R.M.

~ Essays. Poems. Written Meditations.

R.M.

Tag Archives: Buddhism

The Dull “I”

16 Thursday May 2019

Posted by racheltejas in divorce, Grief, Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia, Motherhood

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Buddhism, children, divorce, grief, love, meditation, motherhood, nature as metaphor for Buddhism, philosophy of mind, short form essay, short meditation on the self

The Dull “I”

When I began writing I loved the long essay form of autobiographical essay.

Now I am so tired of myself, of writing even the slender, deceptively simply “I” that I find it impossibly dull to do so.

What is left when one has grown so very weary of oneself?

Enlightenment?
Drugs?
Suicide?
Service?

Perhaps all, not in that order.

The I knows nothing. I know nothing.
Experience is a sequence of felt sense, pattern that turns on a dime to addiction or perception, opaque desire, and even when desire is sated, discomfort.

This is the current felt sense of the body I inhabit: discomfort. It has always been thus.
Eating disorders, unhappy childhoods, rape, assaults physical and mental, ambition, failures, love, touch sex marriage, children, embodiment in physical form – it all seems to lead to the same portal: let us be elsewhere.

I love drugs as much as I love practice. It is a prayer, isn’t it: let us be elsewhere.

Today I walked away from a lover, began perhaps to finally grieve my unending love for my husband who is the X on my blooded heart, found out he was dating, cried for hours upon hours, had my daughters come home only to observe them punch one another, and then felt the exquisite pain of my smallest child’s delicate teeth sink with rather alarming consequence into the softest part of my tricep. Blood, rage, tears, regret… on and on it goes. For all of us, every sentient being, all the time.

We took the dog outside into the warm spring dusk.

The moon reflected down on us her borrowed light.
And the patterns were suspended, drifting upward like used webs.

Quietude.
All that remains.

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Invitation to Exit

06 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by racheltejas in Melancholia, photography, politics

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

activism, anger, Buddhism, Christine Blasey Ford, feminism, Kavanaugh, personal photography, political photography, politics, progressive politics, PTSD, rape, Trump

Invitation to Exit
a lovehate note for Dr. Ford

“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter”
~~ Christine Blasey Ford

“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”
~~ 
Anne Sexton

There have been probably millions of words written about Brett Kavanaugh, and I don’t flatter myself I have much to add.

My writing is read by very few people. Not even my family reads it anymore. Yet somehow, knowing I have language, some kind of document, of my own observations, sadness, love, joy, personal regret, cultural anger: it makes me feel more alive, and more connected to the roiling stream of human existence.

There are mothers searching for dead babies at this very moment in Sulawesi. They don’t know about Brett Kavanaugh, or the people, mainly women, who feel some kind of end has been reached in our Great Experiment. Suffering is everywhere. Birth is everywhere; Change, as the Buddha cannot remind us enough, is the only constant.

When the man currently living in the White House was “elected,” I thought we had reached a nadir, and would quickly correct our nightmarish, almost comical, mistake.

It was only the beginning. And his beginning, this little, stupid, mentally unstable carnival barker, will leave an impossibly long impression on this country that might well mark its demise. He is remaking the courts from the bottom up in his own image, filling vacancies Barack was unable to fill because of the thoroughly racist, undemocratic obstructionism of Republicans, of the quasi-fascist Mitch McConnell, and he is going to fill those vacancies with minds so far to the right we may as well be on a tilt-a-whirl that speeds only in one direction. What was fringe, what was Pat Buchanan, is now the celebrated norm among unimaginable numbers of white, often college educated men and women.

Shame to them. Shame on this country.

I thought I had no love for this country. For a long time, my entire life to be honest. I should have moved to France when I was 17; that I didn’t was a result of a rape that made me paranoid, fearful, and incapacitated for years. The memory still does, particularly when I hear the so-called President of the United States happily mock a brave, dignified woman who had the temerity – the fucking balls – to confront a system already rigged against her. Listening to him bring her down, the crowd laughing its approval: how similar that must have sounded to Dr. Ford to the laughter of Brett as he covered her mouth and prepared to have his way with her body.

Kavanaugh joins Clarence, who is publicly silent, poisonous, and unimaginative in his “originalist” views of the Constitution. Such a viewpoint is really just an excuse for profound intellectual laziness, a sentimental attachment to a past that never existed, and a convenient cudgel to keep traditionally marginalized humans in their place. Now the two Yale men can have drinks and chat about their college days, the ones Kavanaugh can remember anyway, which apparently aren’t many.

I try not to hate him but I do. I hate him as I hate my own rapist. And I battle the same feelings about donald trump, who is a dangerous, petty, profoundly mentally ill, narcissistic black hole of corruption and greed. He is a shell of rage, and it is my work, the work of all people who loathe him, to not become a mirror to him. Or to Kavanaugh, who revealed a temperament so fraught with anger, paranoid rantings, self-pity, and arrogance I cannot see how his mind has room for any input other than his own. Kavanaugh brags about having four women clerks. I am convinced he sussed them out for bullying purposes and bragging rights.

Kavanaugh is a travesty. He will possibly bring down Roe. His previous rulings have shown him to be about as far to the right as rush limbaugh. He seems to think regulations are a mere inconvenience to the great gods of commerce. What else can one say about a man who looks at Kenneth Starr as his shining beacon, his mentor? Apparently the Clintons still weigh on his mind. They should: he was part of a huge mess that should never have happened in the first place. Why this country insists on having no collective memory after 18 months is beyond me; perhaps we might evolve a bit if we held the evils of the past as something from which to learn, not promote, as we have this vengeful, drunken man.

Kavanaugh might make this country so dangerous for women I will be forced to leave: I have two daughters. And a son I will not allow to adopt even a shadow of the white-boy me-firstness so celebrated by the powers that be.

These “men” – trump, his minions, Kavanaugh. Not only are they terrifying and disgusting in what they represent for women, for the so recently empowered, now endangered LGBT community, for brown people, for black people, for common sense environmental regulation (god the list is apparently endless) – they are a mortal threat to our boys as well. What parent wants to see a child grow up to be an angry, narcissistic and selfish power monger? I have never believed politicians should be personal role models, but these men are infusing and altering our entire culture; the racists, the homophobes, the anti-choicers are crawling out of the shadows like starved prisoners who have been waiting to be released.

So I teach my son about honesty, equality. I am stern. I use foul language when I need to, sometimes just because I’m so fucking scared of what is happening around us. I teach my daughters about their bodies, that there is no such thing as shame, that they own their bodies, and no one has the right to touch them, even look at them, in a manner that creates discomfort. I teach them to use force. Verbal force. Physical if necessary. We practice. No “baby” voice. But they are babies. It breaks my heart.

I am boxing.  A lot. I want to adopt guard dogs. I am… so scared.

And yet. And yet… in the middle of the Catastrophe, something has been born, deep inside me:
a tenderness. A new tenderness. I feel a love for my fellow countrypeople I have never known before. trump supporters – that is a struggle. I don’t understand them. I want to, but I don’t think I can. I still try. Even racism is born from Fear. A wounded heart. It is a wounded heart that carries a loaded gun though, and that is hard to hold.

I still would rather leave. But I am more involved, more loving to my neighbors, far more aware of the inequality around me, and far more willing, wanting, and needing to leave my little white-woman-yogi-ballet-arts bubble and see what the Hell is actually happening in the world.

The non-president is having, in untold numbers of citizens, mainly the ones he loathes (women, people with various pigmentation), an unanticipated effect, of which he is probably unaware: his rage creates love. I will not be him. I will see him. I will see the people around him. And I will admit to my own hatred, my own shadows.

But ultimately his absurdity, his indescribable foolishness, will awaken many to dignity, wisdom, and walking the long road to acceptance and love.

And that is my fuck-you valentine to trump, Inc.

May you find peace, quietude, and healing Dr. Ford.

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Buddha in the Tree

18 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by racheltejas in Denver, Meditations and Poetry, Motherhood, photography, Yoga

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Buddhism, Buddhist practice, Denver, lateness, meditation on mindfulness, motherhood, photography, traffic, yoga

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Buddha in the Tree

When my smallest child in the not too distant future reads Alice in Wonderland, I am not at all sure she will not conflate the White Rabbit with her chronically disorganized and over-scheduled mother.

“I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date. No time to say Hello Goodbye I’m late I’m late I’m late.”

Indeed. My temperament has never been particularly geared toward modern life, or at least the sort that uses clocks. Where others prepare I meander, and usually by the time (that horrid word again, one cannot escape it even in descriptive writing) it is time, I am just beginning to consider what it might mean to actually meet the Buddha on the road or what might happen if Artemis had failed in her slaughter of Acteon or when my children might be old enough to live for 6 months in France after a year in India. Also, of course, what to wear. To the thing that started 20 minutes ago.

This ungrounded tendency of mine has been the almost ruin of friendships, certainly took a few years off my chronically, bizarrely on-time ex-husband’s existence, has caused irritated receptionists, poor innocent souls, to squeeze me in at the last moment, and has made me rue the day, almost every day, I agreed with my ex-husband to move back to Denver, where the problems of traffic are hardly a dream-bound woman’s friend. Invariably when I am in traffic, and this being Denver I am usually behind some huge Trump supporting truck or horrible “save the environment” SUV, I find myself thinking of life in a small village in Southwestern France, or becoming a nomad like the characters in Bolano’s The Savage Detectives. They, I seem to recall, were not bothered by time, except perhaps in an existential way. I dislike rushing but I loathe being forced from my vision states even more; I have yet to find a kink in the universe where these parallel lines might be forced to intersect.

Being late. It is rude, and thoughtless; it’s a habit, perhaps even an addiction (somewhere there must be a fear of not being late); it is presumptuous and arrogant and belongs to a non-existent aristocracy of unequal humans.

Lateness also causes me to rush through experiences that could otherwise be savored, or at least not be crushed under the worry wheel of catch-up and speed.

A few days ago I woke smallest child early from her nap. “We are late!” I cried. “I have to take you to a meeting, we must leave right now.” And so we hurried through mounting afternoon highway traffic while she told me stories about her new imaginary friend and asked endless questions about subjects I am sure were utterly fascinating save the fact I cannot remember them. I was too late.

Clutching the cheery little creature to my chest, I began a familiar race from car to building, where I was sure (I am always sure) I was going to be yelled at or dismissed or given the final lecture that would once and for all turn my behavior around forever. I’m positive my eyes were as huge as a wild pig.

“Look Mama!! A tree. A big tree.” Somehow through the self-absorbed frantic chatter of my own useless mind the tiny child’s voice pierced and quieted me, and I came to a sudden stop.

There in front of us, it is true, was a tree. And it was indeed a large tree. I looked at her. She was gazing at it with curiosity and amusement, as if this tree were the one tree for which she had been searching her entire short life. Which, of course, it was. Because she searches for the new. Or, to be more precise, everything is the New to her, and therefore worthy of her curiosity and fearless amusement.

And so, in the act of noticing, we were both momentarily absorbed. We were not small child and frantic mama. We were the gaze that unites with its object, and therefore for a brief second, we were the object, which of course could have been anything, and we could have been anyone. I felt myself dissipate. There was the seeing. Just seeing. It was all we had to do.

I pulled her away from my chest and looked at her perfect round face and eyes full of secrets. “Buddha nature,” I thought. And then I raced inside, late for our appointment.
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Prelude: Rage

05 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by racheltejas in Grief, Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia, Motherhood, photography

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

ADHD, Buddhism, childhood, Christian imagery, divorce, early childhood development, essay, giftedness, guilt, meditation on motherhood, memory, motherhood, ODD, photography, siblings, special needs

Prelude: Rage

When my son was born he was slender and somber, with a small cap of black hair. He remained slender and somber, but the cap of hair grew quickly into a black-brown thicket of curls; I used to stare at the spiraling tendrils draping his tiny alabaster neck as one gazes upon a Donatello. He was, and remains, a beautiful, even ethereal child, skin white like a high cloud, limbs thin as antelope bone.
20141019_170518He was my first living child. I gave birth to him after losing still-born identical twin boys, little creatures I am sure would look today exactly like him. He developed in a body encased in unresolved grief and overly protective fear: will this be another death will this be another death will this be another death… the 9 month mantra. Surely, I think now, as I watch his world disintegrate, this is the cause, the answer, the underlying mystery to his illness, and it is one that cannot be fixed. Believing one has harmed a child is to live in a shadowed, secret land of the non-incarcerated condemned.

For the first two years of his life, the child was so much my focus, my world, my soul that there was not much difference between his existence in my body and his nascent life as a new little person in the world. He was a delicate jewel, an ancient priceless coin not to be exposed long to air and light; my love was, and remains, something cosmic, divine, like a goddess of single minded fury, selfish, consumed, blind.


Memory: When he was about three, my son and I were in the high desert of northern New Mexico. It was spring. We were staying in a large adobe home on a quiet dirt road. The dry April seemed to swoon with its own awakening warmth: sunsets of vivid, almost artificial pinks and purples, days of infinite blue and horizons of empty rolling brush. For those who need space, particularly those with the Ayurvedic tendency toward a highly Vata (airy, ungrounded) temperament, which I have to an unfortunate degree, the desert is almost as sacred as the ocean. Space. Sanskrit: akash. So necessary to the mind, so freeing to the body.

One afternoon while his baby sister was sleeping, we took a walk down the silent dirt road. He wore overalls and a plaid button-down shirt. In one hand he gripped his lion and teddy, his companions at the time, and I held the other, my long fingers lightly encircling his tiny palm. Contentment and love imbued every ounce of me: open space, my son, my love, the grace of silence.
2014-11-05 15.11.31Above us were two birds, swimming with extended wings through mellow tides of high wind. “Look,” I said to my little boy. “Those birds. Look how together they are. They seem to be good friends.” I looked down at him, and his calm indifference. “I think it might be time, Little One, to look for a preschool for you. That way,” I lowered my voice as I spoke the words, as if knowing what was to come, “you can make friends too. I think you might like a few friends, yes?”

He glanced up at me, huge eyes so much older than his soft pale face. In a wise, calm voice he said, “Oh Mama, I don’t really have friends. I don’t need them.”

I never knew it was odd that my toddler son, barely two, would focus on solving 100, then 200 piece puzzles for two, three, four hours on end. Every day. When the images lost their interest – I think now they never even held his interest – he simply turned the white sides up, and solved them from shape alone. And I never thought twice about the fact that this child, at the same age, never spoke. He had very little language.

Until he did. One day he spoke about three words, none clearly. The next day, something switched on in his brain. He spoke his name perfectly, running around in joyous circles as he did so. Two days after that he was speaking in complex paragraphs, reams of information issuing from his growing, mysterious mind.

Escaping my notice as well was the strange manner in which my son read. Or didn’t read. He was obsessed with books, and would sit every day while I read 6, 7, 10 books at a time, multiple times a day. My voice would grow weary. “Gan,” he would say, his simple word for “again.”

And then the day after kindergarten’s end I took my child to Tattered Cover. I bought him the Little Bear books. The next day he read them. All of them. He never learned to read. To this day he could not tell you what a “sight word” might be, or what the value is in showing one’s work for math, which he has also taught himself, or visualized to himself; I will never know because he cannot show his work.

Eventually along the way it was pointed out to me that my son wasn’t “normal.” Because my values tend toward the classical and deeply conservative within the context of education, I dismissed the label as simplistic; in my idealized understanding of the intellect, every child should be trained as an auto-didact, and my son was simply following that path.
2014-11-12 09.17.12

But he wasn’t. Or, perhaps his intellect was, but his emotional life was slowly growing tattered, stunted, frustrated and cold. I made huge, unforgivable mistakes: I moved him a lot. When he rejected attending a preschool because he wanted to stay with me I simply withdrew him. I tried a charter school. Then another. Then our local school, which has “good” scores but seems rather to me like a large daycare with a lot of experience in discipline management.

I moved to the suburbs, despite the fact that I hate them, thinking the comparatively bucolic life at a tiny local elementary, the fresher air, the “family” centered sports complexes located a half mile from us – it would all add up to the simple, calm, curious and happy life I had imagined for my children.

None of that happened, but the move did succeed in ending a marriage that had in truth been over for a long while. And the school indeed was small enough, and rich enough, to finally give a “label” to my son, and, more recently, to my struggling daughter. I remain grateful for the help, the guidance, but more lost than ever as to what path to take with two children who live in vastly different worlds, the elder’s a universe of control, analysis, and raging delusion when life takes its unsuspected turns; the younger a self-enclosed island of visions and color, empathy so attuned it’s like a daily blood letting of her mind, and apparently almost no memory or capacity for the “facts” of our hard hard reality.
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Most days now are consumed with dragging my exhausted body through the memories and details of my son’s childhood: at what point did I fuck up the show? Did I not nurse long enough? My worshiping, intense nature was surely the ruin of him, and taught him that rage is better than reason, because a demi-god doesn’t need reason. Too much love, not enough wisdom… and then on to my daughter, who’s odd mind, so imbalanced and ill suited for this world, was surely created by my eating disorder, not enough protein in her breast milk, not enrolling her in Waldorf when it was clear she belonged there.

How does a mother uncoil herself from the narcissism of self-flagellation when one – or more – of her children show signs of illness? I know it is useless, this form of self-loathing and punishment, but I am an addict of masochism in almost all its forms; how could that force not be present in my understanding of myself as a mother?

How does a mother disengage? The wise Buddha heart knows that the truest love is, in a manner, the most indifferent: it is something pure, untouched by outer circumstance. But the Mother, as archetype, and certainly as my own experience has taught me, is the opposite of this distant, perfected purity. The child is her body, her body is the child, quite literally, and forever.


When I was on a trip to the Yucatan a couple years ago I fell in love with pelicans. There were four occupying our little patch of sand. I spent hours and hours watching them, missed them when they left at sunset, worried if they weren’t there promptly the next morning.
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I learned later that the pelican is a sacred symbol in the Christian canon of Mother-imagery: the birds are said to pluck the feathers from their own chest to offer nourishing blood to their young.

When my son is lost to himself, when his mind becomes a slaughterhouse of accusatory rage and desolation, the pelican, her white chest bloody from bonded love, resonates far more than the wiser profile of a bodhisattva.

After the storm, however, comes the fatigue.  The Eastern sun, encompassing, beautiful, slowly rises, and together we turn to face it.
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2014-11-27 15.18.45

 

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2015-02-08 13.07.17

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Passage

27 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by racheltejas in Meditations and Poetry

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Tags

Buddhism, free verse, James Salter, mortality, nature imagery, nature poem, poem, poetry

Passage

“It happens in an instant. It is all one long day,
one endless afternoon, friends leave,
we stand alone on the shore.”
            – James Salter

I.
Low and quiet
the autumn sun,
and empty are the hills.

II.
She had a dog, young, long-limbed;
her eyes were dark
as a new moon
her coat a priceless gold.
Puppy mill: these were her
unfortunate antecedents.
An impure blood of greed,
factories of flesh and discarded
bitches gripped her veins
but did not enclose her heart.

III.
Empty are the hills.
The young dog
and the young woman
run the hills
hours upon hours;
they know the land, the paths
where people linger
and how to avoid them.
The young woman
and the young dog –
one as un-
restrained
as the other
is chained –

IV.
Empty are the hills
and the emptiness
is, as she runs,
a destination,
or an arrival
that will remain
unrecognized
even upon the approach.

V.
The hills are more rain
than soil, the water
a silver weight in a low sky,
endlessly draining.
The sky is water,
and the curled leaves
of the aged oaks
frail fountains, all twisted edges,
desiccated
intricate
then fallen.

VI.
The young dog’s paws –
large and crude
in the black-brown mud-
tread the heavy path
in strides too long
to follow.
Her gaze traces the bounding body
tense with life, senseless sense
and hunger.

VII
The completion of a life
lies in absence –
or is it a slow stubtracting –
palimpsest erased to abstracted
fine lines,
and the mind
grows naked
as a winter branch.
Above the hill, hidden by the torrents,
a small hawk arcs
and dives through invisible waves.

—  for Richard and Mary

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The Incident

25 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by racheltejas in Meditations and Poetry, Motherhood

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Tags

Buddhism, childhood, Dharma, long stanzas, motherhood, poem, poetry

The Incident

1.

The child’s right foot turns in as if seeking shelter when she walks,
especially when she holds her stuffed bear or my hand – really
to her one and the same –

her legs long, loose jointed
as her stories after school.
Dreamy, she is called, too often because that is
a word we use when we have no idea what might
constitute the content
of another’s mind. It is a lazy word
rather like the muscles (not) controlling her right foot.
It drags conversation along but lacks precision – –

2.

At the huge store housed in a huge space selling huge boxes
of frozen fish and loaves of bread large enough
to feed many congregations of gatherers and fretful families
one sees in the tight glance, the convex spine and gripping fingers
that the more huge the market space
the smaller the heart becomes
until it is just a hurried accountant, keeping the books
or re-working them, the chambers closed to all
but its own blood –

An old man draped in a worn sweatshirt, round glasses fatigued from
the years and the accounting –
wanting nothing at all to do with a small aimless child –
by luckless rhythm aimed
his metal wheeling cargo,
and drummed it into the child’s new unfocused face.
Blood, blackened eye, blame – the hardening set in
as a potter’s glaze, stiffening the story into place – –

3.

One afternoon I heard a parable
it went something like this:
there was a great rabbi who had many followers
he spoke of the Torah as love and making offerings of the self
to the unending ocean of compassion.
“Place the teachings on your heart,” he would say,
“Place the teachings of love on your heart.”

One day a student approached him and asked
“Why on the heart? Why not in the heart?”
“Ah,” he said, “we place the teachings over and over on the heart
so that one day
in the evening of your life
after many luckless calamities
your heart will break
and the teachings can fall in.”

Yes. Yes, I thought upon hearing this.
But the student did not ask
what happens if the heart breaks
all the way through
like a crystal glass cracked rim to stem
and then cannot hold
what it waited so long to be taught.

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Wry Buddha

01 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by racheltejas in Meditations and Poetry, Motherhood, Yoga

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Tags

antiques, awakening, Buddha statues, Buddhism, Buddhist teachings, desire, emptiness

When I grow old, older than I am now, when I am an ancient, sparse tree with roughened bark for hands and bones that possess a brittle, sad dignity, I hope to live in a small house made of glass and stone. Somewhere, I predict, in the wilds of Southwestern France, where the land itself is ancient and tough and beautiful and wise.

There is an emptiness I lean toward, and the emptiness is a refuge, which of course means it is not yet a true emptiness but an escape, a fantasy. Fantasies are beautiful and necessary, but they are alluring trails that lead away from the easily lost vision of Shunyata, formless form. Realization of emptiness does not come from being old and having taught yoga for 50 years, or from living in a glass home that connects one to cloud and sky and sun – as appealing as that life might be. It comes instead, I suspect, from an infinitely brave and terrifying recognition that the ego, the self, are phantoms, cloaked illusions; they are the demonic yet necessary shape shifters that constitute the entire trajectory of the human story.
View-from-the-shady-forest-towards-the-bathroom-with-wooden-and-glass-wall-design-decorated-by-modern-double-sinks-and-fresh-orc

For now I do not live in a sparse room by myself. I live with three children, three animals (soon to be four), a few pieces of art to which I am probably too attached, and an enormous wardrobe of clothing I am in the process of donating and selling. The great divesting must begin somewhere, and why not begin with the center of one’s primary addiction, which in my case is fashion and clothing and yet more clothing. As much as I cannot really stand my own body, I know I have a good silhouette for clothes, and I have indulged for years in the pleasures of silk and good cashmere. The pleasure isn’t really a pleasure anymore, but a hope, which is of course a mask for a need; time to let it go.

In a wonderfully ironic twist, however, my deepest object-attachment in this house lies with a small bronze statue of a seated Buddha. He has his right hand in abhaya mudra, which is the gesture of fearlessness, and his face is passive, peace beyond peace. He is small, feminine looking, and I love him. I placed him on a decorative triangular teak plate, and positioned the statue in front of a large antique bronze pot that is many, many hundreds of years old. The three objects together sit on a large table from Sicily that was used in the dining hall of an 18th Century monastery. It’s my corner of treasures and age and wonder, but the little Buddha is my favorite, a lovely reminder of awakening in the face of fear.

Then he disappeared. A few days ago, he was gone. I suspected at first a wild neighborhood boy who hangs out with my son. Then I found him in a laundry basket. Today he was gone again, a doll for my two year old. I finally located him in an undignified dirty corner by our shoe shelves next to the front door.

At first I was bereft. My beautiful statue, my friend, my Object of Reverence! I looked everywhere for him, convinced of some horrible fate. And then, in the looking, I started to laugh. Of course the Buddha would not care about being stolen or shoved into a corner or used as a doll or a prank or anything else. Buddha is empty, the mudra, although a reminder, is also empty, and emptiness cannot be grieved. My sadness was an imposition, and suddenly I saw my statue, vivid in my mind.

His mouth had changed from a thin unreadable bronze crease to a wicked wry smile. Remember, the smile seemed to say. Remember…..
Tian Tan Buddha, Lantau Island

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Visitations

03 Tuesday May 2016

Posted by racheltejas in art, Meditations and Poetry, photography, Travel

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Tags

Amorgos, Buddhism, emptiness, free verse, French language, Greek myth, imagery, Paris, Paros, poem, poem of memory, practice, prose poem, Rimbaud, Rimbaud quotes, stream of consciousness poem, travel, yoga

Visitations

Qu’est mon neant, aupres de la stupeur qui
vous attend?
— Vies, Rimbaud

I

20160223_150828-2The fresco has faded to a mere suggestion. You will miss it, you probably did miss it.   In the corner hides a very old man, I think he was young when the plaster was warm, and he aged with the walls. He does not look toward his god; he looks at you, passing by, or stopping for a moment to whisper, one hand wrapped about your waist, something about what the color used to be, before Saint-Saens played, before the barricades of 1832. What the color used to be, when the old man posed in his youth, saintly under a spring sun.

II

There was gold, everywhere gold, a paradise of gold, a promise of gold, a gold that took the light like a thief, smoothed and smothered it. The light sometimes struggled to be free, and then the painting danced like liquid metal mixed with a shallow tide. Mary kneels to the Angel, whose wings are high, Pelican-white, and half presented for flight behind his back. Mary’s gentle head, her sweet neck, are quiet, as if she cannot quite hear the words of Gabriel. He speaks half in whisper, low and soft,20160223_150935-2 not of news but of a story. Gabriel looks at Mary, Mary gazes upon the feet of the Angel. It is not humility that keeps her head bowed.

III

Amorgos in October. Rocks, paths for goats and their keepers, young dark boys cast by Bertolucci. At the cafe by the small bay is a girl with long thin legs, rounded knees; she is the color of burnt wheat and when she returns to the limestone shaded streets of her father’s house in Neuilly-sur-Seine her skin will lighten as the skies cluster with autumn rains. Next year, University and complicated lovers and an important exam that she will fail, but now, this early October, she sits by the sea, her regal collarbones moving with her breath, a grey salt-stained sweater revealing wrists so small one can see her veins like bracelets. Delicate cheeks and widened eyes, tinged with pale brass. A mouth small and serious, but her torso moves in the cheap beach chair with a language louche and light. She brings a cigarette to her lips and opens a book with a broken spine.  In early evening I climb vertical steps the color of milk carved into the high arcing rock wall of the island. They lead to a monastery of the purest white stone, dug out and built up by the faithful or the enslaved sometime in the 11th Century. At the top a young monk greets me with Ouzo, and I sit with him in his pearl, ringed by the sapphire sea.

IV

The body was alone. At last. Dry heels bitten ankles slender thighs grown thick. Belly concave hips narrow, but sloping, and weak. Breasts of youth, wide and full at the sternum, narrowing to Cubist triangles. At last the body was alone. Arms long and burned, neck long and burned, hair long, unwashed, crusted in parts like a tidal creature with bits of salt. Skin a patchwork of pale Nordic blood and Mediterranean darkened limbs, scars from a jellyfish, scars from a knife, scratched and bothered bites like ruined confetti. Paros. Early awakening, before the sun gives light to the sea.

Emergence. Elemental, the simplest language strips it, skin off a carcass. Emergence. Cold autumnal sea, the same sea of the great gods; only a few miles away the waters split open for Aphrodite, and the waves of the white seeded surf turned red from the rage of the father. Cold cold sea, hardly a movement in the salt-heavy water, still black with the passing night. The sky gains color suddenly, as if surprised by its own creation, and the dark in false humility ushers in the dawn, a dawn, this dawn, never before seen; it must gather itself quickly, as a lady in waiting protects the trailing silks of her mistress.

The body lives in the sea. For an hour or for a lifetime or for the quick birth and slow death of a star. Measureless. The body rests in the sea, turning first into an anemone, attached to a large porous rock, and then becomes the rock itself. For a time it is both rock and water, then, in effortless motion, the formation returns to itself. Once more, the border of blood and vein and pale skin. It is attenuated as an El Greco, fingers stretched and empty. Bone, joint, fascia.

Nos os sont revetus d’un nouveau corps amoureux.

The body is alone. At last. The water dries. The salt blur fades from the eyes, leaving them reddened but sharp as shark fin. Supine, angular, empty as a droughted well, relief spreads, like a vine. Or a drug.

The body travels the Earth, spectral, joyous. Over many miles, meadows wide, rivers starved or swollen, peaks long separated from the sea, cloud-touched, treeless. The eyes no longer reddened still sharpened pierce through every vision. Every vision a visitation. Emptiness walks alongside the body, keeping the visitations from morphing to demon, and the travels continue, hard press of movement, migration.

Men. Women. Animals. Earth. Children, infants, the sick, the wounded, the dead. Birdsong of the jungle, light wind in the forest, the sword-slashed light behind the pine needle, shadows leaning over a fox’s den. Great jaws of a wild cat, the terror of what is hunted.

Wanderer. Endless days endless nights. Light sleep and the visions of the world unfolding, flowering, each petal a universe, the body at the center. Stamen. Fecund mind. The great cities of marble and limestone, red brick, cracked concrete, buried earth. Towers high, men and women at the top, trapped like fairy-tale maidens. No rescue, in the city. Wealth and beauty, the women elegant mirrors, suited men with thin hips, swagger….personnes  doucement malheureuses.

Shanty towns rooted to city centers. Weeds of the unwanted. Sickness defines the child, sorrow the mother. Living ruins, broad boulevards in spring, cherry blossom, tended freesia, red and yellow tulips. The city gardener clips the boxleaf. The cities shape what they can, recycle the rest.

Ville monstrueuse, nuit sans fin!

Re-turn.
A slow seeing. It is enough. There is, perhaps, a finishing, an ending. Or there is only the sea. Paros. Before dawn. Re-emergence. At last the body is alone. Joy. The body, already water, enters the sea, loses its center. Never was there a center. Only the visions, and that is enough.

Assez vu.
Assez eu.
Assez connu. Les arrets de la vie. O Rumeurs et Visions!
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Against Nostalgia

30 Saturday Apr 2016

Posted by racheltejas in Meditations and Poetry, photography, Yoga

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Buddhism, Donald Trump, existentialism, fear, Louise Gluck, marriage, meditation, meditation on memory, nature of memory, personal essay, photography, poetry, political fear, politics, relationships, Richard Freeman, self-portrait, spiritual practice, yoga

Islands in the distance. My mother
holding out a plate of little cakes–
as far as I remember, changed
in no detail, the moment
vivid, intact, having never been
exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age
hungry for life, utterly confident–

   – Vita Nova,
Louise Gluck

“I remember, changed in no detail….” It is a fantasy, unlike the poem from which the quote is taken. Gluck of course knows this. Exploring the nature of memory, and therefore of mind, makes the best poet a philosopher, and the best philosopher a scientist, and of course the greatest scientist must be all three. A true memory, a moment that can be recalled without the scars of time and desire, must remain, as Gluck points out, unexposed to light, to thought, to the tampering manipulations of the mind.

Well, then, must it be the case that there is no such thing as real memory? Our experiences are either hidden by layers of time or they are carted about with us, and morph with age, and sorrow, and the emergence of an end. Very rarely, if ever, do we look back with an intention to understand the truth about our lives, or the lives of those now gone; more rarely still do we look ahead with clarity or fearlessness. And of course the present is a muddle we just want to get the Hell away from, so what is left?

Look back, look back, I said to my husband. Were these habits, now grown to mossy stone, not even at the explosive beginning so obviously present to us, had we chosen to look up? Oh, yes.. there was that moment, I remember it so clearly. And yet, and yet, does the memory not serve some current purpose? Usually, for me, as analytical and competitive as I am, to win an argument, to carry the point, even to the edge of memory’s abuse.

The wavering angles of the self: we cannot bear it. It is too painful to see that one doesn’t ever really… exist in some profound sense, especially when one is taught from infancy that it is experience, and remembered experience, that constitutes self-hood, a personality (the sacred god of our culture), and differentiates us from… well from everything else. It is our experience, what we do with experience, how we manipulate and control our minds (which are out of control anyway, despite or because of the grand effort), that grants us the superiority of personhood, and creates the silhouette that will define and protect us as we move through childhood, into adulthood, until the silhouette thickens and hardens to an impenetrable black. A walking death: this is what most of us eventually undertake.

Finally we are filled with ourselves, and nothing else. And still we cannot face the pain of the self’s distortion, and so we become bitter, or romantic, or nostalgic for days that never existed anyway. Ephemera. How beautiful and sad to discover that ephemera in the Greek, its root, roughly means “lasts for a day.” But we want the collection of our memories to last a lifetime, and to give meaning and definition to our lives no matter what mental gymnastics we must execute to force memory to fit into our ideas about and addiction to our immutable Selves.

I have been thinking a lot about nostalgia, and memory, and how toxic the former can be on a mind and on a relationship; really, on entire communities and countries. Ronald Reagan was the archetype of the collective yearning for a nostalgic past that never was, just as Donald Trump is now trying to cash in on our fears and yearnings by promising to make things as they were: better, America ascending (and without that uppity black man living in a White House, so much of the subtext reads), America ruling by being both expansionist warmonger and isolationist King.

Trump promises, in other words, all the conflicting desires the mind wants to soothe itself with; it doesn’t matter that the balm is sealed in a poisonous tincture, it is a balm nonetheless.

What, then, is the difference between nostalgia and fear? Certainly nostalgia and desire are one and the same, the two are simply slightly different sides of the same mental patternings. And almost all desire, it seems, is rooted at least partially in fear: fear of losing control (whatever that means), fear of losing one’s sexuality, fear of fear, fear of being present to whatever passes in front of one’s felt experience, even for a moment; fear, I think, defines us more than anything, and so the great yearning that is nostalgia acts as a powerful, sometimes necessary and beautiful salve to the terror that is existence.

Richard Freeman, my primary spiritual teacher, is exquisite in his presentation of meditation, and “how” one meditates (can’t be taught, as far as my simple mind can ascertain). “It begins,” he says, “with the mind saying: Anything but this. Anything, oh anything but this. This of course being the actual moment in front of you.”

And so one sits. And immediately the stories begin. The spinning thread, ceaseless, without end, unwinds as if Arachne herself has taken up quarters in one’s frontal cortex. Yearnings and physical pain and sorrow and depression and memory. Especially memory. Remember when? Oh, then I was happy. In those days I was happy. Before the sickness, before the child, before the childlessness, before the money came, before the money went, before her death, before we fucked, before I started to try and sit with myself. Jesus. Anything but this.

My mother is cleaning house. She brought over my tiara that I wore on my wedding day. I looked so beautiful on that day. Skinny and sun-touched, my hair in golden ringlets down to my waist, my waist so tiny the tailor couldn’t bring the dress in anymore. The dress had no back, only a light double string of pearls held the entire thing on my body, and it was made of two thin layers of silk so thin I couldn’t wear underwear. Red lips and kohl-lined eyes, a klonopin champagne high with my best friend before the descent down the stairs with my dapper father. It was sunny and then as my betrothed and I kissed thunder came out of the sky and the rain came down, making the photos look like pointillist images by an experimenting Signac.

Oh. How nostalgic I am becoming. I also remember: should I be doing this? I look so incredibly fat. My arms aren’t toned enough. We should have eloped. This man is beautiful and loyal, but I kind of… hammer-smashed my way into his heart. Wasn’t I on cocaine binges just a couple years ago? What the fuck am I doing?

This afternoon I put the tiara on for the first time since my wedding all those moons and years ago. I felt nothing. No nostalgia, no yearning. Is that a good thing? Or am I waiting for a memory once buried so deep to make its way to the light, exist in some pure form, just for a second, like a firefly flash, before the light of the mind grinds it down to something else, belonging, today, to some other person?
20160429_172303-2

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You Are Here: *

18 Monday Apr 2016

Posted by racheltejas in art, Meditations and Poetry, Motherhood, photography, Yoga

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Buddhism, Buddhist teachings, existential humor, illness, meditation, meditation on motherhood, motherhood, photography, practice, yoga, young children

You Are Here: *
025-pablo-picasso-theredlist
I have always loved looking at the directories one finds in shopping malls or complicated grand monuments or famous parks. “Vous etes Ici,” “You are Here,” always accompanied with a comforting round red dot reassuring one of one’s existence and physical planetary location, and then indicating all the points west, east, north, south or in between where one wants to go, or should go, or should want to go. It’s a lovely little existential private joke created by companies and institutions who perhaps don’t even understand the meaning of their own creation.

My family is lost in some labyrinthine directory of its own at the moment. The red dot showing where we actually are is a place we would all like to leave as quickly as possible. We arrived there on Saturday night. First, the baby: vomiting, fever, choking, throwing up every 20 minutes from early evening until 4AM.

I was alone in the house, my husband gone, the children unwakeable. Outside, a spring storm of heavy snow. It had been snowing for hours and hours and hours. The baby slept on my chest, covered in a pale peach blanket, and I watched the snow thicken and shine under the single street lamp on our block. Snow-silence – a different sort of silence than any other. The baby would awaken, wretch, settle back in. It was a long night. A hard night. But tender. I was an animal, tending to her animal young. Sometimes life is very simple. One takes care of the sick baby. One watches the snow. The night passes.
20160314_123645-2And then it is day, and I was the next to arrive at the dreaded point the baby had so recently left. I knew it was coming by mid-morning. Sleepless, nauseated, I would much preferred to have stayed at the point indicating “Zara,” or “Shala,” or “antiquities,” but instead I could not escape “Disgusting Toddler Virus, Origins Unknown.” I am still at that point, despite my mind being restless to move on to the more interesting parts of the map.

And following me, of course, came Eldest Child and then Second Eldest. And now here we all are, feverish, miserable, each of us yearning for some other place that doesn’t involve losing lots of bodily fluids.

But this is practice. This is the essence of practice. “You are here,” says the map. The mind must absorb the fact, even though the map is an ephemeral shifting stream, and even the seeming stasis of sickness changes every moment.

What does the mind want? The same thing as the planning, controlling ego: vigorous practice. Dance. Beauty. Intellectual vibrancy. Health. Travel. Freedom. An unchained being, roaming about the world at will.
20150905_152806-2

The mind does not want to be interrupted by reality. It wants to decide the precise quality and feeling that defines and makes up the location of the self. If the ego/mind could decide, “You are here” would forever be some tightly controlled invention and not, as it is today, the simple reality of a passing (and easily passed) illness.

This is the practice I loathe, and therefore probably need the most: the sort that forces me through the power of its own circumstance to slow down, and to sit (or sleep) and to accept the vulnerability that defines our existence, and that when it comes to the indicator “You are Here,” we really haven’t much choice in the matter. It is all, the wisdom teachings advise, in the interpretation. And so illness becomes stillness, and fever becomes release. For a moment, even a moment…. and then the map shifts and splits again.
Rilke_path_and_Duino_Castle (1)

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