Strong back, soft belly. Weak back, armored heart. Never leave the house. Never talk to strangers. Never let them see you sweat. Tears are for sissies. Personal armor comes in many forms. What does it take, to feel safe? What assurances do we require from others? What are we willing to put up with, and to what end?
A Facebook ad offers a kind of serrated plastic stabby-ring, with a pink outer layer, intended for women to wear on their fingers while jogging. The ad begins with pictures and stories of two (gorgeous) women who were murdered while out on their daily runs, and cites “these incidents” as the reason why women might be nervous about exercising alone. So, why not buy this affordable, attractive plastic accessory, possibly designed to poke people’s eyes out, though we won’t say that, because it’s gross? Does personal armor have to be attractive? Does it have to be cheap? What about just walking around like a grumpy warthog all the time? Wouldn’t that in some ways be easier? Sometimes, people who have suffered awful abuse use extra weight or bulky clothes to build a barrier between themselves and the world. Thick foundation makeup can do the same thing, and glasses, too. When I go to aikido practice, I have to wear my contact lenses, and thus feel doubly vulnerable: a beginner, face stripped of her habitual armor. Dancing’s different. In the safe space of improvisational movement, sometimes I skip both contact lenses and glasses, allowing blurred edges to settle into wholeness and ease. I've never tried on the kind of body armor that police and military people wear. Is it grounding, like the lead apron at the dentist’s? Does it ease anxiety, like a Temple Grandin people-squeezer; or does it crush you to the earth, the way altitude sickness does? Encased in military-grade personal armor, is it possible to feel touched by another person? Is it possible to feel welcomed by the spaces you enter, and to feel that the spaces you leave might miss you? I will have to ask my friend who is a veteran. Armor shifts. A story begins: some being walks towards danger unarmed, seemingly unprotected. The story continues towards the miraculous, or towards martyrdom; but really, I'm not sure these are different stories. Some being, unarmored, meets what she meets. Without hindrance, there is no fear. Far beyond all inverted views, she is released, exclaiming, Gone, gone, gone beyond, altogether gone, hoorah! That is the aspiration, and sometimes the reality. Also sometimes: I don’t want to die! I don’t want to deal with this! I am so tired of this crap. I’m familiar with a kind of personal armor that looks like: if I just mindfulness hard enough, I won’t fall apart anymore, otherwise known as, if I just squeeze hard enough, I’ll be shitting diamonds in no time. Now I don’t think that’s how it actually works, and my sense is that wanting to patch together some kind of Eightfold Armor is a perversion of the human heart. I haven’t always felt this way. During my monastic jihad phase (why does it feel so risky to write jihad?), I was all about rooting out defilements, and streamlining myself into a form of being so thin and clear that nothing could stick to it. I would become a human Stealth Bomber, orbiting the earth at such a high altitudes that nothing could touch me. Coated in special invisibility paint, I would communicate with the mother-planet only when I needed fuel. That was what part of me wanted. Then I would wake up, and step in bare feet on the latest mouse-spleen that Sita-the-cat had left on the carpet. I would enjoy working with a friend to shape canned tuna into a monastic buffet Leviathan. I would, inevitably, fall in love again with the world, with some monk, and with the clay sticking to my heavy boots, as I clomped up the hill to my homeless home. I mindfulnessed pretty fucking hard in those years, having joined the Foreign Legion of mindfulnessing. And still: I would fall apart, and it would be extra-hard, because I had set not-falling-apart, not being touched, as my measure of success. I was supposed to be a Stealth Bomber, a Hopeless Diamond, not some hungry, skinny person trying to hose down a very unhappy cat. I was supposed to watch my mind, to nip delusion in the bud, in hopes of never having to return to this vale of tears. These days, I can't say that I'm always super-stoked about this vale of tears, this ocean of sorrows, but at least I'm turning towards it with a sense that this a perfectly reasonable place to be, given human birth. Oh! This is anxiety, not some terrible existential mistake. This is doubt. This is longing. This is falling for the nine-hundredth time into the hole labeled My Family Doesn’t Understand Me, which seems to widen noticeably around the holidays, especially during years where I prepare to make the pilgrimage back to the old country. What if I just called this season The End Times, in honor of the hinge of the year, and the deep dive into darkness that we in the Northern Hemisphere are currently making together? (Thanks, Southern Hemisphere, for holding the torch of daylight, while we go down. We’ll return the favor in June.) That would be a way of dropping the armor of I Am Supposed to Be Enjoying This, and settling into curiosity. I wonder what will happen beyond the end of the world, this time? I am transforming a little book formerly known as Letter from an Airman to His Mother into a Christmas gift for my mother. It's growing intuitively: a gold nugget, an engraved horse on a black background, jellyfish at night, dusk-colored butterflies, a river-womb. The original text was some young man's exhortation to his mom not to be sorry if the Luftwaffe shot him down. I'm using the bones of his armored book to make anti-armor, a declaration of the unknown, a strange and watery mirror through which the energy of an open heart might pulse. It’s a chance to try something new, to go from posturing into feeling, to be torn apart, and come back transformed. Who knows what this will bring? My gluey fingers touch the pages, sensing their way towards some new, unarmored truth. The closest I’ve come to a regular date with a laundromat is my relationship with the dusty room under the apartment building on Lafayette Drive that was my last home in Atlanta. There was some trick to fooling its dryer into restarting, which was important, as one cycle was never enough. You would reach into its cavities, tickle a certain spot – and whoosh! The ancient beast would lumber back to life for another round of tumbling, tangling, and scorching. Dust would fly, the ancient lint would with mingle with the new, and out would emerge all the clothing I needed for another week’s Catholic school teaching.
My first year at the school, I never wore any underwear. I had reached some kind of underground agreement with my animal self: You show up and keep growling and biting to a minimum, and I will leave your hindquarters unbound. Deal? Deal. In my defense, at the time I didn't know how to find underpants that weren’t actively oppressive to wear. I was also still close enough to my hard-core monastic minimalism that I squirmed at the idea of buying useless garments. Money was for art supplies. Money was for food, rent, travel, and shows. Underpants, especially the ridiculous thong-things that everybody’s equally ridiculous low-rise jeans were always flashing? I don’t think so. Less to put in my weekly wash in the basement; less to organize in my dresser. So I checked the girls’ uniforms for modesty when I was asked to do so, but always with a certain degree of cognitive dissonance. At or below the knee, but secretly: no knickers necessary. The girls wore skorts. Who would have known? We bought a house. We bought a house, and when we did, I could hardly believe our luck: two massive, chiming machines, gleaming white, side-by-side. The washer shakes the whole house with its spin cycle, as though we are about to take off in a convoy over the mountains. We have two laundry baskets now, and maybe more, because Timothy works in finer gradations than merely clean/not-clean. (He’s a nondual laundricist, which I think is related to being a philosopher.) In short, after many years of suboptimal laundry lives, we are all sorted out. I appreciate this, and yet I’m aware that this is exactly the sort of comfort that keeps people from making revolution in the streets. You become more or less able to pay your bills whenever they arrive, you learn to shop for comfortable underwear (it exists! It’ll cost you, but it’s there), and the hungry wolf gleam in your eyes gets muted by drawers full of clean, well-folded clothes. That's the thing. When I was still a nun, laundry was an ordeal. First, since you only owned two sets of clothes, and they were white, and you lived in the middle of a mudfield, you had to clean them all the time. Second, “laundry,” meant buckets left soaking in chilly, uncomfortable places. Third, when it was cold, sometimes there was no choice but to set everything to line-dry outdoors, from thence to pluck it, stiff as a board, at whatever point you decided it was “dry.” Sometimes, there was a sort of suspended indoors rack, and that was much better – your clothes actually did dry, and there was something magical about wandering in the warm, close fug of hanging brown and white monastic whatnots, under half-light. At no point in any of that process could a person forget want, dirt, and cyclical work. Monastic laundry was an exercise in scarcity, precarity, and inconvenience – it kept the wolf-gleam in your eyes. It kept you aware of the labor inherent in being alive, and some of the inconveniences of poverty. It also meant, I think, that we didn’t fear poverty: there we were, in the midst of some version of it, and yet basically OK. Still drinking cups of tea, and wandering winter fields with our souls alive and yearning. Not comfortable, no, but look: so many socks belonging to so many feet. So many muck-buckets of robes going through the self-same cycles as mine. It's not always easy, when the system is working like magic for you, to remember that it's not working like magic for everyone. In fact, what looks like magic for you most likely looks like malediction for someone else. Remember a few weeks ago, when American Airlines canceled all their flights into Delhi, due to poor air quality? Well – it turns out that India is the American fossil fuels industry’s laundromat. Crunch tar sands into fuel (already a very bad idea), and you’re left with residues so horrible that they’re not even allowed to exist in this country. What to do? Sell it to India of course, so they can burn it while making all the stuff we buy over here. It’s truly ingenious! We have crap we want off our hands. They will pay to launder it for us, and return attractive goods. Hoorah! Magic. Except: the residues in question – called petcoke (which makes them sound like a cross between a virtual animal and something you snort off a mirror) – contain seventeen times the levels of sulfur allowed in coal in this country. India-as-laundromat-and-magic-goose isn't working out so great for India. Do we ever ask what happens to the dirty air and water, downstream of our new, clean stuff? Once, I was driving through rural Georgia when a horrible sight stopped me. There, off the side of the road, was an open, gushing pool, full of black water. Truly, unnaturally black. Black-black. I pulled into the compound, got out of my car, and asked what this was. Oh, blue jeans, you know? There’s a Wrangler plant just up the road, and this is where we process their dye-baths. I had never thought about this. How do you get clothes dark, and what happens next? The liquid I was looking at would have melted flesh from bone, I felt sure. Everywhere, every pair of jeans requires this. Not magic: pools of poison, kept very far indeed from retail shelves and advertising campaigns. My friend’s friend wanted to know about meat, and so they slaughtered her duck together. The body of this animal, in their hands. Plucking, gutting, cleaning, cracking bones, cooking, eating. In this way, we know. The other way – I’ll have the duck, please – we don’t. When we launder our experience of grit and consequences, we are left uprooted and anxious. A young man comes to see me, wanting to learn about the roots of his anxiety. Here’s an answer: Your blue jeans. Here are some more: The stuff you buy, that’s made in India. The Bear’s Ears, desecrated and mined. Generations of children with damaged lungs. Endless war. The young man’s mother wants to know if his anxiety is her fault, and I ask if she knows about the epidemic that’s been sending people to the ER all over the place. Has she been tapping everyone from here to Oakland who shows up to the hospital in the middle of the night, convinced they’re dying? Busy lady. She laughs. Together, we can do the laundry, but it’s going to require getting messy, and we’re going to have to stop outsourcing our dirty work to those who can least afford to do it. Hyena. O Hyena. No one makes charismatic calendars of you. No one photographs you against the sunlight, with the wind riffling your furs. Your furs are gobbeted with carrion, and as for the sun, well, you’re not in the habit of posing nobly for it. Hyena, you show up to eat whatever’s not moving fast enough to get away, and you don't bother much with whether it’s dead or not-dead. As long as chunks of it will fit between your powerful jaws, well, you're golden. Not golden. No, you're never that. Fed. And that is your gift.
Hyena will eat the faces off sleeping people, and that's obviously horrible, but it's worth pointing out she'll eat the butts off dead wildebeest, too. It's not like Hyena is looking for sleepers to maul. She's a meat-seeking missile, and not very particular about what she finds. You’ll never see Hyena in that episode of Portlandia where the couple asks too many questions about the chicken’s provenance, and wind up living in an abusive farm-cult. Hyena doesn’t care. Is it meat? Can my jaws fit around it? Voila. Actually, I wonder. Would Hyena care for the chickens horribly immured in Tyson meat-silos? Or would she slink away, horrified by a stench even Hyena can't abide? Stack upon stack of de-beaked, de-clawed, near-immobile birds, shitting on each other's heads while fattening relentlessly on the powdered remains of their ancestors. Hyena turns to the house, looking for something juicier, with sleep apnea. Lately I've been feeling Hyena energy a lot in myself, as a kind of irresistible pull towards the dark underbelly of things that would prefer to remain all bright face, all the time. I walk in, sniff something hidden, and my jaws tighten. Hyena-nose, knows. Here’s a thing that no one wants to acknowledge. Here's a question that brings the whole endeavor out of its conventional disequilibrium. So, why are we doing things this way? When we say this, don't we really mean that? When you come home, and I want to bite your face, what does that mean? Carrying Hyena energy to term is exhausting, not least because nobody wants to always be the dark fairy at the feast. Couldn't I just once be a fairy who actually receives an engraved invitation, and has a golden bowl with her name on it waiting at the table? Couldn’t I happily piece together my cashmere fairy-outfit, while humming pleasant spells to myself? Right now, no. Right now, this is not my work. What I mean by carrying hyena energy to term is not some Rosemary’s Baby kind of scenario at all. Instead, it's a commitment to being with old pain when it wakes up, squalling, and finding out how to feel it without fearing it. I am walking down a logging road in the far North of New Hampshire with Timothy, when it starts up. No one will ever love me. There is no place for me in this world, and my voice cannot be heard. Ah. Hyena starts eating my insides, but I’m not willing to let her have that meal. So, what else could be present? I realize I need to poop. I tell Timothy, There’s some old pain rearing up right now, plus, I need to poop. He stops with Elliot, and Chloe follows me into an old, logged clearing off a side road. Which tree? That one: small, maple, deciduous, off to the side, good for leaning against. Poop! Out comes some hyena, kindly met by frosty ground. Wet leaves make excellent toilet paper, and Chloe is a good woods-pooping mentor. What else? My voice. My voice is strangled from the inside right now. Timothy suggests Here Comes the Sun, which is not on Hyena’s Top 40, but works fine as a warm-up. We come to Slewgundy, a fine, smooth oxbow in the Dead Diamond River. More voicework – sounding, squawking, singing together, voices building as we, sure enough, drink in the sun. Chloe and Elliot dry their river-soaked hyena-furs on the rocky shore. On the way home, we sing round after round, weaving our voices together in harmony and listening. Did I know that Hyena wanted sentimental Thich Nhat Hahn songs? No, not at all. Would it work again? Definitely not as a formula, but as a general approach, noticing that Hyena is waking up, and attending to her, feels essential. O Hyena – you are eating away the dead parts of the world, the habits that no longer work, the sad magic of pretending. You are welcome to that work, and if I steer you away sometimes from what is sleeping, but not dead, I thank you for the reminder to wake up. People have wolf t-shirts and wolf notebooks. Every conservation organization in the US wants me to send back the nickel they’ve hot-glued to their mailing, and Save the Wolf. PETA and the ASPCA share gruesome urgings to end cruelty in dog-world. But nobody ever asked me to protect the Hyena. That’s a mission I’ve had to come to all by myself, a secret commitment that no one’s going to salute via free, personalized holiday greeting cards and mailing labels. So be it. Day after day, I embroider my white wedding dress, and day after day I wear it for the photographic record I am keeping. The white dress, surprisingly, is my Hyena suit – the one that shows me to myself. Here, naked, in long-johns, in boots, on new snow. Here, shedding all the old agreements not to speak of this, and not to notice that. Timothy has a Hyena suit too, which includes one of the first items of non-white clothing I owned after leaving the monastery. It’s a brown fleece jacket that somehow wound up in a plastic bin full of stinking, rotten potatoes. After that, it was so horrible to be around that he left it out on the front lawn in the snow and mud for a whole winter. In spring, he washed it, and started wearing it again, paired with some tattered fleece pants from a long-ago expedition to Torres del Paine. The suit becomes a corpse. The corpse lays out in the open. Time and water, wind, snow, and rain bleach its bones. And it comes back. It comes back. When experience has been marked by horror and pain, it can take a long time for all that to work its way through. It can take strong jaws to chew your way out, and the willingness to risk being hurt and hurting others. The creature’s not going to be an easy ally: she’s going to snarl and bite and snap, and you’ll need a steady hand at the back of her neck when she’s preparing to lash out. You’ll need to learn to choose what she meets, and when. You’ll need to learn how to open old cages that neither of you really needs, any more. Distress can be hard to measure, or even to detect. The cost of learning to detect it in others is learning to tolerate it in oneself.
I am hiking in the woods at twilight with the dogs. It's not a trail I know well, and post-storm, the corpses of large downed trees hide the way. Finally, when I get to the low cliff with the knob of cold quartz in it, I call the dogs back to me, and head back down hill. Elliot and Chloe can’t imagine that the trail isn’t plain to me, and so they’re of no use in finding it. Loose, fresh-fallen leaves blanket so many possibilities for what could be a path; and yet, luckily, whoever painted the salmon-orange blazes out here did a thorough job. I keep myself focused on each next passage, each next mark on each next trunk, and put aside the feeling that there’s something here that wants to be lost. So going, we find our way to the bridge just before the road. I keep my distress low, to keep my senses sharp. Once back in the car I’m filled with a deep sadness that seems to intensify as daylight ebbs away. Quarter to five, in the dark. No wonder people don’t want to feel what they feel, I tell myself. Again, something wants to be lost, but instead, I stay with what I’m feeling. There is no place for me in this world. There is no known way forward. I feel distress, for sure, but also a kind of deep love towards it, which transforms it into a kind of pleasurable, lived intensity. I notice I want to stop at the store for coconut milk and tea. Am I even allowed to go into the co-op with a tear-stained face? I can feel the distressing old story that I most certainly am not allowed to be seen this way. Then, that distress eases as I think, Really? When I'm sad and want to cup of tea, I should withhold that comfort? I park in an empty section of the lot, so the dogs won't feel the need to defend my Subaru to the death. I wipe my face with my sleeve, re-knot my hair, make sure there are no leaves or squirrels caught in it, and tell the dogs I’ll be back soon. I wonder if anyone else in there is having a hard time? I wonder, as I walk toward the brightly lit sliding glass doors. This question becomes a guiding curiosity, as I walk around the aisles. Is anyone else feeling the ghost of the holidays like some cyclical curse of exile? Is anyone else in here shopping for warmth and care of a bruised heart? Oh, yes. Yes, oh, yes. There’s the thin, beautiful young woman so paralyzed by the whole process of being here that her eyes can’t meet the shelves, let alone anyone’s gaze. There’s the older woman standing by the dairy case with her friend, looking for a product that isn’t there, while the man restocking the various milks can neither confirm nor deny the reality of her desires. Wait a minute! She’s looking for what I’m looking for, and she’s totally right: it’s not there. There’s a flash of recognition: her distress, my distress, and then some subjective experience of these two needs soothing one another out. Long may we prosper! I exclaim at the end of our second round of conversation, and I really feel this. She tells me she felt, before we talked, like she'd been hallucinating, but now she know she's fine. What we were looking for wasn’t exactly the same thing, but it doesn’t matter: the experience of meeting one another in that lostness has shifted each of us back to ground. My friend Sam, who died about three weeks ago now, had a cutoff black t-shirt he’d printed himself, which said: She who can’t be found is the one I’m looking for. He knew a lot, I suspect, about how acknowledging unfulfillable longing moves it from being a source of distress, into something holy and connected. That connectedness can live anywhere we remember it. I forget all my embroidery thread at home when I go down to Manchester, and so after first ransacking the supplies at the castle to find a single length of conch-pink floss, I take myself to Hobby Lobby to expand my palette. I've never seen a retail space quite so overwhelming as this hanger-sized depot of female creativity, subverted to profit and bad jobs in China. Truly: people here longing, and buying glitter reindeer; people there longing, and flocking glitter reindeer for miserable wages. Somehow inevitably, after I track down my thread, I find myself in the wedding-crap aisle. First, I notice that Hobby Lobby’s ideal of marriage is still very much A Man and A Woman – their in-house brand is Mr. & Mrs. Still, if you’re gay and hoping to deploy a lot of China-made crap at your special day, you’re in luck, because all Mr. & Mrs. brand wedding accessories are 50% off. You can buy double, and pass off the unused half of it all to the matching same-sex couple (Mr. & Mr. to your Mrs. & Mrs.) down the road. Ha. You’ll have to get more creative with the cake-toppers, because those mini-people are fused together, and sometimes there’s a cross thrown in for extra blob-heft. Probably this should be a warning: Danger! Distress ensues when marriage is envisioned as a blobbing-together of human-units and flower-shaped crosses. Beware! Mandatorily-tiny white women sheltered in the arms of mandatorily-tall white men may not exist, and are in any case not clinically guaranteed to lead happy lives. I stop shuddering and become curious. What is here? I notice a rack of very small cast-plastic frames, intended for conveying table place-assignments. They are spectacularly ugly, in a way that tips over into beauty, and I find myself thinking of all the longings enshrined in this vast, cynical wonderland. I see the woman composing a green tulle wreath in her cart; I see the woman buying a talking goose for her baby granddaughter to dance with. It strikes me that the black Mr. & Mrs frames might be wonderful for SHE WHO CAN’T BE FOUND IS THE ONE I’M LOOKING FOR I see myself making up a hundred and eight of these, and hot-gluing them all over the towns where Sam once lived. But then, sensing the distress in such an over-gesture, I scale myself back. Sam made one shirt; I can make two frames; and then see. I bring myself back from the brink of craft-store madness, re-center in intimate remembering, and head for the registers. The next room will be the one where suddenly, everything fits together perfectly, and no one looks at me like I am from outer space. It will be amazing! Suddenly I will find that it's possible to simply welcome all my parts, and find that they are welcome, too, without all the tiresome shape-shifting and self-editing that all the other rooms seem to require. I won’t be told, This is a Buddhist/psychological/professional/scientific/family-friendly/academic/arts-based room, so kindly take your bag of eels someplace else. Nope. The next room will be the one where my bag of eels, and your bag of giraffes, and his bag of dicks will all be welcome, just as they are. Did I just write bag of dicks? Shit. I guess I’m in that room already. One male friend once made an impassioned plea to another male friend, who’d just said bag of dicks with great relish, to please never use that phrase again. I get it. I super-get-it. Why take what’s tender and sensitive, honest to the point of inability to hide its true likes and dislikes, and put it in a bag of ridicule? No, no, no. Still, what are we going to do with the current room, the one where all of a sudden, all the lady-people, plus some of the men-people, are talking about all the assault and rape and hurt? It’s very tempting to want bags for all of that, to want bags for all the perpetrators, to want to shove all of it back into some room, maybe the one it all came from in the first place? But that room is crumbling, and all the bags have holes, through which eels and penises and inconvenient truths are wriggling out. Via Facebook, my friend Shakeema recently introduced me to a genius who, under the name of Sailor J, publishes dystopian YouTube beauty tutorials. At one point, she explains, Perhaps in a better world, women wouldn’t need to contour, seeing as it has nothing to do with experimentation, or artistry. Since it’s simply for the dick, we have to do it. Damn! That woman knows how to shred some bags. Out come all the things that have nothing to do with anything even vaguely satisfying, but we have to do them. Brr! There goes homework, there goes biting your tongue, there goes being pleasant when you feel like a bag of hyenas. There goes forgetting altogether what you wanted, because this is what you have to do. As she attempts to erase her nose with makeup, Sailor J explains, Men love pterodactyls, sealing her place in my heart forever. The next room will be where we actually pay attention to and acknowledge how we feel, versus obsessing about how we think everyone else should feel. In that room, we’ll keep opening the possibility that there’s space for feeling what we feel, without being pushed around by it.
How about that Mr. Alabama Senator, in the next room? Wouldn’t it be great if he could respond to the current round of denouncements sort of like this: When I was 32, and working as a district attorney, I felt incredibly lonely. I hadn’t earned enough yet to feel I was worthy of marrying anyone, and to be honest, I was dead scared of what I knew about myself. You see, when I was a kid there wasn’t anyone around I could talk to about sexual desire. In church it sounded like all that was supposed to stay in the next room until I was married, but then, what about what was already happening in my body? I was fourteen, and something was burning me up from the inside that nobody had any words for. My father was a good man, but hard, and I’d’ve sooner talked with him about the plague, than about what I was feeling in my body. Then I heard some other boys talking about Jolie from down the road, and how she’d let you touch her down there, if you brought her a dollar. This surprised me. Jolie? Her dad and brothers were men no one talked to, and there was something side-eyed about that whole house… But if a dallor was going to get me closer to the next room without having to wait for marriage, you can bet I was going to do what it took to earn and spend that dollar. That's where it started. Jolie made it clear what I was allowed to do with her, but one day I forced her to go further, and then what? She didn't have anyone she could turn to, because the deal was rotten from the start. I started forcing myself on her pretty regularly after school, knowing no one would help her, and I started telling myself that it was her fault all along for being a slut. But I hated myself every time I came, and I guess I never learned how else to work with desire. So, yeah, of course, there I was at thirty-two, still looking for Jolie at fourteen in every girl in town I thought I could use, and some others besides. I know this doesn't excuse what I've done, but honestly, can you tell me how else this could’ve turned out? Do you really think I’m the only one in the Senate who’s got this problem? Can you help me in some way? If Mr. Alabama could say this, it would open the entrance to the next room, the one where the current round of denunciations would turn a corner into vulnerability. We're getting way better at outing evil and abuse, and that's incredibly important. But we’re also going to need to get better at confession, restitution, rehabilitation, and systematic reform in the weeks and months and years to come, for any kind of real progress to take hold. I read this morning that Republicans are requesting that Jeff Sessions should step in as a write-in candidate for the Senate job he left only a few months ago. Quick! Tie the eels back up again! Close the door to that room! Avoid change at any cost! We do not want to hear about your teen-rape past, and we do not want to acknowledge that anyone except Our Righteous Father should hold power, ever. Given his behavior so far, and the respectablility he still enjoys, I'd say the odds of Mr. Alabama ever admitting wrongdoing are pretty fucking slim. I'd say the odds of any of his compatriots coming out about their own shady pasts are virtually nonexistent. But how great would it be if Jeff sessions, instead of standing by, or agreeing to backtrack, said something like this: No, I'm sorry. If the point here is whether past sexual violence precludes government service, I'm going to have to step down, too. You see, like my colleague here, no one ever helped me understand desire when I was a kid, and I've been carrying around my own dark stories for years. I’ve been getting away with everything I can, ever since I learned that’s how the world works. So you’re going to have to find another solution. Like maybe Jolie Smith? I hear she’s been doing excellent work representing her district. The next room always requires a password made of risk. Today, because we have no choice, we must risk our hands, reaching out to understand one another. Brr! But I don’t want to touch a rapist. Quite possibly true. Don’t. There are rooms and rooms full of garbage, with methane flames burning off the extra gas. There are rooms and rooms of truths no one wants told, because no one wants to be seen in the company of those truths. And yet, listening into the body, all the keys are there, and every once in a while, the right door opens. In my teenagerhood, I considered New York City the locus of all things cool, sleek, loud, sophisticated, and beautiful. It was the opposite of the South and the suburbs, where I lived. My senior year I went with three other girls to stay with a friend’s mom, who was then working as an Episcopal priest in Jersey City. She was wonderful with us, taking us to lunch at La Mela in Little Italy; to Canal Jeans and Pearl Paint; to see Gypsy on Broadway. We ate and walked and bought our way through the city, sucking in everything from the vast expanse of sky available at the top of the Empire State building to the deep earth-rumblings of the subway. I remember the taste of tart tomato sauce and lush elastic mozzarella cushioning eggplant fried in more olive oil than I’d ever imagined possible. That trip was an opening into another world, one not mediated by my family’s ideas of what was right, wrong, or in good taste. In important ways, I began to understand that while my family was well-traveled - cosmopolitan, even - there were important tranches of the world that they knew nothing about, and some of those realms held real treasure for me.
When I chose to go to Yale, I entered into another relationship with New York City, one mediated by my friendship with Stephanie (who’d been my best friend in high school and was attending Barnard), and by my love of making and witnessing art. I’d take the Metro-North train down to the city to visit Stephanie maybe twice a year, and then a couple more times to see art shows and frequent the photo- and paint-emporia for studio supplies. When I moved into an unfurnished off-campus apartment in 1993, I went to Chinatown to buy a futon, which I carried home on my back from New Haven Station – an arduous task that matched my then-allegiance towards frugality and self-sufficiency. The futon never stopped smelling of the weird chemicals it was steeped in, but never mind. By then, I, too, reeked of chemistry from the darkroom, and so it was a match. I have never been so cold as in New York City, on an ill-considered visit that must've coincided with a spell back in the US from my post-graduate stint with the Yale China Association. Back then, I thought about what to do much more from the perspective of how it would look from the outside, rather than how it would feel from the inside. So whatever jacket I may have had was totally inadequate to the wind blasting down dark canyons between buildings. Back then, Starbucks was a new phenomenon, one that had crept in while I was away in Asia. I remember shivering in one Starbucks after another, taking shelter on my New York-dyslexic journeys through the city. True, my legs probably did look nice in their thin black tights, but, what the fuck? I felt on the verge of death, disoriented and freezing, as I tried to find places that shouldn’t have been hard to locate, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This business of my not orienting to the same grid that seems so obvious to New York City dwellers has been ongoing for me, with the only period of respite coming during the year when Timothy was teaching at NYU, and had a studio apartment in faculty housing on Bleecker Street. Then, I gradually did what I think all city-people do: I started to form a network of connections between the above-ground world and the world of subterranean passages. I learned to sight a kind of intimate constellation marked out in embodied experiences: here is the burrito joint with the small courtyard garden out back. Here’s the patisserie with the almond croissants so close to home that they’re still warm when you untie the box’ red-and-white striped string. Here’s the movie theater that shows arid documentaries, and the one with the six-legged rat. Here’s the way to the river. My frozen inability to distinguish directions began to thaw, and I started to know, when I popped my head back above ground like a gopher, which way to go. Just last week, I returned to New York City for 10 minutes of bureaucratic process at the Swiss Consulate in Midtown. I boarded an early morning bus, after Timothy dropped me off, found out I had bought a ticket for the wrong month, and also that the bus was sold out. I hunkered down in the back seat and waited. Sure enough – someone no-showed, the bus started moving, and I found myself among sleepy others making the long journey south. When the bus dropped us off outside Grand Central Station, I was immediately aware of feeling basically not-attuned to the energy of this hard, fast, noisy place. I made my way to the marketplace inside, found all the surfaces too slippery, and proceeded into the main hall. Magnificent, yes, but also somehow scuffed and fretful. Down to the food court, sniffing around: What’s good to eat? What does the body want? I circumambulated, aware of how strange it felt to be seeking nourishment deep underground, with so many strangers. The longest line was for a burger joint whose sister I’d tried with a friend years ago, so I went there, savoring the companionship of the wait, and the opportunity to really see people, now that I had a digital food-alarm to justify my observer’s stance. The food, when it came, was coldish. In my haste to find a table refuge-place, I forgot to pick up salt, mustard and ketchup, lacking the city-rat’s instinct for refinements that may cost jostling, but pay off in pleasure. I found I did not want to cram experience in. I found my NH instincts for open spaces and comfortable roosts stayed with me, and so I sat and read in the dappled sunlight outside the New York Public Library till it was time for my appointment. After ten minutes of fingerprinting and photo-taking, I took the train to Brooklyn, and gravitated toward the exact spot my friend Louise and I, and her then-newborn baby, had enjoyed in Prospect park a few years ago. Shoes off, feet connecting with ground, heart opening to the vast blue sky and this unexpected miracle of a midcity meadow, I moved through my tai chi forms, allowing them to do their work of anchoring body, mind, and space. Staying with Louise and her family nearby was a continuation of this way of being. By necessity, by homing instinct, my friends’ lives are not lives of outward-seeking and outward-seeming, but rather of nurture and carefully cultivated domestic space. Louise makes pizza, and her now-talkative, alert little daughter negotiates how to eat this her way (no olives!). We make our companionable way through a ritual of dinner that could be happening anywhere from the Hopi Reservation to Brussels. New York City, once a miracle of becoming and locus of longing, is now for me a series of bodily impressions, a network of friendships, a reminder that the strategies for self-regulation that serve me well in semi-rural New England can serve me well anywhere. I ride the subway to catch the train home from Penn Station. I am aware of the violence that could unfurl right now, in any place where people gather. I am aware, too, of the solidity of my feet on the ground, as a loose dance flows between my hips and the rails’ uneven surfaces; between this body and our swaying, beautiful, shared world. Lilac wine: Nina Simone sings the elixir of Spring, distilled. Summer distills itself through October sunlight on parking deck pillars, and on the nubbled yellow edges of train platforms. Lilac wine is like unicorn-horn powder. I’ve never had it. I imagine it’s pleasant. I’m glad when I hear about it, but it doesn’t have anyplace to land in this sensorium. That’s the way it is, with the edges of what I know. I can maybe locate which edge I think something might live near, but unless I’ve actually encountered it, I can’t know for sure. Lilac wine might be some awful hooch, or it might be the amritsar nectar in that silver ewer, back in Bhutan, the one with the gilt Silk Road embellishments and the peacock-feather stopper. A whole lot like fresh, clean spring water, with the possible addition of other devotees' cooties on the slender, graceful spout.
Lilac wine: nostalgia. Lilac wine: qu’importe le flacon, pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse Lilac wine: the sobriety of entering the senses without reservation. I tear vigorous tendrils of wild grape off the lilacs every year. Every year, the vines come back. Every year the lilacs flower, and every year they are drowned in grape, creeper, and some unnamed, thorny-yet-decorative monster. Lilac wine is beauty crowning and drowning, asserting itself and surrendering again till rescue comes. Is it always like this, being human? Beauty crowns, then drowns again, until we are touched again by some reminder of our true nature. In dreams sometimes I go so far into bewilderment that the focused attention of my whole being is required, in order to come back to beauty. I am trying to go home, but I don’t know the way. Before I set out, I have to use these expensive tickets I’ve bought for Chemotherapy! The Musical. Who will go with me? And how will I find my seat? I am running down city streets at night, but I don’t know which way to go. Which street leads back to the place where I last remembered the way home? I wake to the yipping of coyotes, pull out one earplug, let in their perfectly wild, bewildering song, laugh, roll over, and remember breath, gravity, and field. I find my benefactors, remember bewilderment as itself, and not as the whole truth. Sleep comes again: the lilac wine of beauty, distilled and restored. Turning towards existence with a basic desire to know involves an endless stream of remembering and forgetting. Also, it involves everything, which is a distinct problem if you are hoping to hold on to any kind of stance about Us and Them. Lilac wine drowns us all, without preference. Anoints us all. Courses through our molecules, a connective fluid. I am walking around looking for lunch, before my train home leaves Penn Station. I notice there is hardly anything on this street that is not an enormous chain enterprise. I notice that the disused former phone booths under the scaffolding have become parking spaces for homeless people in wheelchairs. I notice one deli with two doors, offering the kind of food I actually want to eat, instead of feeling like I am settling for I should eat. Blueberries and scallions, small mozzarella balls cut in half, cold tortellini and sun-dried tomatoes. I notice how much harder it is to meet the needs of desperate-looking people outside the station. Easier to give online. Funds fly out quietly while I am not looking, and no one has to ask. If someone were to hold a cardboard sign asking for lilac wine, would I know how to answer? A spray-painted, fat, one-eyed, navy-blue rabbit winks from the base of a train power-pillar. Stray marks of creativity are lilac wine flowing from the hands of unknown people. Do I say enough in these essays, to take what happens, and turn it into wine for you? Sometimes what happens is still so unripe that I don’t know how to stand knee-deep in it and press out the wine. My aikido teacher, who makes wine, apologizes for the state of his grape-purpled fingernails. As a painter, I don’t mind. As a student of this precisely kind, powerful person, I don’t mind. My teacher showing me how to pin his arm behind his back twists lilac wine from what I do not know. I am squeezing wine out of living. Do you know what it is like when you go straight towards the thing you fear most, and an opening arises where you never imagined one could be? I don’t know much about Harry Potter (I’ve only read the first book), but what I am describing is like running full tilt at the wall between Platforms 9 and 10, on desperate faith that Platform 9½ might show itself to you in this way. The hurt parts of the self are saying no, no, no, but there’s something else that wants more than anything to move beyond the safe, known, and presently visible. You run at the impossible, and something new rises to meet you. Oh! Lilac wine. I’ve never tasted you before. I’d heard, but I had no idea it could be this way. Thank everything I took this risk. Thank everything for all the times I’ve lugged out the clippers and chopped off those ever-drowning vines. Thank everything I listened when I heard: lilac wine. The taste of home, guessed, but not till now experienced. Yesterday I was in the city for a ten-minute appointment to renew my Swiss passport. In some ways, this was total bullshit. Expensive, time-sucky, tiring. But even so, I found I could follow the grain of the embodied city into places and moments of refuge. The gallery inside the New York Public Library, with its mashed-up prints of women wearing fountains and alligators. A small, tree-dappled metal table outside the library. The vast, golden field of Prospect Park, just right for barefoot tai chi, and for the blessing of a red-tailed hawk tearing the air overhead. Then, this morning, time for talking with my friend Louise, pressing out the wine of our lives’ truths as they are right now, while eating oatmeal, and paying attention to little Beatrix’ demonstration of the key features of her excellent pajamas. I did not go out in quest of museums or galleries, as in the past I might have. Still, attunement to beauty was with me every step, dancing the subway rails’ uneven rhythm, feeling into the body of the world. Lilac wine is just this: the sweetness of surrendering to the ordinary-extraordinary as it is, in every moment, without hope of recompense, or of rescue. Up in flames, the idea that old pain resolves completely one day, and is replaced by some new version of being human, where the good moods stick around forever, and all obstacles can be met graciously, without a hint of faceplanting into frailty. Up in flames, this heart, this body-mind.
A friend told me yesterday he’d raped. Up in flames, the idea that those we love are somehow members of a separate, blameless category of humans. I've known this for a long time, of course, but there's a first time for everything. A number of friends over the years have told me they've been raped, but no one had ever come out to me before as having forced another human being into sex. Now what? My standard Buddhist strategy for not going up in flames is to fall back on the section of the Seven Branch Prayer that places me solidly within a continuum of having committed, at some point among millions of lives, every kind of transgression possible: I confess to all evil acts committed by me From beginningless time until now, Influenced by the defilements, The five that ripen immediately, The ten non-virtuous acts, And many more. Basically, the whole thing has been up in flames forever. Where’s the news in a little more horror? That’s where I went first. Next, what came up was the memory of drowning the sick bunny I bought in Hong Kong at a time of great loneliness. White, fuzzy, sweet: what could possibly go wrong? His butthole didn’t work. Or maybe the problem was elsewhere in his body, but in any case, the bunny never once shat in the week I had him. He got frailer and sicker, and I found his suffering intolerable. To make things worse, the weekend was coming – one of the long ceremonial periods connected with Chinese ancestral observances – and a typhoon was blowing in off the Pacific. My veterinarian friend couldn’t help. Friday night, storm raging, bunny held in my hand against my chest, I filled a red plastic bucket with water, and took it out into the back yard. I plunged the bunny into it, and held him down. My story had been that he wanted to die, but his scrabbling feet at the bottom of the bucket told me that the instinct for life was strong in him, and that I was the one who wanted this death. After he stopped struggling, I used a rusty old cleaver to dig a hole under the clementine tree, while the wind whipped around, the lightning flashed, and sheets of rain came down all around us. I placed the limp little body in the hole, and covered it with wet soil. Afterwards, I felt tainted, separated from the continuum of life by sorrow, by knowledge of myself as someone who had both reached out to a helpless being – in Hong Kong the pet- and meat-markets were intimately connected with one another – two sets of wire cages containing the same species, at either end of a long, smelly row – and who’d in the name of release turned against him when things got hard. It took a long time to shake that sense of being marked by my actions, separated from the community of being. I told my friend this story as a way to draw close to his sense of being marked and separated by the violence he had done. I told him about the Thich Nhat Hahn poem Call Me By My True Names, where the narrator sees himself both as the young girl who drowns herself after being raped, and the pirate who raped her. I did all these things, and yet, I could tell something in me still needed to go up in flames. My friend asked, How do you learn to call someone by their true names? Later, having completed my sewing and photography and writing for the day, I noticed I felt ill, awful, cramped, nauseous. Standing at the kitchen sink with my husband nearby, a powerful feeling came over me, accompanied by two questions: What would their mothers have wanted me to say to you? Did you hurt them? I realized, in my responses to my friend's disclosure, I'd taken an above-the-storm view. I hadn’t allowed myself to feel what I needed to feel: the horror of being forced, abused, disregarded. I sensed into this, as the pain in the back of my neck got stronger, along with the sense of being held underwater, like the bunny years ago. I've learned not to try to shake something like this through distraction, when I have the space and resources to let it roll on through. Timothy kindly offered to do the dishes, and I went upstairs to fill the bath. Once in, once warm, once safely in that womb of release, I listened for what wanted to come, what wanted to go up in flames. Tears – not comfortable ones – but soundless sobs, racking, shallow breaths, shuddering through the body. I remembered my date kicking me across the room after prom, and no one saying anything about it, least of all me. It was all so awful – what was there to say? Plus we were all drunk, and drunk teenagers are by definition outside the law. Who could help, among these flames? I remembered helpless childhood sorrow at being the recipient of adult rages all out of proportion to anything I might have done. I remembered, in short, all the times my body and being have gone up in flames, hurt, helpless, unhelped. But this time was different: I could intentionally go back to the feeling of the warm water for a break. I could remember my benefactors. I could feel what I was feeling as This is what hurts feels like. Everywhere, right now, are beings who are hurt. Since beginningless time, we have hurt others, and been hurt. May we know comfort. So this is the gift I can bring back to my friend – the possibility of allowing himself to go up in flames, consumed by the hurt he has caused. How? By allowing himself to feel fully and consciously the hurt he himself has experienced in the course of his life. This agreeing to burn is how we learn to call one another by our true names, and I am afraid that there is no alternative, if what we really want to learn is compassion. That’s not at all an appealing process, I will admit. Who wants to be reminded of drowning a bunny, twenty-plus years ago, mid-storm, tears of horror and failure mixing with rain in the freaky light of some raging storm? Who, in processing past wrong deeds, wants to enter completely into the body and being of those whose integrity we’ve transgressed? None of us, really, but then, we have no choice, if we really want to heal. Another Thich Nhat Hahn memory: in his quiet voice, somewhere in the midst of a long Dharma talk, he pronounces: Today, Because we have no choice, We must risk our hands, Reaching out To stroke the tiger’s whiskers. The day I arrived in the tiny nuns’ community in Devon, shortly after my novice ordination, a mostly-deflated mylar tiger balloon floated down from the sky to my hand. Here, honey, it said. You’ll be going up in flames, but the good news is, I’m worth all the burn. Knife me, said basically no one except Chris Burden, who also said, Shoot me right here. Do you ever hold a knife and, feeling the weight and potential of it in your hand, think of plunging it into the nearest-by body? I do, and while that’s not a pleasant experience, I chalk it up to something like the call of the void. Now, standing on this cliff edge, something about the abyss is singing its seductive song, and I can’t help noticing that there are some beautiful riffs in there. I can’t help respecting the void and the knife, for the truths they embody, even while no-thank-you-ing my way back to the path, the onion, the beloved business of this life, unfolding.
Tomorrow evening, I’ll make another pass at aikido, in search of further and more direct ways of dancing with knife-energy. I tried a few years ago, in Edinburgh, getting off the top deck of the bus at the Holy Crossing stop, wandering through church hallways till I came to the padded room where strong people were casually twisting one another to the floor, casually tossing one another, glorious black Japanese skirt-pants flying, across the room. At that time, the answer was clearly: No, your back, shoulder, and knees can’t take this shit. No, your relationship to violence is not presently one that allows of being in this room with any reliable sense of ground or safety. Now, I wonder how this will be. My friend, who’s been practicing with this particular micro-dojo for the last year or so, tells me it's small, awake, caring, human, well-boundaried, and yet exhilarating. She, like me, has a tai chi background, but unlike me, she’s done weapons training before, and she’s also been at this a long time. We will see. If it takes, I will get to reincarnate my friend’s Californian aikido suit from the 1980’s, as I now, in my mid-forties, enter a system of belts and drills, swords and staffs, opening my awareness and tolerance for both the knife and the void. My friend tells me about a book by an aikidoka who trained women in prisons to understand space, energy, and boundaries. You're not allowed (surprise!) to go into a prison and teach people how to kick ass, but this woman was able to translate what she knew from aikido into what she calls Conscious Embodiment. Sign me up. Part of why I want to know all of this in my bones is because I know there’s a need to illuminate, aerate, open and release the violence in my own body-mind and heart. Part of it is also: I want to know more about how to help ground others in this way. For the past couple of weeks, one of my counseling clients and I have been working on finding embodied space and boundaries, finding real ground beneath the feet, real strength in the arms and legs, a real strike in the fists, a real sense of choosing who and what comes in, moment by moment. She’s been beating the stuffing out of a velvet chair, then stroking its pelt back into beauty. Last week, my client brought a sheet of superhero stickers in with her, and we spent much of our session with the Hulk as guru. OK, how is he standing in this one? If you take that pose in your own body, what comes next? Smash! Boom! My space. Girls don’t often get taught this, either overtly as self-assertion and self-defense, or as horseplay. Every time I hear some parent say, My boy really needs horseplay, but it’s different with my girl, I want to cry. Do it, I want to yell. Even if she tells you she would rather braid her hair into a crown, or paint ponies, she still lives in a world where the knife and the void are both in her, and all around her. Get her used to pushing, hitting, running, kicking, falling and recovering. It makes absolutely no sense to continue pretending that violence is only a boy’s game, when we know what we know about women and girls as targets of violence. Knife me, says the part of us that longs no longer to be alive. Knife me, says the young woman, slicing into her arm what nothing else can ease. Knife me. Break the dam of this suffering skin, ground me in this body that feels and bleeds. I didn’t understand cutting until I attended an all-day Mental Health First Aid class. At one point, participants were given a questionnaire about various behaviors, and how they might relate to suicide risk. One of these was cutting. The young woman sitting next to me said matter-of-factly, Actually, for me, cutting is a way to avoid suicide, to let off steam, to ease pain before it becomes too much. Do you know what it’s like, when out of the blue someone does something so courageous you're at first not sure you heard what you heard, saw what you saw? She understood that she was in a room full of people who, for various reasons, wanted to understand how to help people in crisis. She understood that she knew first hand something that we needed to know. So she told us: I cut myself not because I want to die, but because I want to live. Fear of pain can blind us to what's really happening. Take this from me! I can't be with it. Opening to pain, on the other hand, can open us to What Is. This feeling right here in the chest, if I follow it, what do I find? A keen knife, right between the ribs. And then? Sharper and sharper pain. And then? The heart opens wider than it’s ever gone, the pain transmutes to bliss, this body is the knife’s edge between small Me and the body of Being Itself. Knives in this life: the Laguiole pocket knife my brother gave me, and which I once had to surrender (we here at the airport frown on that sort of thing); the trusty B- and C-grade Zwilling knives Timothy brought back from being a student in Germany; the razor-sharp green-bladed Kuhn-Rikon parer I acquired last month, and which I somehow don’t trust, because it can’t be sharpened. Knives I don’t own, but remember: an Engelberg bread knife, whose serrated teeth reproduce the chain of the Bernese Oberalp; my uncle’s machete, beating down brush as we make our way through Jura forest; a big, fat Swiss Army knife, with a saw and a magnifying glass, gone to wherever it is that vanished things go; a rapier-shaped letter-opener in a leather scabbard on my grandfather’s leather-topped, gilt-edged desk; the horrible wooden-handled pirate knife my mother sliced roasts with, when I was a kid. A Damascene steel blade my not-quite-of-this-world friend Andrew forged, in a smithy he built himself, before the ocean took him back. Manjushri’s bullshit-cutting sword, the one he wields overhead, a smile on his face. The one that emerges, flaming, from the center of the lotus, itself emerging from the mud of all our unhoned violence and loathing. Take from me all that is not free, goes the song to Kali. It means, Cut off these barnacles of hating and fearing; trim me clear, open me one cut at a time, so that I can grow to the full span of this being. Here, now, I am living what it is to turn towards integrity. Strange, peeled clean, and through that peeling, ever-tuftier, evermore exactly as I am. Squirrel, O squirrel in the attic, squirrel in the hole, squirrel my first spoken word of English – I love you, and my dogs love you, even though our ways of communicating this can be quite different. Squirrel – you are a visit from the wild, a telephone pole acrobat, a daredevil provocateur. Squirrel-of-the-north, little red squirrel scolding head-down, eye-level to me from the hemlock, whose rough bark you clutch in your clever little paws. Squirrel who gathers and shreds.
When I lived in Tennessee, I gathered buckeye nuts like some mad biped squirrel, filling pockets with glossy nuts, incredibly appealing, until they dried, and shriveled up. Carried through the winter, they became reminders of this part of Fall, where everything is golden: all the stored heat of summer cascading down in golden leaves, all the sunlight spending itself before night takes over. Right here, under this picnic table, someone has been squirreling smooth stones, a cache, to remember rough edges’ resolution into gentleness. Or, to chuck at peoples heads. I can’t presume. One day I looked out from the porch of the little yellow farmhouse I lived in, and I saw a tall, slightly stooped man circling the almost-ruins of the big buckeye across the street. He told me it was his way to drive here to Sewanee from – where? – Knoxville? – far! – each year, to find a buckeye for his pocket. Elegant, nostalgic squirrel. The next year, the tree finally and irrevocably died, and I never saw the buckeye pilgrim again. The thing about squirrels is: they’re kinetic geniuses. If they weren’t, my daily walks with two massive predators would be a lot less ethically sustainable, and the words would be littered with squirrel-corpses. They’re easy to find – the guard squirrel shrieks a warning to all – who dive or climb for cover – but they’re so fast and so confident that the matter how many times the dogs shove their heads up to the ears into burrows, or how high they strain their front claws up some trunk, there’s never any squirrel-slaughter to be had. Two creatures I have known who were actually capable of catching squirrels: my icehouse roommate Cooper’s sour black-and-white tom, and a farm apprentice in the mountains of North Carolina. The cat, I never saw an action, but there was a summer where every other day or so, he would leave a fresh tail for us on the porch. Only in retrospect did I realize I should have been saving them for the edges of some savage cloak. But by then they were gone to ants, and to whomever else settles carrion scores in hot Atlanta scrub. The farmhand was one of my friend Joe’s helpers – part-time tending to permaculture crops and mountain medicinal herbs, part-time doing his own thing, which in this case meant building a bow and arrows, and then stalking squirrels in the forests at the foot of Mount Mitchell. When he killed one, he would eat it, then stretch and tan the hide using the animal’s brains. He said his plan was to make a loincloth, so that when the squirrels saw him coming, they would be laughing so hard it would be easier to shoot them. “Old Fuzzy Nuts,” they’ll call me, he said, and it was impossible not to love him. Impossible not to love a squirrel: sine-waving through the grass, its tail a perpetual counterbalance and flourish. How is it we humans have been de-tailed? What a tragedy, what a root of loneliness and unworthiness! With a tail, you are always with someone to wrap around yourself, to swagger, to wrap around other someones, when you dance. Chloe and Elliot use theirs differently: hers is for stiffening in battle, for asserting her will in the world. His is for pythoning around those he loves, for thumping and circling when his joy is uncontainable. Imagine! If we had tails we wouldn't need phrases like, Oh thank you, how kind! or, May I have this dance? Our tails would express all this, and would comfort us at days’ end, built-in safety blankets and teddy bears. I wonder, if Donald Trump had a squirrel’s tail, would he calm the fuck down? Squirrels are not particularly calm, I will admit, but there’s a sane, embodied competence about them that we humans could learn a lot from. What if all the things we give so many names to – addiction, obesity, depression, anxiety, political strife – are just so many faces of the same basic wound up not liking or understanding our bodies enough to actually take up residence inside of them? The tai chi master who came to visit last weekend mentioned casually that Chinese medicine holds our human decision to stand erect as the root of many of our health problems. Instead of hanging down peacefully from below our spines, our guts get all mashed up together in the bottom of our trunks, and suffer. Plus, no tails for remembering and expressing the body’s joy, aggression, and love. Poor things! No wonder we are so confused. No wonder we can be fooled into thinking Twitter is ever a good idea. This same tai chi master taught us two new ways of walking: like a crane, and like a bear. The first – inhale, wrists float up – exhale, elbows float down – is good for bone-strength. The second is good for those mashed-up organs. Each arm snakes around, up and across, then climbs the back, alternating in a kind of burlesque wave that is satisfying as much for its – true enough – wriggling of one’s insides – as it is for its mad-sexy willingness to be present, right here, in this body, as it is. Bear-walk burlesque is my current favorite discovery at the intersections of dance, fighting, and movement. What would squirrel-walking be? I imagine a fluid hop, followed by a hovering look around. Squirrel’s graceful, and also alert. Throw in some nose-twitches and a chatter to all your fellow-squirrels. Squirrel-walk sees & doesn’t see the car-predator, the truck-predator, all the sad fluttering tails and blacktop-smeared bodies. Forgive us, Squirrel, for we know not what we do. |
AuthorJulie Püttgen is an artist, expressive arts therapist, and meditation teacher. Archives
November 2019
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108 Names of Now