Two Pieces

Yesterday I walked down a set of stone steps to the water and sat for awhile, to be quiet and enjoy the morning. There were rustlings in the brush all around. Little flares of fear went off in my mind; I thought, someone is here, and looked around to see who and where. But there was no one else. My mind does this when I sit in meditation too, this sudden rustling, coming up with things I have to do, afraid that my sitting down to be quiet is a sign that I’ve forgotten, maybe, or given up on everything that needed to be accomplished still.

A few years ago, hiking with my aunt in the mountains of southern Tennessee, we missed a sharp turn in the trail and found ourselves on an unmarked path. Growing uneasy, we started to mark where we had been, and eventually we found our way back. I could have sworn that was a trail we were on, I said. It was, she said, it just wasn’t a human trail.

I know myself in two pieces. The human self hears the rustlings and thinks, we are not safe here. It wants to find its way back to regular time and space, never to be lost. The animal self wants to be pulled deep into wordless consciousness, to forget itself from time to time. I try to keep the two pieces together, to let the animal self calm the human self, to tell it, there really is nothing else you have to do just now.

Chalk Door

In a movie I saw recently, a girl takes a piece of chalk, draws a door on the wall, pushes it open, and walks through. It’s a common motif in mythology and folktales; a door is drawn where no door exists, a maze opens up, a wardrobe becomes a portal to another world. Most often a common set of rules applies: There is a dead end. There is no other path. The stakes are high.

I love the image for the way it speaks to so many ideas I am in love with.

Postmodern thought says that reality is the collective story we tell each other every day. We know its rules and parameters; the doors are where everyone agrees they are. We know a door when we see someone open it and walk through it. The beautiful thing about this is that when the collective story doesn’t allow us to go where we need to go, we can create a new narrative instead. We are always free to draw a new door.

Buddhism says that the perception of opposites, good/evil, mind/body, is a limitation of the mind, not a limitation of reality. Zen koans are unanswerable questions that force the mind with all its dualisms to a dead end, where it can draw a door with chalk and enter a new kind of awareness.

Art therapy says that the creation of images is powerful and life-saving: When you hit a dead end, and there is no other path, and the stakes are high, draw on the wall.

Perhaps because she is young enough, or perhaps because she learns faster than most of us, the girl in the film doesn’t have to be told twice. The first door she drew closes. She is at a dead end, and her life is in danger. So she reaches up to the ceiling, draws another door, and climbs through. Today, if someone were to ask me about the single thing I wanted to do with my life, I would have to say, I want to be a person who draws doors with chalk.

Red door

I took a walk in my neighborhood after it snowed a few nights ago. I walked just down my street and around my block, past the cathedral, where snow had settled into all the small ridges of the architecture, down past my old apartment and then back. A couple with a black cat came out the side door of my old apartment building. I thought of the black cat that I had when I lived there and of carrying her out that same side door for an emergency vet visit one cold night just before Christmas. I looked down the block and saw that a building I once visited had been torn down and a new building put up in its place. I had only been inside once but remembered it distinctly, its red door, its fireplace, its open staircase against a brick wall.

Apparently this is what happens when you mix Buddhist thought with a Protestant work ethic: All that time during my walk, I kept thinking, I should not be so lost in my own mind. I should be paying bare attention to what’s right in front of me.

I can turn anything into a job, even a walk in the snow.

So I will back up and say what is true in its barest, least shrouded form: I took a walk in the snow. I saw the cathedral, a black cat, the absence of a red door.

Piano Playing

It was 5 o’clock in the morning, and a man in my dream was playing the piano. It was beautiful, but I am not a morning person, and I was irritated. In my dream, I opened my eyes, and the window at the head of my bed looked out onto a beautiful courtyard garden. The musician dream figure sat at a piano down below. I yelled down to him to stop, that it was too early; I was trying to sleep. He obliged.

Back in waking consciousness, it makes me smile to know that there is a part of my psyche playful and inventive enough to pester me awake at 5 AM by playing the piano.

Shtick

Last year, a teacher of mine taught an exercise he called “presenting your ego to a tree.” It goes like this, he said, you pick a tree, and you do your shtick, you know, whatever it is you do to present your persona or get attention. Then be quiet. Then say to the tree, what do you think? He said the first time he tried this, the tree replied, you think all that’s going to help you when you die?

This weekend, I met some new friends from a nearby small town. And I tried, really hard, to be who I am with no shtick. It was scary. It always is. I was minimally successful. The thing is, I’m good at shtick. Really good. Because I love experiencing new things and because I am continually putting myself in different situations, I have a wide variety of experiences and worldviews to draw from. And because I have spent so much of my life developing intuition and empathy, I usually know, very quickly, what’s being asked of me, whether it’s overt or not. So most of the time, my shtick involves hiding select pieces of who I am in favor of other, less threatening or more impressive pieces. My fears when I met these new friends? They will think I am overeducated, stuck up, too intellectual. They will think I have a lot of useless knowledge and no practical understanding. It will be completely obvious that, despite all my rigorous branching out in many directions, I am still very firmly rooted in my semi-urban, intellectual, liberal bubble. All of that might have been true. The fact is that’s all in my head, and I have no idea what they thought. I know they were nice people and that we all did what we could to bridge the gaps, connect and have fun together.

The paradox is that to understand where someone else is coming from, you have to know where you are. It requires an intense and unwavering kind of authenticity and a brutal honesty with self. If you don’t know where you’re coming from, you have no ground on which to stand and from which to build a bridge to anyone else’s world. I am still working to keep my feet firmly planted on the ground and to allow other people to see exactly where I’m standing. Most days, that still feels pretty terrifying.

Inch & a half

 

My brother, the Nurse, sent some pictures of a recent snow in the town we grew up in. This one was among them.

It stood out to me because I remember our Dad taking pictures just like this when we were young – a close up shot of a measuring stick in the snow. That was so Dad, the impulse to record, to catalog. It’s a strange experience to see these little reflections of my parents’ personalities in my adult brothers.

I spent last Christmas with my other brother, the Deacon, and his wife out in California. It was their first Christmas together as a married couple, the first one they’d spent in their new home, and there was much discussion around traditions. What kinds of traditions did they want to keep from each side of the family? What new traditions could be created? And although it wasn’t said overtly, there was also an implied question: What did they definitely not want to perpetuate? My sister-in-law, the Deaconess, had wanted to find some crystal or glass ornaments for the Christmas tree, something to reflect the light. So Mom dismantled the chandelier that hung in the dining room of the house we grew up in and shipped some of the pieces to the Deaconess. Out in California, we ate Christmas dinner next to a tree hung with pieces of the chandelier we had countless family dinners under when I was a child.

To me, this is the perfect metaphor for what it’s like to be a family even though we are all adults, with our own lives, in different cities. The chandelier is gone, but the pieces of it hang on the Christmas tree. The Nurse sticks a measuring stick in the snow and takes a picture. The Deacon wears our grandfather’s wedding ring. I like the way things seem to break apart and reform in new ways. I like the place I find myself in now.

Harvest Moon

Recently someone asked me if I knew what a Harvest Moon was. Harvest Moon? No clue. So he sent me the picture featured in the header of this blog, a picture he took at his parents’ house in South Dakota. It was intensely beautiful, and I had never seen anything like it. That’s the moon rising over the horizon, not the sun going down.

A Harvest Moon, I have since learned, occurs near the autumnal equinox, when the moonrise and sunset are very close together. It allows northern farmers to use the extra light from the full moon to work later into the evening harvesting crops; hence the name harvest moon.

I love that this world I live in can still surprise me with how beautiful and unexpected it is.