pants always wrinkle in this heat, gnats and humidity. i walk to the front pew to make
a lewd, joke. i regard laughter from the man in the. pants are always honest i mean really heavy
at a summer burial. yet he doesn't ever cry, the stained man, why. when i observe nothing (un-
usual) i do nothing (unusual) in response. new or novel. real lit relics on these occasions. in
ritual: nobody's learning, true. and to lewd is dumb, otherwise. like the way i put up my dukes
when i observe the cowboy kneel. he's praying he's asking. he doesn't see me, my gesture's fu-
tile. what am i doing here, writing. what am i doing here righting the page at funerals.

sublime meanings

from ghachar ghochar by vivek shanbhag

"had vincent taken on a grand name and grown a long shimmering beard, he'd have thousands of people falling at his feet. how different are the words of those exalted beings from his? words, after all, are nothing by themselves. they burst into meaning only in the minds they've entered. if you think about it, even those held to be gods incarnate seldom speak of profound things. it's their day-to-day utterances that are imbued with sublime meanings. and who's to say the gods cannot take the form of a waiter when they choose to visit us?"

failure

quotes from fail fail again fail better by pema chodron

"sometimes you experience failed expectations as heartbreak and disappointment, and sometimes you feel rage. failure or things not working out as you hoped doesn't feel good; that's for sure. but at that time, maybe instead of doing the habitual thing of labeling yourself as a 'failure' or a 'loser' or thinking there is something wrong with you, you could get curious about what is going on. . . getting curious about outer circumstances and how they are impacting you, noticing what words come out and what your internal discussion is, this is the key.

if there is a lot of 'i am bad; i am terrible,' somehow just notice that and maybe soften up a bit. instead say, 'what am i feeling here? maybe what is happening here is not that i am a failure -- i am just hurting. i am just hurting.'"

"it is out of this space that real genuine communication with other people starts to happen, because it's a very unguarded, wide-open space where when you look out your eyes -- unless you are getting into the blaming yourself or blaming others -- you can go beyond the blame and just feel the bleedingness of it, the raw-meat quality of it.

you can't describe it, but i bet everybody knows what i am talking about. and so in that space, communication with others and all of life happens, and my experience is that it's from that space that our best part of ourselves comes out. it's in that space -- when we aren't masking ourselves or trying to make circumstances go away -- that our best qualities begin to shine.

the alternative is that out of that space of failure comes addictions of all kinds -- addictions because we are not wanting to feel it, because we want to escape, because we want to numb ourselves."

"one instruction that i give when you're in that difficult place is to notice what it is you're saying to yourself -- and if it's very self-critical, if it's very harsh, don't believe what's being said. or you can just rephrase the self-critical talk so it's more gentle and positive. in other words, you're in that place of experiencing failure and it is very difficult, and you could say, 'this is really hurting, but i haven't done anything wrong.'"

"there is something cultural that reinforces the idea that we're fundamentally bad rather than basically open, fresh, full of possibilities, whole, complete -- that we're basically good. so when you've actually done something intentional that hurt someone, usually what i recommend... is something like the fourth step of AA. in the fourth step, you bring forth a kind of fearless inventory of all the things that you regret having done. the idea is not to induce guilt and shame, nor is it to turn your awareness away from whatever has actually happened. it has to do with being open and honest and true about the mistakes you've made.

once you've brought them forth, you allow yourself to feel the regret, and this becomes the method for letting the regrets go, letting them pass away. . . let the regret pierce you to the heart, and then you can lay it aside so that you don't have to carry it with you for the rest of your life as a package."

"allowing yourself to get dragged down by failure builds up this huge sense of 'me.' 'me' as a monolithic solid, instead of a fluid, dynamic, changing process. it becomes chiseled in stone that 'i am bad; i am a failure,' and then you sort of get addicted to the feeling of wallowing in self-pity, wallowing in guilt and shame. and who does that help? nobody! it doesn't help you, and it's poisonous for everybody around you. so it's a futile strategy to let failure drag you down, which we employ rather easily."

"chogyam trugpa rinpoche talked a lot about fear as being a positive thing. so again, this is having an attitude that allows you to become curious about exploring something rather than just committing for life to running away from the unknown because it's so devastating or challenging.

trungpa says that fear, unlike anger or jealousy or craving, is a very open and fluid state. it doesn't necessarily have to be narrowed down into something solid. . . he says loneliness is kind of the same, actually."

"my definition of bravery in that case -- or courage -- would be the willingness to stay open to what you're feeling in the moment, the willingness to feel what you're feeling. we talk in the shambhala tradition a lot about the warrior and the definition of the warrior. the warrior is one who cultivates courage and is willing to feel what he or she feels. to be completely human and be okay with being completely human, and the willingness to feel it."

"when i get hooked in any way or my feelings have been hurt or i feel my tendency to get obsessive, which is one of my qualities, or i want to really tell someone off, any of those things where there's that strong pull to go in an old, habitual, small-minded kind of direction, then the courage is to not heed the call of the sirens in that particular moment, but to just stay present and feel what i'm feeling.

every time i do it, i think, 'oh my gosh, how can i be asking people to do this? because this is actually very difficult.' it's humbling every single time, and it fills me with awe when i realize that other people are actually doing this, because it does take a lot of courage and bravery."

my cock weighs a ton

excerpt from 10:04 by ben lerner:

we talked about the latest NYPD brutality for a while and then he said, you know how when you're a kid and you go to the bathroom with other boys, i mean you're standing side by side pissing -- i was a little worried where the protester was going with this -- the big thing was looking at the other kid's dick out of curiosity, and as you got older that became more and more of an offense, could get you called a faggot or whatever, and so that stops at some point, unless you're cruising maybe, i don't know. but then sometime in middle school or maybe for some people it's high school there is this kind of performance that starts when you take your dick out of your pants to piss in a urinal, you start bending at the knees just a little, or otherwise making a show as if you were lifting some kind of weight.

i was laughing because i did know what the protester was talking about, knew exactly, but had somehow never noted the widespread practice consciously. countless instances flashed before my eyes -- in locker rooms in kansas as a kid, more recently in airports all over the country and in large restaurants, two of the only institutions where i now urinated in company, because at school i always entered a stall; many men, maybe the majority, would act, as they took themselves in hand, as if they were grasping, at the minimum, a heavy pipe, and others as though they were preparing themselves for a feat of superhuman strength, often then making a show of supporting their back with the free arm if they held their penis with one hand, or grasping their member with two hands, as if either of those postures were required by the weight. i tried to recall if i'd seen this in other countries. regardless, we were both laughing by this point, laughing as hard as i'd laughed in a long time, because now the protester stood and started miming perfectly there in my dining room the midwestern man's premicturition ritual display.

i saw my dad do it and my coaches and my friends and i did it basically without knowing it, had done it all my life, the protester said, catching his breath, and then the other day we were in the mcdonald's bathroom by the park where the manager lets us go and my friend chris was just like, when are you going to quit acting like it weighs so much, man? do you need help with that or something? and that was the first time i even realized i was doing it, realized that all these men were always doing it, and i just stopped. i mean, i know it's not the point of occupy, but i'm telling you that now i don't size men up in terms of fights all the time and i don't act like my cock weighs a ton and it does make me see the world a little differently, you know?

midsummer

by william bronk
(from ben lerner's 10:04)

a green world, a scene of green deep
with light blues, the greens made deep
by those blues. one thinks how
in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen
(through a window, maybe) far behind the serene
sitter's face, the serene pose, as though
in some impossible mirror, face to back,
human serenity gazed at a green world
which gazed at this face.
                                        and see now,
here is that place, those greens
are here, deep with those blues. the air
we breathe is freshly sweet, and warm, as though
with berries. we are here. we are here.
set this down too, as much
as if an atrocity had happened and been seen.
the earth is beautiful beyond all change.

the weather in space

by tracy k smith from life on mars

is god being or pure force? the wind

or what commands it? when our lives slow

and we can hold all that we love, it sprawls

in our laps like a gangly doll. when the storm

kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing

after all we're certain to lose, so alive --

faces radiant with panic.