Patchouli

I put my patchouli away years ago.  But then came Nag Champa, basically patchouli's little sister in incense form, and so, moving out of the little yellow house in Tennessee, the kid who helped move the shrine room dresser exclaimed, This smells like straight-up hippie, and I didn't mind, because what are you going to smell of?  Arrid XX?  Febreze?  Or are you going to become the anti-scent zealot patrolling the the dojo and the Dharma hall for shampoo infractions?

Anyway, that kid seemed sort of pleased to be hauling incense-wafty furniture with his more straight-laced brother, the one who looked suspiciously at home with his father, playing a pair of Schutzstaffel dudes in the parish play.  The hippie kid was like, I myself do not mind a whiff of the ganga, of a tedious, humid Southern evening, and you, my lady, appear to be a surprising fellow aficionado of skipping the 12-pack of Natty Light & the fake kilts, and thusly remaining sane in Sewanee, TN, population 2311, not counting the 40% of ghost houses owned by the nostalgic but nevertheless quite absent rich.

{He was wrong - the few times I've been stoned have made me feel like a tranquilized cat - alert mind, trapped in sluggish body.  I let his inference slide in the name of bonhomie.}

Oh, Sewanee!   I remember riding back from a Bela Fleck African-roots-of-the-banjo concert in Atlanta, in a van full of students driven by a very thoughtful football player, who politely rued the day he chose to take the scholarship and come up to this haunted plateau.  As we drove down University Avenue, half-dressed, booze-addled students lurched out of the shrubberies at us.  What the fuck?  A preppy-zombie army.  Calmly taking evasive measures, the student driver informed me that we were being mistaken us for the all-night  drunkmobile.

One weekend, grading student portfolios, I looked up to see a line of frat pledges walking toward's the studio's wall of windows, unzipping their pants.  A student had told me earlier about working by herself late at night, when a group of frat boys had come to piss collectively on the window behind which she was working.  So, crazy logic being what it is, I was pretty sure what they were up to.  My response was instantaneous.  With a running start from across the room, I sent a flying kick into the window, which boomed satisfyingly, scattering semi-de-pantsed idiots, but luckily not shattering.  I was livid when I called the police, who promptly did nothing.  Later, the highly-paid, affable Dean of Greek Nonsense, himself a former Sewanee frat boy, told me that he was "committed to helping the Greek community make better choices," and that was it.  No penalties, though at some later point he did call to offer me a pair of streaking offenders as live models for my drawing class.  Was I interested?  Not so much.  

The firefighters in thequasi-frat dorm next door to the art building took to harassing students on their way to class.  They had McCain signs in all their windows - to the point that it must have been quite dark in there, in addition to beer-stinky.  On the triumphant bright morning after Obama's election, biking in to work, I wheeled squelchily right through an enormous pile of barf left on the sidewalk by some despondent young Republican.  A harbinger, perhaps, of Republican ressentiment in the years and months to come 

Sewanee was the perfect catalyst for me to  come to terms with some of my own nonsense and denial.  In a more hospitable environment,  I could have used unexamined coping strategies to construct a story I could live in, but the mutual incomprehension I encountered there demanded something new.  I returned to a consistent, daily meditation practice.  A friend who was dying of cancer - the sensible, kind woman who handled dispatch for the campus physical plant - asked people who offered help to say the St. Francis Prayer.  So I prayed daily:

O Lord make me an instrument of your peace.  
Where there is hatred let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon,
Where there is doubt, faith,
Where there is despair, hope,
And where there is darkness, light.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console,
to be loved as to love,
to be understood as to understand,
For it is in giving that we receive,
in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and in dying that we are born into eternal life, Amen.

I started to realize that not feeling at home in Sewanee was only part of the story, at that there was a lot for me to learn there.  My job offered tools that could facilitate what I needed to do in the world.  I asked for & received research funding to return to the Himalayas.  I found my way.  I picked up the patchouli again, and life has gotten more beautiful with each passing day.