All of the above are ecstatic images from the last few days. Yahoo! Fall in New England is beautiful. I know. Everyone around here waffles on about this ad-super-nauseam, but please be patient with us while it lasts. Our April is a frozen, muddy shit-story, so of course we have to go on about October leaves and apples, especially as we avoid making eye contact with the four tons of pellets sitting on our front lawn, waiting to be schlepped to the basement. Seriously. Four. Tons. Eight. Thousand. Pounds. What I'm about to write is also a bit heavy. Ready? Last night, sitting on the floor in a vain attempt to get Chloe (aka BooBoo the Explorer, see above ecstatic image) to come cuddle with me, I was doing some after-dinner Margha Program reading. Meditation famine. I registered those words together & a chill of recognition & grief shuddered through my body. Yes, I know what that is. I suspect I've known for rather a long time what that is. Here's the passage: When you look into a thought's identity, without having to dissolve the thought and without having to force it out by meditation, the vividness of the thought is itself the indescribable and naked state of aware emptiness. We call this seeing the natural face of innate thought or thought dawns as dharmakaya. Buddha-nerd language not doing it for you? Here is a very loose translation:
As tree makes leaves, skunk makes stink, sky makes clouds, and mind makes thought. All are expressions of What Is. Stop worrying so much about the purity or non-purity of your mind, and rest in being an expression of What Is. You were born, and so you're free, so happy birthday. Here's the thing: meditation CAN actually be good for you. Picked up as a way of cultivating a deeply felt relationship with Being Itself - wonderful! Deployed as a way of opening the heart of compassion - hoorah! Danced with as a path of intuitive, ecstatic union with All That Is - shazam! Rested in as a way of learning to do less & be more - yesssss! Savored as embodied spaciousness - yum! I could go on and on. In fact, I have: for almost half my life, meditation has been a lifeline, laboratory, and catalyst. Meditation can also be brilliantly helpful in fucking yourself up. Emotionally distant and insecure? Uncomfortable with women, men, intimacy, the feminine, and embodiment in general? Pretty sure being born into this world is some kind of weird penance? Grossed-out by the details of household life and your own body? No problem! Just cultivate this little hobby, and in no time, you'll find your way into a rigid ideology perfectly suited to confirming all your pre-existing tendencies. Plus, as bonuses, minimal talking & sure-fire cosmically-endorsed answers to life, the universe, and everything. Welcome to meditation famine! We know you'll love it here. All the spiritual kids are doing it. Believe me - I've given the Famine Path a run for its poverty. I've fasted & sat vigils, kept silence & shaved my hair & eyebrows with the phases of the moon. I've endured grey afternoons of watching the mind, and interminable mumbly Dharma talks. Luckily, even during the times of my greatest zeal for starvation, famine's not all that was happening. I would come home from wandering the fields, and find myself molding a little dragon from the thick globs of clay stuck under my nun-soles. I'd set up a table in the back field of the monastery, and write poems. Winter dreams would come rattle my cage, and friendships would loosen the hold I thought I needed to keep on myself. I was pretty sure that dreams, poems, dragons, and friendships weren't the point of the Serious Spiritual Work I was doing, but also aware of how much more alive I felt whenever they came to visit. Eventually - but not before I was so skinny you could see the gap in my sternum - I realized callings as an artist/writer/dancer/singer were the actual stuff of why I was alive. If I refused them, I would die. So I started the long and messy road of accepting them instead. Some time ago, when I was in the early stages of opening Just So Space, a woman I've never met wrote me this: When I set out on the Inner Beauty Pilgrimage to the Sacred-Ordinary Everywhere, I was aware enough to know I wasn't sure what I was doing. There was a pretty good cover story: I will offer some events with some people in different places, talking about what really makes us whole / beautiful. There was a pretty good calendar of events - not by any means complete when I set out, but good enough. And there was rich personal experience to back up the hunch that whatever I thought this journey was all about, much larger truths & patterns would be revealing themselves bit by bit, if I remained open to receiving them. Speaking of truth & its opposites, you know what's total bullshit? Allowing the beautiful word Isis to be claimed & monopolized by a bunch of violent sado-theocratic thugs, that's what. I hereby reclaim Isis as the name of the Egyptian wisdom-and-love goddess. I hereby claim Isis' story of searching the world for the dismembered pieces of her soul {mate Osiris}, and bringing them home, as an underlying mega-truth of my pilgrimage story. Remember, on the very first stop of my journey, when my friend Monica gave me back the before-the-beginning prototype of the Inner Beauty compact, that I did not even remember she had? That was the opening move in a whole long series of intimate visits from my past. I would show up at a friend's place for dinner, and above the dining room table there would be some Tibetan nuns laughing in a photograph I'd taken 20 years before. Elsewhere, a glitter-painting of FULLNESS from my grad school days winked at me from above a friend's couch; and in another friend's bedroom, a little ibex-painting I'd forgotten about leapt up to greet me, in all its freshness and clarity. Kali's Names glow in a painting in my brother's living room, and above my friend's clay workbench, my weird little minotaur carries on his passionate dialogue with the moon. These re-visitations happened again and again, with such un-dismissable reliability that I began to get the message: Don't forget who you are and the beauty you have made. Modesty is fine, but the cloud of forgetting is dangerous. It stops you from trusting the power of your way, and thins you out in the world. Yes, there is a LOT of egotistical nonsense in the world & especially the art world, but your amnesia serves no one. You have important work to do. Reclaim your roots in beauty. Speak. Re-member the pieces of your soul. Re-experiencing many of my past homes became another part of this Isis-finding-bits-of-soul process. Again, I did not consciously set out to do this, but it sure was happening. What's partway between Manchester, NH and NYC? New Haven, that's what. Zooming along the highway with no intention of making this detour, I found I physically could not resist it. So, OK. There were the residential college & weird little annex I had lived in, the apartment above the café, the Yale-China Association that had sent me to Hong Kong. There was the landscape of my life from 1990-1994, open to the bright September sun, self-liberated and stripped of the restrictions I had felt when I lived there. In Sewanee I drove past the little yellow yellow house where I had lived, and saw that it was good: someone had put out white-painted rocking chairs, and the yard looked neatly kept. In Atlanta, a steady thread of curiosity trumping common sense, I braved super-congested Friday afternoon traffic to revisit many of the places I'd lived, as well as my old high school. I knew the beautiful rambling house my parents had lived in from 1989-2006 had been razed to make way for a circle of giant McMansions, but apparently McMansion standards rise fast, because now that new house is has been destroyed, and an even-more-giant gaping hole in the red clay awaits grander designs. Aha! I thought. Like this. I drove up the steep driveway to my old apartment on Lafayette Drive (yep! still lovely, still no parking), and walked with my friend Kristin to the studio apartment I'd lived in on Charles Allen Drive. She remembered that I'd once missed most of family Thanksgiving, too busy rolling around with my then-boyfriend on the platform bed I'd built in the kitchen to be very interested in other forms of stuffing. Nyuk, nyuk. Despite what one might expect, these visits didn't carry a quality of nostalgia. They felt like re-assessments or re-seeings. There was the pleasure of recognition, without any sense of wishing to be in the past, or wishing to alter the past. More than that, I felt the pleasure of knowing how much more at home in the world I feel since those days. Whatever this life is for, I am growing into it. I felt this in returning, now as a visiting teacher, to a new version of my old Zen group. I felt this in re-seeing old friends. Oh, you! Mostly, we've grown up. Some of us more than others. In the midst of all this, my Bay Area friend Johanna emailed me from a business trip to Fresno. Fresno? That's not a place I thought I'd hear from again. On a lark, I wrote, Say hello to 4361 Wishon Avenue for me. And so Johanna did a drive-by, and sent me a picture of the house I lived in with my family from 1977-1982: My intuitive sense of what's happening in all these places is that I'm releasing any bits of regret or unfinished business that may still be clinging to them. I'm shepherding home any bits of soul that are still stuck there. I'm doing the work of re-inhabiting the world from a new perspective: one that's wider & more compassionate, more grounded in the body and less afraid.
Last night, back home in my bed in NH, I dreamed of my family's first house in Atlanta, on Dalrymple Road. In the dream, there's water flowing down from the white dining room ceiling onto the dark hardwood floor. I go into the kitchen, and from the oven, pull a foil pan with egg-shaped indentations in the bottom. With a sense of duty towards the empty house my parents cared for, I try to set the pan to catch the flow, but I can't - the leak's precise location keeps shifting - there's water everywhere - it just won't work. In the living room, in the gloaming, I realize all the lights in the house are out, except for one string of Christmas lights glowing away in a loop in the ruins. Cheers to you, Lights! I think. I don't know who set you, or how long you'll last, but I am glad you are here. I realize I don't need this house anymore. No one does. I leave the house of my adolescent depressions, and re-enter the world. On waking, my body feels rich - not by any means pain-free - but alive, wholly inhabited, heavy, tingly, delicious. Having brought back the pieces from Fresno & Atlanta & Sewanee & everywhere, this soul is whole, present, and ready. Like Isis, I find the pieces & whole the soul. On my last night on the road, through the auspices of Couchsurfing, I am lucky enough to enjoy the hospitality of Geraldine, in Rhinebeck NY, along with her husband, her two teenaged boys, and her truly magnificent Saint Bernand, Sophie. Geraldine has organized a small gathering at her house, inviting her friends Lise and Lucy to come join us for some meditation and assorted Inner Beauty activities. She has also prepared a glorious spread of tasty things to eat - hummus and chips, baked apples, chocolate cake, jasmine tea - which we ferry downstairs to the rec room, with its lush mermaid-inspired purple velvet armchairs, and its air of a secret gathering place.
I love being with these women - they're brave, and they've owned the versions of A LOT that they've been through. Lucy summarizes these travails as The D's: despair, depression, doom, darkness, divorce, disillusionment, dispossession, dislocation, decay & desiccation. (OK - desiccation is my contribution to the list, meaning the dry sense that nothing again will ever come to nourish the soul's mossy brooks & funky swamps, and refresh its connections with the ocean of being. You've been there, too, right?) We work through the feet/heart/crown/hands meditation I've been offering all along this trip - entering deeply into the body as a gateway into spacious awareness. I can feel it permeating the room & all of us. Go into the feet & inhabit them completely. What do you feel there? Now imagine there are gates in the soles of the feet. You can choose to open these, coming into deeper contact with the vastness and stability of Earth. Connect your feet & your seat with Earth & feel fully received. My hundreds of miles on wet Poconos back-roads clogged with weekend leaf-peepers fall away. Go into the heart & inhabit it completely. From within the space of your chest, notice that your heart is completely unobstructed in all directions, vast as the earth itself, though different in quality. Our worries about children & health & marriages fall away. Go into the crown of your head, inhabiting the space of your head completely. Now imagine that there is a gate in the crown of your head. You can choose to open this, coming into contact with the spaciousness and luminosity of sky. Connect your whole upper body with Sky, allowing yourself to feel supported from above. Our bodies become places of contact with What Is - not to be fled, but to be entered. Inhabiting your entire body fully, feel how it is permeable to boundless space. Experience your being simultaneously as a body supported by a skeleton & organs & contained in a skin, and as a bridge between the vastnesses of Earth and Sky, with the vastness of Heart at its center. You are here, embodied, inhabiting space. On this trip, I've been encountering a lot of spiritually-inclined people who report positive experiences of exiting the body altogether, as a method of solace for the pain of being in the world. There are many different versions of this:
That last bit - when I am there, I don't want to come back - is tricky. In her wonderful book, Red Hot & Holy (which I am currently devouring), Sera Beak says that at one point in her life, she seriously thought about creating a new twelve-step program called "Disincarnates Anonymous." Being in the body can feel unbearable. You are a ten-year-old runaway being sexually assaulted. You are a woman suffering from a degenerative disease that is destroying your spine. You are a slave, being whipped. You are a soldier whose leg has just been blown off. The body is the last place you want to be, and so you do your best to become disincarnate, turning to dissociation, alcohol, drugs, meditation, religion, sex, fasting, violence, suicide, or work (or any combination thereof) to exit the suffering body. It kind of works, but in the long run it's impossible, because the truth is you ARE in a body. You are embodied, and if you believe that the Universe/God/Goddess/Creation is not messing around, you also have to believe there's good reason for this situation. You have no choice but to make your way back into the awkwardness & the pain & the subtlety & darkness & juiciness of the body. That can be a very hard journey indeed (especially in such a disembodied culture as this one), but if it is done with & for & out of love, it can be done. See the body as a beloved animal you are rescuing. Its eyes & ears & nose & skin & feet are incredibly sensitive & intelligent. Feed this body well. Play. Don't drive yourself to exhaustion. Simply wanting to come home more than you want anything else, home comes towards you. Right now, take the steps you know how to take. Stop believing anything that undermines your essential connection to body-heart-mind-home. So when I wake in the morning, and body-heart-mind-home is saying, Please take me home. I want to go out into this bright morning, and to go home, I gather my Inner Beauty things & my sleeping bag & my little suitcase & make my way quietly out of Geraldine's house before anyone else is awake. I take care of the steps I know how to take. Here are the simple instructions for the inside covers of the Inner Beauty Passports: The Hindu goddess Kali has 108 names. Some are sweet (Protector of All Girls) and some are scary (Garlanded with Skulls). What are your 108 names, from most likable to shadowiest, from proudest to most shameful? What roles have you fulfilled? What have you been called? Write a litany of your 108 names. Hearing me mention the sweet & scary names of Kali, Chaplain Emily exclaims, Well, THAT sounds like womanhood! We are gathered together for an impromptu picnic lunch at Wilson College, in Chambersburg, PA, where my beautiful-hearted friend Mary Beth Williams is Associate Dean of Students. I've been invited to give a workshop, lead a lunch-and-learn (aka picnic), and then offer a meditation in the afternoon.
Everywhere I look are signs of people learning, thriving, taking care of one another & themselves. The farm field above the center of campus is swaying with collard greens in thick, bushy rows. Pink-and-black spotted piglets roll in deep, clean sawdust in the barn, and super-fit farm interns stride towards harvest. Students in equestrian pants and high leather boots chase each other around between classes; students in dark blue Vet Tech scrubs pause to study. Patrick Dougherty is on the lawn with his assistants, building some kind of giant turreted nest out of willow boughs, and I am nearby with my own crew of Inner Beauty volunteers & participants. I learn there's a program here to support women students with children under 10 - offering free daycare and appropriate co-housing. Roberto, a student from Brazil, answers the Free/Not-Free questions with such honesty & good humor that briefly, I think, the rapture has happened, and Wilson College is it. Mary Beth & I & the women at the Inner Beauty picnic, & the women at the Becoming Animal Meditation have all seen a thing to two in our lives, and it's not stopping us from leaning in towards the possibilities for wholeness and growth we see in the world. In fact, knowing that marriages end & jobs end & parents get old & kids get eating disorders & dirty dishes keep happening & religious orthodoxy will never be our friend keeps us anchored, knowing goodness takes work. We choose versions of rapture that we bring into being, side-by-side, and apart. It is good to be here, on this next-to-last leg of my journey. I stopped in Charlottesville, VA on my way from Greensboro, NC to Chambersburg, PA. Walking around the UVA campus, I spotted this magnolia pod extruding bright orange shiny seeds from inside its furry fuchsia skin, and thought, Farewell, funky South! I have loved spending time with you again. The miles zoomed by in reverse: Roanoke, Shenandoah, goodbye! Thank you for everything.
New England, your trees are not so furry, and I love you too. See you soon. When Elana Langer and I were first talking about going on the road with this project, we fantasized about getting hold of an old moving truck & converting it into a movable Inner Beauty space. Imagine my delight, then, when I found out my stop at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro would be taking place in their brand-new Art Truck! The more I do this work, the more I trust it. There was a moment, the night before my UNCG talk, when the ghost compulsion known as must make the powerpoint came to visit. I thanked it for its excellent sense of duty, finished up my conversation with Lu, and went to bed. When the time came, I found a talk arising spontaneously - 45 minutes of this trip's origins in undergraduate painting work, in Santiago & Shikoku, and in the currents of friendship and contemplative practice in the world. The Zen classic Xinxin Ming (Song of the Trusting Heart) says: The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinion for or against. The struggle of what one likes and what one dislikes is the disease of the mind. This profound framework is as relevant to public speaking as it is to anything else. Fresh from the flurry of truck-installation, I began the talk by offering a grounding meditation, inviting everyone present to enter our bodies & the moment as we co-created it, and the rest followed naturally, clear and undisguised. With thanks to Barbara Campbell Thomas & Chris Thomas for their hospitality; to Alex Thomas for lending me his room; to Lu Xu for helping me understand the Inner Beauty Project; and to Lee Walton for his beautiful photographs.
Susie Winton is an Atlanta artist friend. My most vivid memory of her from grad school days is of an early morning when she & I & Cecelia Kane & Susan Cipcic & Julie Stuart & Mitch Lindsey - aka the artist-activist group Stuff & Nonsense - were running around downtown Atlanta, putting up vinyl lettering on empty shopfronts. We had donned hazmat suits modified to look like pig costumes, planned our community-friendly messages in conjunction with local residents' wishes, and gotten a small grant to fund our spiffy, official-looking signs. Our mission had been going surprisingly well. COMING SOON: EMPTY SHOPS MAKE GREAT ARTIST SQUATS. Check. COMING SOON: A DECENT CAFE OPEN AFTER 6. Check. COMING SOON: COMMUNITY HEALTH CLINIC. Check. COMING SOON: REASONABLE RENT. Check. Time before the streets filled was running out. Suddenly, flashing blue lights. Nuts!
With my squirrelly history of speeding tickets, I was rattled. But Susie, unmistakably a Lady, even in a pink-painted full-body hazmat pig-suit with ears, walked up to the police cruiser and spoke calmly and politely with the officers. She told them we were doing an art installation in conjunction with the Downtown Tour of Lofts and Lifestyles, set to begin in a few minutes. This was true: we had been talking with the few pioneers who had started the process of re-inhabiting Atlanta's then-deserted downtown, and they wanted their vision for a livable city to be seen & heard alongside glitzy real-estate developers' promises of urban Paradise. The policemen thanked Susie, and moved on. So, Susie is a Lady. She is also a wonderful artist, a wildly kind host, and an exemplar of the kind of modesty that lots of people like to talk about, but few embody. We spent some time together in her studio, and Susie told me about her current projects, all related to overlooked elements of daily life & art practice. These include:
When inflation & insecurity come to rattle their cages, I know I'll draw strength from the knowledge of Susie, quietly & masterfully at play in her beautiful space. Free, amused, and curious, I'll know she's there, dancing steadily with all the partners no one else thought to look at twice. Kristin Gorell is straight-up a genius, and thanks to her I now have Baloney Pony as my copilot on the highways & byways of this journey. Nicely embroidered, with glitter & echoes of Xmas. Stand by for an entire show of these marvels, coming soon.
Thank you, Lady. I am so glad to have re-met you, after all these years. One of the things I love about teaching is that it pushes me to articulate understandings I may not know I've come to. In offering a Dharma talk & discussion at Red Clay Sangha, I found myself talking about the kind of code-shifting I've done as an artist in meditation circles, and as as a meditator in art circles. Artists know how to fine-tune their listening, taking the risks necessary to bring an idea to full, specific fruition, but they may not know a lot about letting go into the ground of being. Meditators know how to cultivate their relationship with the ground of being, and how to watch phenomena arise and cease in a non-reactive way; but they may not know a lot about trusting instinct in finding form. The Inner Beauty Project says to artists You are safe, supported, and connected. You can let go. Your ideas & obsessions don't ALL have to come into form. It says to meditators You are safe, supported, and connected. Your project mind might have some ideas worth attending to. You are allowed to come out and play. As it turns out, many of the members of Red Clay Sangha (and the mini-retreat attendees) are artist-meditators themselves, so this discussion proved really fertile. I enjoyed teaching Inner Beauty Treatments in a meditation retreat format - everyone doing a single activity side-by-side for a set period - and seeing how supportive that structure could be for myself and others. More of that soon, I hope. Photos by Richard Skoonberg. Thank you, Richard & Sarah, for everything.
Pale as a ghost dissolving in the vast Home Depot parking lot, my artist friend Allison reaches into her trunk and pulls out the tasseled silk rope she plans to hang herself with. I feel both horrified (please don’t do this thing!) and amused (not just any weapon of self-destruction, but a beautiful one). Thankfully, Allison doesn't kill herself that day, or any other in the fifteen years since. I move away from Atlanta, and we keep in Facebook contact, so I am aware that she has had a son named Ping Pong, and is still actively performing and making art.
After the Inner Beauty event at {Poem 88}, Allison and I agree to go on a snack-mission together in the epicenter of Atlanta’s foodie culture. I sit on the porch of Star Provisions with my clear plastic box of cheeses and almonds, mini-crepes and quince paste, and watch a huge American flag sway in the rain’s gentle breath. It comes and goes, and the rain falls evenly on everything: gleaming black cars and dumpsters, waterworks and ladies bearing the centerpieces of that night’s feast. The rain and the flag lift my fatigue, and Allison comes to sit down next to me. I feel I want to tell you about my carjacking, she says. Maybe you read about it? The hair stands up on my neck. Allison tells me she was at an art opening in a perfectly ordinary area of town. As she walked out, she noticed a man she didn’t like the looks of. She got into her car, and when she looked up, there he was, standing at her window, pointing a gun at her head. The man told her to get over and let him drive. I can’t, she said, my son’s car seat is there. He told her she could. She did. He told her they were going to have such a good time together. But then. Allison drives stick. The man can't figure out how to start her car. Something happens where he bites her. Something happens where Allison is convinced she is going to die, and she thinks, I can’t die. My son needs me. Something happens where the man puts down his gun, and Allison grabs it, and shoots him. Not enough to kill him, but enough to get her out of the car, enough to immobilize him, enough to get him arrested, enough to keep him from ever looking for another woman to harm. He had a cage in his car, Allison tells me, and no dog. I tell Allison how moved I am to hear this story. She’s come a long way from the silk rope to the madman’s gun, from wanting to exit life, to defending it with everything she has. I was like a Grizzly Mama, she tells me, and now I know Grizzly Mama is one of the 108 Sacred-Ordinary Names of Now. |
AuthorJulie Püttgen is an artist, expressive arts therapist, and meditation teacher. Archives
November 2019
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108 Names of Now