New Year, New Age, New Moment

I've often thought of my birthday as an unfortunate circumstance: the Christmas "slash" birthday presents, no chance for a pool party when you're little, and always tending bar on my birthday night for the other New Year's celebrators. I'm happy to say that, this year, I'm finally beginning to imagine it a little differently.

I'm a New Year's baby. Born on a day full of hope (despite the hangovers), resolutions, renewed promises, thoughtful life-reviews, and moments of introspection. Everyone celebrates togetherness. Fireworks explode into the night sky. Southern families cook up black eyed peas and collards, toasting to prosperity and good health. Everyone kisses their sweetheart at midnight. A plethera of "unplanned" babies begin their journey (haven't you ever wondered why there are so many damned Virgos?!). It's a rather auspicious time to come into the world and I'm feeling very, very lucky.

This is despite my car breaking down. And my coworker never showing up to give me a ride to work. And the seat of my pants splitting right in the middle of my bar shift. Take it all in stride, I tell myself. Laugh, smile, be joyous. I'm alive! I was born today!

Dinner with my best friends. Laughing until it hurts. A flute full of golden champagne. A heart warm with love.

I spent some time going back through all of the entries in this journal for the last year and a half. So much growth! Up, up, and away. I'm so very pleased with my changes and the direction of my life. I'm at peace. The spiritual path is gaining width and depth. I'm learning and opening, and loving more and more the strangers I meet every day.

What changes do you discover when you look back over the year? Which one's make you smile? Which one's make the heart wince a little?

Winter Writing

Words! Words have come back to me, marching foreword, onward, with a mission! Determinedly. Demandingly. Commanding my attention. It's as if the tiny slice of time that I have between now and next semester has opened up a flood gate I've been thirsting after for years. All at once. Here and now.

Is it because she has been there, pounding at the door, herself? Calling out to the muse, wringing it out of her, preciously, painstakingly?

I notice that a part of me has grown up. I want to read everything I can get my eyes on. I want to study the craft from the crafters themselves. I want to listen. I want to consider. I never had this desire before. I only wanted to talk. I only wanted to chatter, compose, create, communicate. The one-way street has become the two-way.

I read Didion's latest book and skipped over the recommended Magical Thinking predecessor. I haven't the gumption for weak endings. Blue Nights is no weak ending. I could see it rising somewhere in the middle, about half way through. What I thought it was about, what I'd been told it was about, was not at all what it was about. It's an existential think-piece. She's asking, and yet not quite asking, the proverbial question that's been asked again and again since the beginning. It's about our own personal relationship with impermanence, change.... Death. Our death. Mine. Yours. The elusive way in which we deny it, cover our eyes, stick our heads in the sand. But the covers we erect over this disturbing truth, the reality of our lives, eventually dissolves. We are left with only the simple, plain fact -- and the task of acceptance.

There's something about Didion's writing -- her voice, her style -- that strikes a deep cord of familiarity. As I read her words it's as if I can hear my Grandmother's voice reading to me. It's as if she, not Didion, had written this memoire. I felt suddenly close to her again, admiring her matter-of-factness, her tactful grammer, her flawless poise. Images of Gramma walking away from me, when she didn't know I was watching, her shoulders perfectly rolled back, her spine straight, her gait sensual and sexy (even at 70!), flash across my memory. Her elegance ever striking. It could take your breath away.

I find myself wanting to invent this word: Deloquarious. I don't even know what it would mean, but it would somehow describe this writer's voice.

Deloquarious.
---

Poetic preludes keep entering my thoughts. I take a drive down our street to Jessica's house. I pass the converted funeral home with a lawn full of black birds. Hundreds of them. Pecking away at the ground. I look out the window smiling excitedly and let out a "HA!" alone in my car. Imagening them as my audience I throw out a few playful words. "The black birds taking in their winter feast. Winter starlings feasting. Winter birds feasting on the prize of Autumn's left overs." Reinventing lines. Turning them over. Examining their edges. Rotating them through the kaleidoscope of my mind. 
---

The day got away from me before it even began. It's been the oddest time sheet on record. I woke and did yoga. Rita called and we spoke. It was suddenly five o'clock, so we had dinner. Hadn't I only just awoken?

I think of Didion's book again, and fear I'm marching blindly towards my own death, letting minutes and moments I'll never have again leap off my page and take a nose-dive into the past.

Am I awake?

I lower into plank pose. I slither into snake pose. I bend and fold and push into downward dog. I inhale the foot forward and move to bring the body back into standing and it all takes a heavier sigh than I have ever known. The entire body -- my entire body -- felt in that split second, radically old. I've never felt that before. The tightening. The slowing down. The creak and crack and crumble of my bones, with nothing springy between them restless to move again.

Mother Rita

Two beautiful foreheads pressed together,
we make a canopy of our steepled arms
and place our love here.
Palm to palm.
Fingers interlaced and hooked in rapture.

Hard knuckles of white against white,
we cling to this brittle branch of dreaming
where, for a hollow moment,
I hold you in the whole of me.

Was it the hungry cub, pawing out for its mother's milk
which woke me --
Startled beneath the quick blanket
that jerked the wind from my lungs?

It was then that I first saw you, Great Mother.
Oh how the rounds of your eyes
were so brown! As dark as the wet forest trunk
is heavy,
with earth's ancient groaning.

I found you on your bathroom floor
and fell to my knees
at the cords of your robe.

You were a shrine. My shrine!
Crumpled up on the cold square tiles.
A precious stone burnished over time --

One part coal and one part diamond.
Riddled with the disease
which snakes its way up your sternum,
and sinks its pointed teeth deep into your spine.

This is you, and you are not a dream!
Together,
we cry and coo.
Twittering as the doves do
on your back porch stoop.

I press the top of your head with my lips, feeling
your soft hair, wrapping
myself up in your juniper scent,
my wet tears pounding you with kisses.

Seeing the Light

I made pumpkin bread and pumpkin muffins this morning.

I loved how the light was hitting them through the kitchen window... they look like holy golden muffins. I wouldn't say they tasted quite as heavenly as I would've liked. I balked at the recipe calling for 2.5 cups of sugar when I was only using 3.5 cups of flour, so I took out half a cup... much to the disappointment of the muffins. They also lacked the moisture I would have preferred. Note to self and others: don't apt for the shortcut of canned pumpkin, just go for the real thing.

I attempted to save them by making a cinnamon and suger glaze with butter and cream. All in all? They were, just, okay. I brought them down to Carollton and shared them with the hospice patients and hospice staff.

I was finally able to get a nice, long, 45 minute meditation sit in last night. I'm looking forward to a longer one this evening. I'm still trying to ferret out what makes for the really awesome sit and what stifles or obscures a sit. Last night I found concentration to come quite naturally and easily. As I entered deeper and deeper into the breath I began to notice something peculiar taking shape. Whether it's an act of my imagination, or the "sign" Bhante G talks about in his book, I'm still not sure. It was incredibly encouraging, though! I began to sense being at a doorway. It had real shape to it, and sort of pointed up at the top. I felt the doorway surrounding me a little, like a bubble. I sat in this doorway for a few minutes, minutes which I knew wouldn't last because I had already begun to ponder the experience and think about it, rather than be in it. That's a tricky balance to manage...

I remember when I had my very first meditative absorption. It was back in Iowa on my 21st birthday in a zen monastery. When I entered absorption there was a distinct "popping" sensation, like bursting through or popping your finger through plastic. There was a domed light surrounding me and the color of dark army green. I have no idea what these things mean, but they were present and experienced on some level that was neither just in my mind nor outside of it.

The recent dhamma talk posted yesterday was also encouraging. I was reminded that, though we accumulate bad kamma through our actions, we also create good kamma too. And this good kamma builds and builds. When we sit for meditation, each time we do, it's building good kamma. Eventually, we must enter the jhanas. It's simply bound to happen, like filling a pitcher of water. Eventually, the water will spill over. I'm hoping that the doorway is a sign, a symbol, that I'm building that kamma and coming closer to the first real step inward.

Autumn and All Things Good

I can't sing the praises of this salad enough. Wow. Just, wow! Roasted delicata squash and fingerling potatoes, fresh kale, pepitas, radish, and a delectable handmade miso-harissa dressing. Well, I had to do a little improv for the harissa, which is one very elusive sauce to find. I've searched far and wide without any luck, until I realized I needn't search at all... it can be made in my very own kitchen! Of course, who has the time to put it together at quarter after six, staring at 50 pages of research needing to be read and analyzed for a grant proposal whose deadline is looming? Yea, me neither.

Chili oil can go a long way.

To balance out the citrus and spice in the salad, I also made a sweet corn soup finished off with yogurt and dill. I was unfortunately too full to eat this bowlfull after finishing off a plate of the delicata salad, but the husband had no problem polishing off both! Men... I wish I had half their metabolism!

What are some of your favorite autumn foods?

Getting Stuck on the Way Up

[Cleveland, our 6 month old kitten, takes a look out the window with his butt stuck in the blinds]

It's been a month since I've last written. I have only one excuse: school.

School has been amazingly busy this semester. It's no help that I also signed myself up for the impossible: four classes, practicum, research assistantship, working weekends, hour-long commutes. Needless to say, I dropped a class to keep my nose above the water line.

Even with the recent dropping of some of the load, it hasn't come without its consequences. In the month struggle my stress and anxiety levels went through the roof, I had an emotional breakdown, upped my intake of wine, and the meditation practice almost completely fell out of each day. I watched my sits go from nearly two hours a day, down to one, down to thirty minutes, down to thirty minutes every other day, and finally, twenty minutes once in seven days. I'm reminded of the story Phakchok Rinpoche told me about his experiment with the 'ordinary' life, in which he gave up meditating for an entire week. At first he didn't notice much difference, maybe he lost his temper once in a while. But by the end of his experiment he had become extremely stressed, angry often, loosing his temper frequently, in a constant hurry to go places and do things. "It was just awful," he said, shaking his head. He was amazed that people could function at some level -- albeit with varying degrees of insanity -- without the practice in their lives.

My month-long slope down hill felt very much like his experience. I'm trying hard to turn the boat around, but the current that has built up against me in the meantime has grown quite strong. There's a lot of resistance I have to work against just to get myself back to where I was on the path. It's not just the loss of concentration ability in formal sitting that's difficult to regain. It's more about the memories of various heedless moments I've had -- broken precepts, poor virtue -- that weighs me down. A careless lie, a mean word, one glass of wine too many... these things hurt the faith in ourselves necessary to push on.

I have an overwhelming urge to sit perfectly still, not doing a thing, but it's a real illusion of stillness that is actually lack of energy and motivation. I'm sitting still anyway, in order to try and slow it all back down. An hour's sit this morning and an hour's sit last night, listening to a few deeply meaningful dhamma talks, may help realign the focus.

I'm finding a little bit of inspiration in this picture of Cleveland from this morning. Even though his bottom half is tangled up and stuck in the blinds, he's still reaching for the perfect view.

Patience + Perseverence

I've been working a lot lately with two of the thirtyseven factors of enlightenment, as they're called. Patience and Perseverence.

Back in July, when I was at the monastery, Sayalay recommended two hours a day of meditation based on my "constitution." Since then I've been working my way up to that, but it is hard to (a) find the time and (b) keep my butt on the cushion for that long. What I've found is that she's right -- I do need two hours. Have I met that goal yet in one sitting? No. Well, not yet at least. I'm coming close. I'm clocking in just at an hour, sometimes a little more.

But it takes a while to get to that quiet, still place. For the first twenty, thirty, even forty minutes of a sit, it's like battling the wind uphill, to wade through the thick current of the mind to a place where there's a clearing. It takes a great deal of perseverence and patience to keep with it, to keep going, in spite of sloth, in spite of restlessness.

What works the best? For me, I have found that beginning with the feeling of love in the heart works best. It provides a sense of joy, calm, and well-being. It also provides a terrific amount of easily-accessible energy and stamina. For instance, tonight I began my sit focused on Rita. I thought about her, about her pain, and I just began feeling love for her in my heart. I let it swell and build, I breathed it out, invisioned it surrounding her, soothing her, healing her broken sternum, easing her seizing muscles. Whenever the mind began to wander it was so easy to bring it back to the object of love and compassion, because it's for someone whom I feel so strongly. Thus, there was a tremendous wealth of energy to keep going, and an easier advantage of staying on the meditative object.

After some time of this, I turned my attention to the breath. The breath came more and more into focus until it seemed as though I was the breath, and the breath was me. There was nothing other than the breath coming in and the breath going out. The whole of me moved with its movement, with an intensity that only the present moment can unveil. I began to approach the edge of something much deeper than I've seen or been to... I wanted to follow this deepening further, but it's still new to me and so I wasn't able to sustain it for much longer.

I've also begun to understand, by way of experiencing, the teaching that virtue is one of the main foundations upon which meditation and concentration rests. Virtue must be something which is constantly cultivated in every moment. Some talk about it as "taking care of the moment." When there is any sort of disturbance within -- such as anger, impatience, aggression, etc -- at any point throughout the day, it creates a rift, a ripple effect if you will, that reverberates into one's meditation time. Imagine yourself to be like a pool of water. Negative emotions are like throwing stones at the pool. The bigger the stone, the bigger and longer the ripple will impact your ability to be calm and smooth inside.