Space Cadet Julie Püttgen, reporting for duty, once again, as ever, ad infinitum, et cetera, et cetera, a-cha-cha-cha, Amen. Space Cadet Julie Püttgen assuming responsibility for this tomato plant in a too-small pot, this bumblebee stuck against the mudroom window, this mummified parsnip at the back of the refrigerator drawer. Space Cadet Julie Püttgen accompanying Space Monster One and Space Monster Two for their morning sortie into the woods. Monsters accompanying the Space Cadet, barring any unanticipated deer encounters. Space Cadet Julie Püttgen learning what it truly means to be a cadet of space, a devotee of space, an explorer of the spaces between, around, and through everything. Space Cadet Julie Püttgen Learning that to be a consort of space is to be at home anywhere there’s space, i.e., anywhere. At least in theory.
The practice I am doing these days involves learning to be a Space Cadet, and also a Water Cadet, an Earth Cadet, a Fire Cadet, and an Air Cadet. It involves inviting all the wisdom beings of each of these families to come transform me into a fierce, dancing, flaming, westernized embodiment of what they know, and what I have been struggling to learn. I call out the sound of each family – Yoo hoo! I’m here! I’m here with all my strength and all my crazy, and I could sure benefit from the wisdom of all Space everywhere, all Water everywhere, all Earth everywhere, all Fire everywhere, and all Air everywhere, as I attempt to transition into being part of the solutions around here. As I attempt to see what’s real in beings. As I attempt to turn said crazy into compassion and wisdom. Space Cadet Julie Püttgen has been up to all kinds of stuff that’s looked a little bit like, What...? Because there’s not been one clear aggregate to emerge from it. Chaplain-painter-meditator-therapist-dog wrangler-teacher… what? It takes a long time to we’ve a lot of complexity together, there’s always the possibility that the whole thing will fray and collapse into a pile of knots and burrs. The Hasidic story of the Clever Man and the Simple Man used to haunt me. Clever Man learns metalsmithing, dressage, weaving, and beagle-ballet, and in each case excels beyond what anyone could possibly imagine. Then he moves on to something else. Who cares if I can engrave the entire Torah on the back of this topaz? I’m out of here, and it’s on to Acro-Yoga training in Costa Rica for me. Simple Man, meanwhile, is a terrible cobbler. You can’t count on him to make a flip-flop, let alone a pair of them, but he’s delighted for everything he does, and by the scrapey poverty he and his wife and their sixteen-going-on-seventeen children live in together. I could be wrong, but my memory of the moral of the story is that while Clever Man has it all wrong, Simple Man has it going on. I don’t actually buy either of these dudes as a model. Simple Man’s delusion doesn’t appeal or resonate, and Clever Man’s A-type dissatisfaction feels like a bitter motivation. When I move from one thing to another, delusion and dissatisfactions are certainly somewhere in the mix, so also are curiosity and a sense of deep calling. I have no idea why I have to do this, but I have to do this. Not to be the best at it, but to let whatever it is enter into this Space Cadet and work its changes. I didn’t used to know this, but it can be very liberating to be bad at something, and stick with it. Aikido training brings this possibility to me, over and over again. Who knows if I’ll ever earn the medieval skirt that comes with the first grade above Total Pipsqueak? Who knows if I’ll ever go beyond that? Just showing up to see how that practice works its changes on me is enough. Just learning not to fear failure, Learning how to show up with the possibility of success, and also the great likelihood of winding up yet again in a self-confused tangle of limbs. “Space Cadet” has a connotation of cluelessness and confusion, of groundlessness and lack of a plan. We here in the USA frown upon that sort of thing, think it weak, see only contemptible, effeminate lack of rigid strength. But Buddha family, whose element is space, is anything but weak in its liberated form. Its motto might be, Less prep, more presence. In the absence of a super-detailed plan, space knows it’s possible to respond clearly, to initiate appropriately, to turn confusion into panoramic understanding of a whole situation. Space Cadet doesn’t attach fixed names or qualities to itself or others. It sees the balance of things, stacks them just so, and sends them flying on to their next destinations. Space Cadet can’t fail, because there’s no task available for evaluation. Process keeps rolling, and Space Cadet rolls with it. There’s a point in psychodrama work where each of the players de-roles from whatever they’ve been carrying in the group dynamic. I am no longer Your Mean Mom, I am Julie! The director flutters a scarf overhead, and the spell is dissolved. I am no longer Mindfulness, I am Fred! Whoosh! The role goes with the ritual, and we find ourselves clean again, and stronger for having been able to hold a particular energy without becoming it in any fixed way. I think this ritual would be a valuable addition to any household or workplace. Okay, I’ll be your Adversary, That Bitch, for just the time it takes to work through this dance in this safe space… And now, whoosh! I am no longer That Bitch, I am Julie. We could let each other off the hook so beautifully: from pretending that we should refrain from the dramas that arise in us; from disowning them; from staying caught in the roles we need each other to schlep along, year after year. Space Cadet Julie Püttgen delights in opening the cages of so many roles that might otherwise have languished in the dungeons of the unallowed. Fermented pineapple: a blessing, a curse, a favorite snack among the denizens of Hell. All of these, simultaneously true, in the way so many things are. I open up Facebook, and find a post by my friend Andra Rose. It begins with a warning: “If strangeness is not your jam, you should skip this.” Strangeness is most definitely my jam, so I read on, having previously experienced Andra’s knack for primordial wisdom. (Self-Proclaimed job description: comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable.) In the following paragraphs, she goes on to describe, quite powerfully, a dream wherein she is forced down into Hell, into the company of monsters. From the story, I picture a monster-wedding, monster-conference, or monster-awards-ceremony. Everyone is sitting around tables, eating fermented pineapple wrapped in prosciutto sliced from the flesh of horribly abused pigs. The drinks are bat-slaying tequila, sweetened with slavers’ syrup. Also, there are Unfair Trade mangoes, with no floss anywhere in fathomless space to relieve your teeth of those mango-strings that feel like they last for days, and cannot be captured by fingernails. The jokes run straight to everyone’s worst fears and most excruciating hangups. There is no doubt that everyone present (except the deluded NIMBY-monster) has done every awful thing that it is possible to do. Voilà! Here we are. I am sitting at the lunch table with four fellow Buddhist teachers. We are discreetly showing one another a fang here, a devouring belly there. The topic of conversation turns to safety culture, and what place it has when offering the Dharma. Yes, it’s true that there is altogether too much hierarchical, traumatic student-schtupping going on. We shake our heads in sad disapproval. Not us, vile student-schtuppers! But then, what about the more or less explicitly-stated norm that requires all things Dharmic to be safe, tranquil, accessible, and enjoyable? We agree this is sort of meditation’s fault, for showing up with taglines like: Lovingkindness – Better than Xanax, Since 500BCE! It’s hard to magnetize the world with that particular sell, and then turn around snarling, We don’t want to be your Xanax. Deal with it! Hard to have it both ways. And yet: impossible to inhabit the fiery, awake heart of practice, if anything that shows up more Metallica than shakuhachi is automatically exiled from Buddha culture. A friend describes offering a New Year’s Day retreat to a group that included a certified mindfulness instructor. “That was nice,” she said at the end of a day of inquiry, movement, and other awareness practices, “but I thought you would be offering something a little bit more Buddhist.” What does it mean, to be “Buddhist”? What kinds of experiences lead to the unshakeable insight that monsters - as in my friend’s dream - are sacred beings? The teacher sitting to my right perks up when I describe my not-infrequent experience of building the Ramones or Rage Against the Machine into a dance playlist, only to have this intensity met with dance-participants' most withdrawn restorative yoga poses. Turns out the man I am talking with is a fellow fan of hard-core music, a former school teacher now working with incarcerated kids. We talk about what intense music – music the doesn’t shy away from the monstrous – does for us. It’s releasing, welcoming in a level of stimulation that resets the nervous system like nothing else will. When I unfurl into sound just at the edge of what I know how to meet, I am reminded of vastness and fearlessness in a way that doesn’t arise otherwise. In my experience, big chaos in sound and movement is a doorway into indescribable, unfabricated order. Warrior energy meets overwhelm and moves through it. I don’t want to be a Valkyrie all the time, but riding the wind, ax drawn, limbs whirling, teeth bared, gives depth and richness to parallel, peaceful states. No work also means no rest. No struggle means no resolution. Recently, I passed again through what is a very painful gateway for me: a role is ending, and I’m not being offered what small-self feels to be the next role up. This gets right into the immigrant’s pain of not-belonging, the fear that showing up whole means remaining unseen. It fucking burns. It burns hard – harder than any of the hard music I have ever loved, and which has prepared me for just such suffering. I stay in it. I stay with it, I don’t hide it, don’t lash out, or at least try not to. Then a friend asks, How about no-role? How would no-role be? What if no-role, no knowing what comes next, is exactly where I need to be? What if enslaving myself to this-job, or that-job isn’t actually what Being is for, or about? That’s a hard one to settle into, when so much externally is about how to be good at one’s role, and how to move successfully from role to role. With the help of some monsters I've befriended, I ride this role-wave as I have ridden countless dance-waves, writing-waves, and heart-waves. It begins, it burns, it goes wild, it releases into some spacious gift accessible only through sitting at this table, eating the fermented pineapple, listening to my poet friend tell me a monster-story of abuse and heartbreak, without slipping out the back door of judgment or disconnection. If I go into a restorative yoga pose in the middle of this wave, space out, go passive, I will lose the opportunity to eat poison and turn it into blessings. I will defer a reckoning that wants to be embodied. And of course, I do that. Of course, sometimes the monsters are more than I can meet, and so: bed, advil, food, social media. Sometimes also, the active response is to leave. Someone else’s Metallica might be my there-are-too-many-drunk-people-in-this-room. We do what we can. Bonking out teaches us the growing edge of capacity. Andra’s dream-narrative is not a pleasant tale of beautiful, lovable monsters. She sees monsters who know themselves, and accept their roles as purveyors of horror, unfettered agents of the pain that may eventually grow us. She writes: These monsters know all of the darkness in the cosmos as a function of their being. They are the practitioners and devotees of all that brings us anguish, revulsion, and shame. Like priests, they perform the sacred work of embodying these necessary elements. If you arrive in Hell without a relationship to these aspects of reality, it is… well, Hell. The monsters simply being who they are becomes an agony for you, because you’ve arrived in their territory without any kind of rapport. Naturally you’ll misinterpret howls of laughter for shrieks of rage and grins for predatory grimaces, all directed at you and your wretched personal suffering. The real challenges we encounter in life are not delivered to us by safety-checked monster-simulators, planes without wings, playacting just the right, calibrated amount of Hell needed to straighten us out. They know, and we know, that we need to be smashed flat under gnarled toenails, without ever losing the thread of wholeness that keeps us all primordially connected, role after role, wave after wave, life after life.
Locked in. So it shall be written, so it shall be done. Yul Brynner thumps his oiled chest, and somehow his Pharaoh’s headdress doesn’t bobble. Decrees made without bobbling are a sign of quality Authority. Maybe Yul Brynner had some sense, even then, of being locked into the decree he would make years later? I’m Yul Brynner, he would say, eyes locked in with the camera lens, and by the time you see this, I’ll be dead from lung cancer. Fierce eyes. Yul Brynner, back from the dead, is telling his viewers that they can unlock themselves from smoking.
You can’t unlock yourself from being born into a vulnerable body, subject to aging, sickness, and death. What may seem a bummer also gives freedom to opt out of a whole lot of expensive and time-consuming shilly-shallying around Atlantis Sea Salts and Unicorn Rainbow Enemas, none of which will in the slightest way alter your root vulnerability. You can skip the Cryonics subscription. Extreme longevity and championship vigor are not the point. Still, you can nurture life. You can choose to take care of body and mind in ways that open, celebrate, and support the waking-up process. Not because the Buddha loves rosy butt-cheeks, but because, among lives, maybe this one is a miracle. You’re human. You suffer enough to want to wake up, but not so much that you’re constantly overwhelmed. There are little gaps here and there, where pain unlocks into understanding, where spacing-out gives way to focus, where anger turns to wisdom, and compulsive seduction turns to discernment. You can learn to work with What Is, instead of trying to perfect it all the damn time. Establishing the Right conditions – no matter whose version of Right you might be working with – is a profoundly elitist and ultimately doomed project. Learn, instead, to recognize conditions for what they are. This weekend, one of my classic wounds came up, the whole pattern unfurling its rich carpets of sorrow. Perhaps you recognize the refrain? There Is No Place for Me in This World, which Is in Any Case Run by Nincompoops of Servile Disposition and Meager Understanding. The whole thing is very intricately woven for me, and not entirely without truth. But still – if I let myself get locked into it, despair is really the only possible outcome. Suicide – a not infrequent event in my family – begins to make a certain amount of sense. If this – this pattern of being unheard, unheeded, and uncelebrated – is the outcome of All My Hard Work (cue violins and sitar), then Fuck It. Luckily, the truths that resonate most deeply for me are not results-based. They say, Unbind yourself from results. Unlock the report-card mentality that chains your sense of worth to external conditions. You are not what happens to you. Don’t expect applause. What does that even look like, in daily life, without getting all spooky and dissociated? I remember the intentions that brought me into situations that wind up being harder than I expected. I remember I can know the world, without needing a lollipop from it every five minutes. I remember this one life is not the entire story. There is a context of sufferings and joys of living beings of every description, and I’m here as a student of these. I’m also here clearing tabs left open in half-seen lives. Maybe this perceived slight or setback is connected with those debts? Maybe it’s clearing space for something as yet unseen, unknown? Maybe it’s a reminder not to get too deeply sucked into American entitlement and success theologies, carrying trains of suffering far longer than anything I will allow myself to get locked into. There is a wheel of life, and we are all on it, somewhere. We have been everywhere on it, and most likely will be, once again. And also, if you look carefully, you will see that every sector of the wheel contains not just its denizens – the Animals, the Hungry Ghosts, the Jealous Gods – but also the self-same smiling Buddha, extending a fear-not mudra into the proceedings. It’s not a different Buddha in each of the different realms. The alpacas down in Sector C are not grooving to a woolier Buddha than the one watching over the cavortings of the A-list in their palaces. Same Buddha. Same compassionate seeing. Same wisdom in all beings, regardless of circumstance and fate. This everywhere-on-the-wheel-at-once Buddha represents a simultaneous, equanimous awareness, needing no preferences met in order to be OK. You’re the boss? Fine. The pipsqueak? Still fine. You’re shrouded by grief, felled by heartbreak, pissed as hell, giddy with success? All knowable. The key to all the locks is the same: Know what this is. Know what is happening, and the impact it is having on you, and all those involved in the situation. Don’t forget that this role-play is unfolding in a way that cannot encompass or crush you. Nothing lasts. Nothing is forever. Yul Brynner speaking to the television camera extends a fear-not mudra towards thirteen-year-old Julie, sitting on the floor of her family’s living room in Atlanta. It’s not like she’s ever going to smoke, but still: this person, this actor who played the Pharaoh without flinching or bobbling, this beautiful man who made Bible class bearable, is reaching out from beyond to say there is an awareness not quelled by illness or by death. Compared with Tony the Tiger telling her gleefully to rot her teeth, this makes a real impression. Pray for us now, and at the hour of our death. Forget the Froot Loops. Forget the pointless biases of all those TV fantasies. Something real is here, child, and you can choose either to be curious about it, or to squander it. Chances are, you’ll choose a little of both, without getting locked into either. Malcontent or sage, sage or malcontent, goes the ancient refrain from the astrological chart drawn up when I was a newborn. Malcontent: locked into the circumstances of this world as a flawed mirror for the brilliance of What I Am. Sage: recognizing that circumstances cannot for one moment fix the whole of what any of us are, to one another, to ourselves, as interlocking universes. About to lay out the tarot cards for a reading, I glimpse something scary. I am about to flick the cards at the top of the stack into the unmanifest middle, when I think, No. I am here to learn, to see, to understand. This Celtic cross, this mandala, sure enough has sorrow in it, with the spooky bat of the Hanged Man at its center. But it also has the World in the place representing what I bring to the situation I am exploring. That feels right: a blessing of comprehensive wholeness. Sorrow can be known. Failure can be known. And there is no shame in either of these, honestly come by. I let the cards speak, not with a sense of being locked in, but with gratitude for greater and greater capacity to receive patterns, unfolding. Inside-out is an invitation to break the rules. Something comes out of the box, and you put it back in. Then you change your mind, crumple it up into your pocket, and choose again. Two come out. Which hand? The one with a colorful bracelet on the outside, and all the ten thousand things on the inside.
Inside-out is encrypting your new hard drive, and then forgetting the password that lets you get inside. Voila! Welcome to the useless plastic thingy, formerly known as a terabyte of storage. Some things are only useful if you can get inside them. Some things are only useful if you can get outside them. Inside, outside. This house only functions as a home if I can leave and come back. I leave and come back. My friend Karen gives me morning glory seedlings, which I’m taking through the inside-outside dance called “hardening off.” Don’t leave them outside overnight – they’ll catch cold. Don’t leave them inside during the day – they’ll never learn how to grow in the blustery, changing world of New England. The inside is outside, and the outside is inside, say the alchemists. As above, so below, they say. I say, Maybe. I say, that fails to account for just how much there is going on, all in all. This feeling– is it mine, yours, ours? Clenching my teeth and my hands in my sleep, am I letting the outside world too deeply into my dreams? What is too deeply? How could I sleep unclenched, when elsewhere, cynical men are poking sticks at desperate, cornered people, in my name? When elsewhere, Oligarchy Barbie stands next to the cornerstone of an abomination engraved in her father’s name? So, that is what it’s like when the outside is inside. On a bad day, when the inside is outside, I am cranky from whatever countless causes, looking at Chloe the Pirate Dog with frank annoyance. Dammit, Dog, you breached the fence again. Now, we can’t contain you. Now, we can’t know exactly where you are, when. Now, we’ll have to build a better fortress. In another mood, I can see her defiance in light of my own. I can laugh with her toothy old-dog smile, and have both our insides be outsided in conspiratorial joy. Way to dig out from all obstructions, Big Girl! You show me my own stubborn freedom. On a good day, inside-out recognizes the wisdom and wonder of What Is, because that’s what I’m carrying around within. Flow-state is inside and outside sitting companionably with one another. Tangoing passionately with one another. Inside-out. I drop my resistance to the forgotten password, the unhired model, the many ways that days and plans go lumpy. I allow surprise, innocence, the unexpected. I play. Here’s the news: the thing that you crumpled up and put inside your pocket isn’t done yet. It’s coming back. You can’t build a wall around it, and even if you get Ivanka Trump to declare it a victory for insiders everywhere, it won’t last. Something is already digging it out from underneath, with sharp, stubborn black claws. With bolt cutters and shovels, with root refusal to obey your notions of what should rightly be inside, or outside, here, or over there. The Tao Te Ching is very specific about this sort of thing. No treasure without a thief, it says. No sealed-up space, without the inside and the outside carrying on an illicit affair that you can never stop, no matter how much shooting and gassing, or lying and covering up you do. What Is hates a sealed-up space, will do everything to open it, will insist on the more natural rhythms of breathing in and breathing out, smashing everything in its way to get there, if necessary. When I listen to the headache I wake up with, most every day, and carry around, sullen but workable, I am aware of a sealed space. It begins in the left side of my skull, travels down through the jaw, neck, and shoulder, and then anchors in my sacrum. When I listen to it, I can open up the top of my skull, and unseal the space. Immediately, relief comes. Good. Now it’s pain with contact, with harmony. I stand taller, and the right side also remembers it can breathe. But what about when I am asleep? Then, there’s no control over where body-awareness goes. Then, whatever it is that I am clenching against comes into this being, inside-out, outside-in. I am not saying that I think I am being stalked by something sinister, at all. More like: I become permeable in my sleep, susceptible to the ten thousand sorrows of this world, who need someone to acknowledge their existence. This can be Gaza, or it can be down the street. This can be someone seemingly else, or it can be the pains of my own life. I get into my car after aikido practice, one bright Saturday morning, and am momentarily transported back to the parking lot of Kiddie City, in the Sandy Springs suburbs of Atlanta. I am 11 years old, and must, somehow, spend the morning shopping with my mom. We can’t afford anything. Whatever we find will become co-opted as the outside of this very awkward inward being. Time crawls by in a perfect disjointed dance of inside and outside, out of sorts. What can my mother see, in these overpriced eighties clothes? I’m unsuited to them – not blonde, not petite – and what she knows comes from a French girlhood spent in convent schools, wearing gloves on the outside; wearing assumptions about place and class, on the inside. I try on a pair of pale-yellow corduroys, peel them inside-out as I shuck them off. How is this petal-velvet a solution to the armor I instinctively know I need? The outside and the inside are at war. I’m outside my mother’s insides, and her notions of curating me feel desperate, without power to reconcile world and self, self and world. I come back to this May morning, remember I am on my way to meet my friend, tug the warrior/healer suit I’m wearing back into alignment with this body’s shape. I wear nurse on the outside, because nurse is what I need on the inside. I wear severed heads on the outside, because severed heads are what’s happening on the inside. I slice through old ways of seeing, reacting, assuming, taking a chance that somewhere in all this mayhem, a heart of wholeness cradles the inside, and the outside, without being fooled for one instant that they have ever been other than turning one another inside-out in the ocean’s tides. Cliffhanger is what prompted my brother and his friend Keith to ninja-rappel down Keith’s mother’s apartment building in Atlanta. They watched the film over and over at the bargain matinée, and then decided they knew enough to do the deed. The deal was, they had to have good timing, because half the façade was glass, and the other half, balconies. Balcony-bounce: good news for young ninjas. Window-bounce: not so much. They cliffhangered their way down successfully, making space for their wildness where others simply saw Home.
Cliffhanger implies just this kind of suspense, suspension, an in-between state that just can’t last, and shouldn’t. Get out of there! Find the secret code, punch it in, and emerge into this May morning, in the company of noisy mockingbirds and feeding bees. Leave the bunker. Ditch the falling tower and rejoin the commonwealth of beings. Right now, working on my thesis project, I have to remind myself again and again to leave the transcription software, open the door, and go outside. The transcription can wait mid-sentence, if need be, a mini-cliffhanger, while I go out to admire the asparagus shooting up. While I go out to bob around in the warm-water pool with round ladies in sturdy one-piece bathing suits. The opposite of Cliffhanger is aqua-aerobics. You bounce around in the water, playing its resistance against the strength in your body, realizing there’s absolutely no place to fall, no void, and no drowning. Aqua-aerobics is the underachiever’s dream exercise, and it is also a good way to release all the tension of listening for what comes next, earbuds jammed into my ears, parsing meaning and structure from rivers of words. What did she say? What did she mean? Why did I ask this question, instead of that one? I am writing about the embodied sexuality of long-term women Buddhist practitioners. I am buzzing with stories. I am listening for the unsaid within the said, for the heart of what it is to be waking up in this world as a woman. What happens? What happened? The bees know, but they’re not saying. The noisy mockingbird might know, but is speaking in someone else’s voice. Cliffhanger. Poised between a dilemma and its outcome. This is ending so fast! This is ending so slowly! The crabapple flowers smell of everything lovely and fruitful, honey and wildness pouring over the fence without end. The crabapple is a cliffhanger whose answer is Spring. Later, other answers will come. I feel, this morning, into the countless generations of women ancestors whose job has been to soften male worlds into beauty and wisdom. Fuck that shit, I think. Fuck being caged and made small, and then asked to make sure things smell nice around the place. Crabapple is planted in one place, and draws the bees, but as far as I can tell, no one’s deeply invested in telling her that Real Trees, Important Trees are essentially different than she is. Cliffhanger: what happens when, age forty-six, functionally before the beginning of some new life, marriage comes to seem a ceremony I’ve been groomed for, and no longer wish to enact? Marriage comes to seem like a tower needing exit, as soon as possible, via ninja-rappel if necessary, but more likely slowly, down the stairs, with frequent stops for aqua-aerobics along the way. I can feel old stories rousing themselves in the cellar. Go out alone, and who will keep you safe? Go out alone, and who will pay the bills? Give up this perfectly reasonable, kind man, and enter the territory of loose witches beyond the edges of things. There’s a mighty chorus whose job it is to keep me on the safe side, away from the cliff, up the tower, in place, rooted like the crabapple tree, though not a tree by nature. Cliffhanger: what to do with the buzzing, wild energy of Spring, when at least overtly, not much in the world seems to want it? Wild doesn’t get shit transcribed. Wild crashes in to old ladies in the aqua-aerobics pool. Wild rejoices with unleashed skinny mutts exploding from the trailhead, running pell-mell, and laying down in every mud-puddle between here and home, twice if possible. Wild’s not necessarily who you want to meet at the bend in the path, and wild may not settle down to dinnertime like a good girl. Wild might smell like crabapple one minute, and fox turds the next. What to do? Well, get up early, make a list. Squander as little time on nonsense as possible. Keep connected to wild in ways that don’t tear the tower down while you’re still living in it. Find a place to build a dwelling that’s not a tower, and keep adding to it, day by day. If you are the tree, you can’t fall out of it. Cliffhanger is a way of forcing all of everything into some will she/won’t she funnel, when actually, maybe Her Hasty Escape isn’t the best plan, after all. Ground and roots; tower and pool; crown and all the new leaves that can only come in their own time. One day, there is absolutely nothing at all showing on the surface, and the next, purple-tipped asparagus wands are vying with each other to see who can penis out the furthest in the space of one afternoon. Do we believe – do I believe – that there’s actual work to be done in this world, and the Universe would like me to please keep getting my shit together, because it’s actually kind of pressing? Yes. Yes I do. Well then, fuck the chorus in the cellar. It’s important to keep coming back to whatever supports real growth, and not to get distracted by cliffhangers with names like I cannot bear this for another moment or Not this crap again. It is important to stay connected with path, allowing only a minimum daily allotment for eye-rolling, or wishing the kitchen cupboards contained something more snackable than a hand-me-down bag of panko crumbs, an ancient can of cherry pie filling, and some vinegar. Cookies would be great, but it’s not much of a cliffhanger to imagine how fast I would try to use them to muffle the voices in the cellar, all to no avail. No, there really is no solution here, other than to keep doing the work I know I need to do, to build the space I will live in, and to understand that cliffhanger is a construct that makes no sense, in light of how long we’ve all been at this. Beginningless time does not allow for narrow funnels, only steady work, with a sense of possibility opening around every tight corner. Falling doesn’t sound so appealing, in general. It sounds dangerous, inconvenient, painful, and potentially injurious. It sounds out-of-control and embarrassing. Falling sounds like things winding up not at all precisely where we’d like them. Like drool on our shirt. Like mud on the seat of our pants. Like affection or hatred, landing in places we really wish they wouldn’t. Falling sounds like every pain in the ass we’ve ever encountered, and so, no thanks, really. We’ll take climbing, or sashaying along, or even boring old sitting, any day.
This preference for control over wild wipeout is pretty much what the Anatta-lakkhana Sutta seeks to dismantle, relentlessly, and possibly for our own good. It goes piece by piece, in a way I’ve heard described as a side effect of the oral tradition through which it has been transmitted, and which also happens to be necessary, to get through the armoring we carry around. Form is not self. If form were self, then form would not be accompanied by affliction, and it would be possible to say of form, ‘Let my form be thus, let my form be not thus.’ That’s pretty clear, already, but just to make sure, the Sutta continues: Just so, since form is not self, form is accompanied by affliction, and it is not possible to say of form, ‘Let my form be thus, let my form be not-thus.’ Whap! We fall into some alternate reality, where toning and trimming, waxing and tucking, shaping and exercising make no sense at all in any of the old ways. Sure – go to yoga class, keep your nose-hairs from growing down into your mustache. But also, realize that none of these things can really be filed in the self-improvement drawer. They can be considered in the same general framework as keeping the sink free of dirty dishes, or picking up stray lube-packets from the edge of the woods, but they cannot be seen truthfully as I Am Improving My Self. They can’t fall into that category and stick, with any degree of truthfulness. What do you think? Is form permanent or impermanent? Impermanent. And things that are impermanent, can they be considered reliably satisfying? No. And of something that is unreliable, impermanent, and subject to decay, can we say, ‘This is mine, this is me, this is my self?’ Nope. Here’s a list of questions a good lawyer would never let her client get tangled up in. For starters, who said we should be able to depend on any external thing for satisfaction? Precisely. That’s where this whole thing is going. It’s pointing the spear back at us. We can sort of see, once the package has been opened, and the thin layer of tissue paper has fallen out, that these new swim trunks aren’t going to be the salvation of us, after all. But it’s harder to see that about our minds, bodies, perceptions, feelings, and thoughts. We want very much to be able to improve those into some state where they won’t fall or fail, and what this series of questions is trying to get us to do, is to receive all of these with the same degree of not-grasping that we can sometimes muster for seemingly lesser things. Sometimes. Those swim trunks? In the first few seconds of maybe-ownership, they look pretty grand. Soft, stylish, promising to cover our rumps and new squidgy bits with grace and aplomb. It’s only later we find out the velcro is in a stupid place, and the zipper’s not going to last long, in ocean saltwater. We send them back, feeling virtuous. What happens next? What happens if we can learn to work with all the components of our constructed selves in a way that falls open a little bit, or a lot? Honestly, part of what happens is: we feel queasy, seasick, and like we might throw up if everything doesn’t fall back together right away into a shape that might be wildly uncomfortable, but at least has a shape. In the beginning drawing classes I teach, the time we spend learning to look at negative shape is very difficult for some people. There’s a visceral aversion to focusing on not-things, on space, on the unknown, unfelt matrix, within which all the stuff that preoccupies us is unfolding. People get angry; people get fearful. It can feel like I am the mean witch, stealing everyone’s binky, over and over again. If I let go of looking at that jar/chair/basket, how will I possibly be able to see? Where will I be? If I let go of me and my opinions, where will I fall through to? It’s not at all appealing. And it’s also not at all the whole story. Many us have received such strong, painful training in overriding what we feel, think, and want that we first need to become quite ferocious in expressing these human impulses. We need to know them, before we can honestly make space around them. The point of learning how to see and draw negative shape is not to make weird flat drawings of the gaps between things, forever. Instead, with much time, patience, and training, we become able to switch back and forth at will, to come closer to an accounting of reality that weds the impermanent and the deathless, the thing-view and the space-view, without fixed preference for either. Falling into relationship with Being Itself is an ideal for which there are lots of skilled ad-reps loose in the world, making it sound like bliss, blue sky, realization, hoorah! Don’t believe them. The more space intensifies, the more things do, as well. There’s a kind of interrelationship at work. More seeing means also becoming more aware of not-seeing. More rising means more falling. Thus, with wise discernment of things as they are, a practitioner comes to see: for any form, past, present, or future, refined or coarse, internal or external, better or worse, far or near, ‘This is not mine, this is not me, this is not my self.’ Is that our big invitation to the Depersonalization Ball, where we wind up with all our tendencies to dissociate validated, once and for all? I don’t think so. I don’t live so. What actually seems to happen is something more like compassionate curiosity. Wow. I really went for it, in this morning’s argument over the hot-water kettle. That came together in a way that makes divorce over beverage-habits feel like a real possibility. I wonder what is happening here? I wonder if divorce is where the story of these two people is actually inclining? I wonder how the spaces between and inside this situation are influencing each other? I don’t need to manifest a nicer self. I don’t need to pussyfoot around this uncomfortable pattern. I don’t need to fall into the idea that It Will Always Be Like This. But I do wonder: is it helpful, to keep sharing these spaces? Falling is also falling into the possibility of walking away. What is this like right now? What would not-this be like? What have I been telling myself about the way things are, the way I am, the way we are, the way you are, that keeps generating these particular shapes? What limits me to perceive space, but not shape; shape, but not space? Depending on whose translation you are reading, the denouement (literally, unbinding) of the Anatta-lakkhana Sutta can sound like a clinically-inadvisable total bummer, in which the Mary Kay pink Cadillac reward for hard practice is “estrangement” or “weariness” towards form, self, other, and every possible anything. To me, that language reeks of ill-humor, bad breath, and eyebrow-stubble. More promising is “disenchantment.” What is it like to let go of our illusions about ourselves and others, and as a result, love more deeply, not less? What is it like to fall out of infatuation, and into something that depends less on frantic editing? Falling can be unbinding, and unbinding, love. Vacuum cleaner? Whatever. Don’t talk to me about household maintenance – just trying to crack the code of how not to be numb in this world, is about all I can do right now.
Things it is very hard to get people to be sorry for you about:
It’s hard to know where to take the sorrow of having gone ahead and done the thing you weren’t supposed to do - having flown some mad and gorgeous flag of freedom, and then had it all fall apart. What else was going to happen? Well, but it still needed to happen. Well, but it still hurts. So. There is this truth of suffering. Here, let it be known that future vacuum cleaner references may be sparse indeed. If you are looking for a personal essay about vacuum cleaners, you may want to look somewhere else. If you are looking for a personal essay about love, complexity, delusion, wholeness, and how answers in dreams show up in weird ways, this might be an OK choice for you. You might also want to just put down the vacuum cleaner and write your own version. Nothing beats that. There is this truth of suffering. There is this truth of the origin of suffering. There is this truth of the end of suffering. There is this truth of the path leading to the end of suffering. For the record, that’s the actual deal around suffering that often gets translated as “Buddhists believe that life is suffering.” Not the same thing, right? Anyway, even though I know what the Four Noble Truths are, I still give in to the mistaken idea that the whole point is not to suffer. As in: Why start with that, when it’s just going to hurt? But I don’t think avoiding suffering is the point – or at least for me, right now, it’s not the point. Better to say: here is a field guide to what hurts, and how to understand it, and how to notice when it doesn’t hurt anymore. For the last month, since a beloved semi-sexual friendship froze out into painful misunderstanding, rights and duties, and other assorted shadows of intimacy, my body has been a mess. Low back pulling hard to the left. Left jaw clamping like a motherfucker in my sleep. General feeling of being trapped in the hall of mirrors of my own hard clench against some overwhelming grief that is always just about to break through the surface of a consciousness grown dull and tired with resistance. Hinge of the neck and head stuck fast, also on the left side. Basically: anxiety, depression, inability to connect deeply with others, because what’s deep feels too dangerous. Sound familiar? I am not going to quote any mental health statistics here, but I’m pretty sure that what I’m describing has a lot in common with states that drive many of the phenomena we love to bemoan publicly, while furtively experiencing them for ourselves. So whose is this? At some level, obviously, mine. I reached a point where I had traveled through pacify, enrich, and magnetize, in my relationship with my friend, and the only possibility left was destroy. Destroy left a huge gap: where to find the intimacy of the conversations we had? Where to find the buffer that took pressure off my marriage? I had no answers, only loss and confusion. I think this is also ours. Growing close to someone means allowing some of their energy, their habits, to permeate mine. When there’s pain in any part of that field (there always is), there’s also pain in the shared field, and in its aftermath. I knew this going in. I knew this going in, and yet I didn’t know how intense it would be. Junot Diaz, in his beautiful recent essay, talks about patterns of trauma-influenced relationships, as they showed up for him: approach, distance, approach, distance – disconnect. What he describes reminds me of what I experienced in the connection my friend and I nurtured but could not sustain. When two people who’ve been hurt a lot try to grow close, even the magnetic quality of their attraction becomes an obstacle. The poles flip. The attraction becomes an actualization of what is most feared. There is this truth of suffering. What then? Bear with this. Know where I am. Know this is hard. Know my teeth are literally on edge. Remember: this is part of being human. Don’t try to figure out the future from within a body-mind in pain. Don’t rewrite the past. I dreamed last night about a movie poster with a picture of a family on it. Mom’s face had come off, and inside the slightly bloody socket (as where a tooth has been extracted) was a younger, frightened-looking face, peering out. A movie voiceover said, “A self-rebirthing and a brownie-eating festival, all in one!” I can feel these things in my body – the less-painful right side coming back to life and feeling. Then, still in the dream, I saw a trailer for a different movie. A man and a woman sit on a couch next to one another. Gradually another woman emerges from the body of the first. The man grows transparent and disappears. Children appear. I feel deep compassion for these beings, in their changes, and maybe especially the disappeared man. I leave the dream-space where I have seen these things. Outside along the curb, there’s an old cop car or taxi waiting, with keys in the trunk lock. In the body, this is: activating the base of the spine, unlocking what’s held there, keeping attention low in the body – and not thinking so much about driving, for a while. I can’t blame everything about this odd, uncomfortable time on the end of that very particular intimacy – there are a lot of things happening in my life right now that incline towards feeling unsettled. At some deep level, while I am choosing aikido training, it is also literally kicking my ass. Effecting a turnaround from victim stance, entanglement, or habitual disengagement, to something else, takes real work. I go into practice, and meet everything I’d like to avoid. Incompetence. Ceding ground when I should stand it. Lifelong dislike for organized sports and going upside-down. I grieve work; I grieve workers hauled off from jobs no one else will do, milking cows no one else ever sees. I grieve cooped-up animal lives, cooped-up human lives. Sitting on a New Hampshire ridge looking out over unbroken forest as far as the eye can see, I grieve wild creatures disappearing. Here’s where a vacuum cleaner would come in handy, as a way of clearing cobwebs, or at least sucking this whole thing together into a single bag. But those aren’t really the rules around here. As Julia Butterfly Hill asks, when we say “away,” as in “throw away,” where is that? It’s always still here, in our shared world, in the shape of our unruly hearts, in the work left to be done, some of it pleasurable and easy, and some of it bewildering, some of it impossible. So be it. So be it with the rich layers of mud that come with the thaw – the places that look dry, till the surface cedes and you find yourself ankle-deep in the spaces the ice opened up between stones, over all those cold months. So be it with the blue jay greeting the evening, and the woodpecker’s shrill call to seeking. So be it with the keys in the trunk, the work still to be done, and the losses that are not gaps in the path, but its every step. Crying in public does not in fact require a license, though it’s nice to have one to show the naysayers, if they turn up. Crying in public is like getting to be the egg in its shell, and the running white and yolk, all at once. Crying in public undoes the teaching that being as you are is not what you owe the world. Crying in public lets your bodily fluids run free – something this whole civilization has been set up to prevent. So if it seems daunting, you’re right.
Children used to cry in public with abandon, but I don’t see that so much anymore. Now, children are in huge strollers, eyes glued to screens. Or eyes glazed over, while their parents’ eyes are glued to screens. Screens are there to suck the tears out of us. They are hyper-absorbent energy-suckers, and all the tears have disappeared into games, apps, facebook, porn, and productivity. I was standing in line at the post office yesterday, behind a man in a yellow coat, who started singing loudly to himself, to ward off anxiety. Then I looked up: all the advertising images bolted to the wall above the service counters were of people beaming at their screens. Their tears were being absorbed by the USPS’s new Super Predictability App. They were so happy! No wonder the man in the yellow coat was anxiety-singing: he was there to mail his almost-late taxes, and he didn’t even have a phone to dry his tears. As for me, I felt a little stupid: who goes out into the world with two boisterous monsters, mails a package to a friend, and stops by the library, all without a screen to prevent crying in public? Some people are just so thoughtless. Crying in public is not what Sheryl Sandberg recommends, in her book, Option B. I’m only on the first CD – the first few minutes of the first CD – and I can tell that wild weeping at the post office is not the option she will be in favor of. She has already told the story of not crying at a school parents’ night, and the story of not crying at a birthday party. That is already a couple of oceans’ worth, and I’m pretty sure there’s going to be a lot more unwept tears before I either give up on the project of listening, or reach the end. What happens to the tears the screens suck up? They get turned into shiny things that ruin the forests and hills, either quickly, or insidiously. They’ve become a reservoir that someone’s going to have to cry, one of these days. They get funneled back into the oceans, whose levels rise, whose acidity goes up. The uncried-in-public-tears become a chain of massive hurricanes spinning up across the world, one after another, as if to say, Do you not see? Go ahead and cry the fucking tears. Please, please do not hold on to the story that you must Compose Yourself before buying bagels, or going to the doctor, or answering the question of How You Are. What’s “in public,” anyway? Is it being in the presence of yourself? Sometimes, that is very hard. Is it one other person, besides you? I have a friend whose tears look like racking hiccups, or chopping, hacking laughter, but never run to water. Those are tears not cried in public, over and over. Is “in public” the face we show our families? I have a vivid, terrifying memory of my father breaking down in tears, in a diner near the Cloisters Museum in New York. My mother, brother, and I had no idea what to do with this. For so long, he’d been the source of my private tears, my tears at the dinner table, my tears cried with friends – and now, this? My mother, brother, and I went on eating French fries. We froze him out. There was nowhere for his crying in public to land, and so he just paid for lunch, and then we went back underground for the long subway ride I insisted on instead of a cab. My mother may have asked, What’s wrong? – but that’s really just another way of saying, Please stop. There are so many ways of saying, Please stop, and blocking any crying in public that might arise around us. One is: You are damaged and strange, and your weeping is nothing to do with us. Please go away. Please stop. This happens a lot, around those who allow tears to leak out, the ones whose access to the ocean is momentarily or permanently opened up. This community is fine: you are strange and damaged, and the stories you have to tell about the wrongs you suffered are nothing to do with us. Why dig up old harms? Keep your emotions to yourself. Don’t come to us with your crying in public. We have a good thing going here, and we don’t need your bad attitude. Get on board, or else fuck off. There’s one way to do this, and your crying in public isn’t it. I remember being at a party, the Fall after my friend came back to school from a year of helping her father die of AIDS, which was also the Fall after my uncle died of leukemia. It was a standard party: a room in the front, with food; a kitchen, with booze; and a bedroom, with people’s coats and bags. My friend and I wound up on the bed together, weeping wildly. Why not? She’d just lost her father, and I had just lost a man who’d taken care of my heart. We just went for it: big, racking, beery sobs. But no! This was – even in a back bedroom – not allowed. You don’t cry at a party – or at least not unless it’s your party and you’re being adorable about it. We were not adorable – we were keening. We were meeting each other in the ocean of grief, and it was scaring the other children. Our friends gathered round to make us stop. They thought they were helping, but maybe they were just afraid. What if crying in public were as common as looking into a screen? The argument for this winds up sounding a bit like the one for nursing in public – another transfer of fluids from inside the body to outside, happening right here, where we are singing the alphabet song, or trying to find the vegetarian corn dogs in the freezer case. Why not? Why not, if this will keep the oceans healthy, and allow each of us to reclaim the whales that we are? Why not, if the alternative is a closed system of wars, addictions, and other hells, both more and less visible? I don’t actually, these days, cry a lot in public. I work through oceans’ worth in meditation practice – literally days on end of tears pouring unobstructed from my eyes to my chest, filling my lap, running out onto the carpet, floating the mat as a raft, out into the unknown. I sit down, I go into the body, the tears flow. Simple, unfussy, profound– the ocean. I am writing this while a kids’ sing-along is happening in the room next door. You Are My Sunshine. Where is the You Are My Ocean of Tears song? It’s an important one, a Kali kirtan, a song from Teresa of Avila, a keening we’ve maybe lost in the back rooms of parties and the shiny screens we carry with ourselves, everywhere. Housepaint is what my teacher Robert Reed used to call any act of just filling shit in, mindlessly, without attending to surface, body, or intention. In his world, this was a recurrent risk, because Reed often insisted on his students making enormous paintings. One of the last assignments of our Beginning Painting year was a 4 x 8’ self-portrait on crappy, thin Masonite. It is damn-ass hard to attend to every inch of something that big, to put love into it, to wrestle its edges and volumes into solutions that only it and you can find together. I never quite solved mine, though I can still see it in my mind’s eye: I’m standing three-quarters to the viewer, wearing the Irish fisherman’s sweater I’d pilfered from my friend Nico, who in turn had pilfered it from her brother, the one who became a priest, and then left the priesthood. I’m wearing my fancy cranberry-colored jeans, and looking worried, in front of a partially open doorway. Of course I’m worried: this year of discovery is ending, and I have to finish this painting without resorting to just housepainting the fucker, and walking away. I have to stay present with all 4 x 8’ of, and it’s not easy.
That painting disappeared into my friends’ basement and was never found again. Each year’s end was a stuff-cataclysm. As an artist, I was constantly making shit, and a lot of it was big. Where was it all supposed to go, during the summer? No one knew. There was a squash court. There was a basement. Other people’s parents came from Connecticut, Jersey, or whatever, but there was no way my parents were doing that, from Georgia. So when my friends offered their basement, I walked across town with my painting flopping wildly over my head, sine-waving its way into a major nuisance that blinded me as I made my way to that dank space. Which flooded. Goodbye, painting. There’s a Buddhist Image of the teachings as a raft. You come to a river, you need a way to cross, the teachings are there as a raft. You get over to the other shore. And then, if you’re smart, you bow to the raft and leave it right there. You don’t just sling it up onto your head and walk around in 80-degree New Haven traffic, making a big fuss about going to stash it where it’ll get swamped, anyway. But it’s hard to walk away from the things that have shown us we’re capable of being something other than mindless. And it’s hard not to get caught up in things. Lately I’ve been increasingly wary of thing-making, of the aspects of my training that incline towards making rarified objects. I have crates, boxes, and flat-files full of things I’ve made, some of them quite beautiful. But then what? They are flotilla of rafts that I am hoarding. They’re sitting there getting dusty, while I try to move on. Maybe the tension I feel in my jaw and shoulders every morning, waking up, is the weight of so many un-dropped rafts? Housepaint is exactly what’s needed, when it’s needed. I go to Home Depot, pick out a slew of wild swatches, and have them mixed up into half-pint samples. It’s cheap, and wonderfully easy to use. But it freezes in the winter if I leave it in my studio, becoming lumpy and unsolvable. Housepaint becomes just another thing that’s hard for me to get rid of. Right now I am in the middle of understanding how midlife crisis works for me. Everything that is dear to me becomes also everything that is holding me in place, making the feral nomad in me very, very nervous, indeed. Last night I dreamt I woke up in a house in a pasture, and when I walked outside, I saw that all the traders of the Silk Road, all the refugees and pilgrims, were walking in a tremendous line that extended to the horizon in both directions, doglegging slightly to avoid the house. I crossed the line, walked out into the pasture, stopped, and thought, Wait, where am I going? I saw the faces from faraway, the tide of movement extending from forever to forever, and momentarily forgot these were my people. I walked out of the house and into the empty pasture, turning my back on the Road, and felt immediately dispossessed, by the very act of pretending I was not among the dispossessed. Housepaint depends on there being a house. Is there a house? Right now, yes, very much, there is. There is a house my husband and I bought seven or eight years ago, and some of its paint is starting to look very scruffy, where we’ve knocked into it going upstairs, for example. Wanderer. Warrior. Healer. Nurse. Lover. All of these are coming up strongly right now, asking to be seen, asking not to be housepainted-over. Have I said before that Waylon Jennings’ What Makes a Man Wander is an anthem for me? I have, and yet here it is again. I want to wander, when restlessness comes burning and antsy inside me. I want to walk this long body away from housepaint, across continents, into the places that scare me. I want to be the one who walks into town dusty, finds a meal and a fire, and leaves again in the morning, traceless. Have you noticed that this culture skews very much to housepaint? Both in terms of filling in mindlessly, and in terms of establishing a secure fort, painting its insides tastefully, and hunkering down till death do you part. Yesterday afternoon, some horrible yuppie freebie magazine arrived – Tasteful Trends, or some bullshit like that. Make Your Comfort Zone, it enticed from the cover. Fuck that shit, I thought. Fuck it straight into the recycling bin, along with all the appeals for money I can’t meet right now, because I’m broke. It seems to be that whatever level of not-accumulating I’ve set up for myself in life, some feral beast wants the next level, always. When I was a nun, I yearned to be an arms-wandering mendicant. When I was a student, I hankered to be a backpacker. Now I am a whatever-it-is-that-I-am, and I want to ditch everything to be a nomad-therapist-healer, working out of camps no housepaint has ever seen. Do I make any sense? Does this world make any sense? I can feel one way through is just to paint the damn walls, already, and quit feeding the dissatisfied one who will always, always yearn elsewhere. Maybe both can happen? Maybe almond-green walls, PLUS a license to go somewhere else, breathe different air, be reminded that crossing rivers is part of being human, and joining the lines of wanderers extending to both horizons is just as human as staying put. I bow to the wild heart that spasms and throbs, meeting this world with the intensity and discomfort it deserves. Yesterday, outdoors on foot, making a big circle through pre-Spring woods, I thought: With this nature, it is a miracle I am still alive. I can feel the artist-angst here, and feel also how it’s been grounded, though not painted over, not now, not ever. I fall to one knee, taken by mud, and sit listening to squirrels’ scolding and old leaves’ rattling, till wandering Elliot comes to breathe love, right into my upturned face. Lumpy crossings stick out of the floor that’s still not smoothed under that new bamboo laminate I picked out months ago. I can still see the ugly old green linoleum, plus the even older, even uglier beige linoleum, over there in the corner, underneath where the dishwasher used to be, when I still had a dishwasher, or dishes to do. When I still had a stove, a sink, a refrigerator, and stuff to put in the cupboards. When, in other words, there still was a kitchen in here, instead of a vaguely kitchen-shaped hole. I can’t even make the recipe for Jean-Paul Sartre Casserole right now, because there’s not an oven to stare at hopelessly, while nothing cooks, forever.
Lumpy crossings, I trip on you. Lumpy crossings, I try to deny you, write you out of my will, cut off your access to my bank accounts, but here you still are, ideally placed for me to stub my toes on, spill my coffee over, and crash into. Lumpy crossings, you stop me in my tracks, embarrass me in public places, and declare the ongoing disaster of being. This morning I made my yearly visit to the Seniors of Hanover High School, to answer any and all questions about Buddhism, and to connect as best I can to the lumpy crossings of our lives. We go in a big circle around the room. Kid Two, right on cue, asks, “If Buddhism teaches that life is suffering, as a Buddhist, how do you keep going?” Aha! I say, That is a thing that drives me up a wall. Buddhism does not in fact teach that Life Is Suffering – it teaches that There Is Suffering, which is a different story. Life Is Suffering brings us only lumpy crossings, and demands that we ignore everything else as somehow irrelevant to the project of Buddhist-ing. You can definitely find people of all faiths who practice in this way, never letting go of the lumps for long enough to enjoy anything. This total wariness towards pleasure counts itself wise, sensible, and prudent, but in fact is a cowardly rejection of beauty, trust, and love. There Is Suffering, on the other hand, allows lumpy crossings as part of life – not anything to be ashamed of, not anything to push away – and integrates them into a whole fabric of being. A couple of nights ago, I dreamed this: I have a bike – my own bike – and I am riding it in big, concentrated circles around a pool, where others are swimming or lounging. I take special time savoring the deep mud puddles I ride through on my nubbly cross-trek tires. It is intensely satisfying to ride, to feel the mud suck and yield, to know that I can do what I need to do, for as long as I need to do it. End. In real life, right now is the mud season in New England, when a whole winter’s worth (well – maybe most of a winter’s worth – April is still fair game) of snow melts and stands and seeps. I dig out my orange plastic boots from where they’ve been stashed in the basement, and delight in wearing them with black rubber-mounted spikes, to navigate the still-icy, very wet woods. I choose the dampest, suckiest, boggiest parts of the path, the slickest, most treacherous parts; the deepest, stillest puddles, and walk through. My socks keep me warm; my boots keep me dry; the dogs run happily amok nearby, executing blissful pliés into the snowmelt, as their Viking hearts desire. Elliot finds a pool of golden afternoon light, a pool of leaf-lined water, and lays his body down, simultaneously soaking and drinking, allowing his furs and skin to bask in this snow-bog time, when nothing much of new growth shows itself, but the old, frozen order is clearly over. Knowing how to love this time of lumpy crossings is absolutely essential, if I’m going to live up here, if I’m going to live at all, and right now I choose both, with a sore, whole heart. The White Dress Project – last September through New Year’s Day – was a time of giddy bridehood – and I’m so glad to have had the space and willingness to live it out. Now is different, though. I have a new suit – a World War II American Red Cross Service nurse’s uniform. Combat, healing, service, blood, and death are here. It’s no nonsense, and the sewing’s different, too. This time, I’m starting with a kind of hula hoop of severed heads, using a Tibetan painting of Kurukulla, the Red Tara, for inspiration. Happy heads, angry heads, spacey heads, bridesheads, loversheads – whack! Take from me all that is not free. I stitch the heads around the waist of my nurse/warrior/healer suit, button myself into it every day, and feel what it’s like to live in this time of lumpy crossings, heartache, and mud puddles. Lumpy crossings hold power, like the kitchen floor in the Hasidic story that has been hiding the long-sought, quested-after treasure, all along. Last night, I came home from a house concert and dinner, opened the Amazon box, took out my new set of face paints, and listened into what was coming to meet. A red cross at the forehead, with a white circle around it. Red vajra-lines extending from the corners of the eyes. White lips, white dots down the nose, white fading to pink at the brows. A fierce gaze born of mud, and letting go the pretty phases of falling in love. Something imperfect, but whole. Something wild and sparkly, unafraid of riding in wet circles around the collective, for as long as it needs to. One of the Hanover kids comes to me after class and asks, tears in her eyes, what to do when things feel impossible. One of my meditation mentees asks if feeling more whole than usual is a normal result of compassion practice. I tell them both Yes. Feel whatever’s there. Stop giving into any idea that being good is a bulwark against future lumpy crossings. The crossings may in fact get lumpier, more painful, deeper. I may soon find puddles so vast they overtop my orange boots, and wind up walking around with two soggy snowmelt tanks fastened to my feet. This will in no way mean Stop seeking out muck. It will in no way mean Stick to the dry path. It will mean I need to find a dry pair of socks, choose a new head to stitch onto my suit, and be with whatever comes calling next. Bottomless loss and infinite pleasure are interconnected with the simple act of finding a reasonable set of clothes to wear, to go talk with some kids about What Is, and what might be, and how to make it through this day, wholly and specifically. This floor is a lumpy crossing. Someone’s dry-erase-markered big, sloppy black hearts onto the upholstery of this library chair. This sparkly sweater came from the thrift store down the street, which means one of those Hanover kids’ moms probably decided it was too lumpy to wear anymore, and now it’s with me. We lump along, you and I, and everyone, finding out together for ourselves what can be done, and where it leads. |
AuthorJulie Püttgen is an artist, expressive arts therapist, and meditation teacher. Archives
November 2019
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108 Names of Now