A Chinese Odyssey

Recently, I have been noticing that I seem to be all about texture, both the way things look and the way they feel.  Texture creates contrast, even tension.  For some, the texture of, say, jello, is simply delicious, slippery, wet and wonderful.  For me, well, the texture of jello is more like the mud I fell into while attempting to get into the water at the edge of South Carolina; slippery, wet, woolly and well, scary, sucking my feet in up to my knees and feeling like it would simply suck me down for dinner.  In contrast, wet sand/mud at the beach had me captivated for hours with unbelievably beautiful patterns, whole worlds of beauty created simply by the relationship between the water and the sand and the earth.

I don’t know if it is fair to say when you look at something that you can know how it feels, but that is how it feels.  Sometimes you know just by looking.  Sometimes you have to touch to know.  Sometimes you want to keep touching to know more.  Sometimes you keep looking as though you are being touched just by the sight.

This feeling is elusive and seductive.  The feeling is a kind of knowing and yet there is the sensation that it will slide away as soon as you try to articulate it.  This is the same as the feeling of taking pulses in Chinese medicine for me.  A deep listening that brings a deep satisfaction.  A feeling with a kind of depth and knowing that is both still and moving, both noisy and silent, both rich and simple.

This Fall for the first time I ate rock oysters.  These kind of oysters live in clusters deep in the mud, the same mud, as it happens, that I fell into just later in that same day.  Their shells are rough, full of barnacles, as they climb and cling to one another in a kind of tree-like shape.  When I eat sea creatures,  I feel great gratitude.  They nourish me and offer me the essence of the ocean.  This time, I sat for a few minutes mystified by the giant mound of oysters, wondering how to actually eat them.  Turns out you have to pry most of them open even after cooking and that you might want to wear gloves because their shells are so rough.

Turns out that I love to eat food like this.  A texture fiesta.  Feeling the shells just the way they live in the mud, feeling the strength and intention required to get their shells open.  It became a celebration of both life and death.  Celebrating my life, sitting contentedly focused on eating a huge bucket of oysters.  Celebrating the death of these creatures on my behalf, exhorting myself to use these resources wisely.  I am so glad to be reminded of my true purpose through the act of acknowledging what nourishes me.  All life gives and receives in both life and death.  So I chant this prayer for myself and for these beings each time I eat:

This food has come to me through the efforts of countless sentient beings.

May it nourish and sustain my practice,

So that I open to the compassion and wisdom of original mind

And I, in turn, become a source of nourishment for all beings.

(translated from the Tibetan by Ken McLeod)

This, then, is the texture I am truly seeking, the rough edge between all forms of life and death, the place where anything can happen.

Horseshoe crab on the beach

It is starting wear off, but ever since last week Thursday around noon, I have been walking on air.  Last week Thursday 9 a.m. was my first surf lesson and by noon I had stood up on a surfboard something like 15 or 20 times.  A dream come true, as I have been yearning to learn to surf for quite some time.

It was 11 years ago now, that I well and truly fell in love with the ocean.  At that time, I was in Maine, where the beaches are rocky and the water is cold.  I fell in love with being at the edge of the continent in constant motion, immersed mentally and emotionally in the movement of a body of water inconceivably large.  Laying on the rocks felt like the place I had always belonged.  I didn’t really think about what it might feel like to actually get into the water.  I had walked in the ocean before but only briefly.  At that time, I was 20 and deathly afraid of bathing suits and large numbers of people who could bear witness to my own.  Being in Maine, where it makes no sense to wear a bathing suit because the water is too cold to survive in most of the time, was a great blessing.

I continued to pilgrimage to the ocean each summer.  The water, the body of the ocean herself continued to call me.  I continued to challenge my fears of large numbers of scantily dressed people.  The desire to get into the ocean began to overwhelm me.  I do mean all the way in, since I had, of course, been cruising the shore for hours with a camera and bare feet, getting wet from the knees down.  So, in 2009, before I left for Taiwan, I decided it was time to get into the Pacific.  Strange to write it now, that I was 49 before I actually got into the ocean.  The joy and exhilaration were immediate, surpassing the joy of walking on the shore by leaps and bounds.  The ocean was the perfect embrace, the perfect tough love, salty and sweet, rocky and sandy.

In Taiwan for the half century celebration of my life on this planet, I took myself again to the Pacific and for 5 days I tried to get a surfing lesson from the handsome proprietor of Winson House, an experienced surfer and a very cool guy.  He kept telling me it was too rough or too flat and the one day we finally organized it, it was raining.  I spent many hours lying on the boogie board and riding whatever waves I could, although WenSheng kept telling me there were lots of  jelly fish and I should stay out of the water.   Maybe he just thought he was preventing me from disappointment should I ever get a real surfing lesson.  In any case, no surfing.

WenSheng and son

Now, there has been surfing.   Surfing in the balmy water of the Atlantic.  Standing on water, swallowed by salt water, bobbing back up and paddling back out–why would anyone do this except for fun, for joy?  This is the thing, surfing, you can only do for fun.  There is no other purpose for it, really.  Boating, biking, walking, skiing, these will take you somewhere.  Surfing takes you nowhere except back to the shore and out into the waves again.  For me, it feels as natural as breathing, this movement to the shore and back out, on the water, in the water, breathing with strength, consciousness and  joy added.  Going nowhere and loving it.

after surfing

It is the peak of fire season and the heat is on.  This week I am reading, writing, swimming and resting by the ocean on Emerald Isle off the coast of North Carolina.  Yesterday I got sunburned.  As usual on the first trip out to the beach in the season, I just ignore the reality of more than an hour in the sun.  Then, on the way back from the beach the bottoms of my feet got burned just walking on the sand, blistery burned, since I flatly refused to wear shoes for the 3 minute walk from the condo to the beach.  The night before yesterday hot oil splattered me and burned a design on my wrist with spots all the way to my chest.  Clearly, the element of fire is trying to get my attention.  Well, it is gotten…

Meanwhile, here I am communing with the biggest body of water on the planet.  Getting in the ocean, I am constantly reminded of both the brutality and buoyancy that water brings to life.  Laughing and spitting out salt water, I land and skid on the half rocks half sand shore, dropped mercilessly by waves.  Yet I laugh with the thrill, feeling the softness of the foam combined with the singular force of a wall of water.  I feel so drawn to both the embrace and threat that this water offers.  Sitting on the beach, the heat radiating from the sand, my mind rests with the relentless sound and motion of the waves.  With a mix of awe and admiration for the very special nature of the fire and water relationship, I plan to wait them both out, getting in the water when it gets too hot, getting out of the water when it gets too tiring.  Out here at the edge of the continent neither one can ever really gain the upper hand.

Fire is the ultimate instigator of transformation. Nothing touched by fire is ever the same again, not chemically, not physically, not emotionally.  Water, the perfect complement, the perfect partner, the perfect opponent, the medium, the reflection, must be present for any transformation to actually take place..  It is working on me, this marriage of water and fire.  Body- the water, Mind- the fire, dancing together.  Which one has the upper hand?

evening at the edge

I was teaching over this last weekend and out of my mouth popped the line, “unconditional love is the medicine we all need.”  So, in our heart of hearts we all know this.  But, do we offer this?  How do we offer this?  What is love without conditions?  I really have only questions when I try to think about it, and clearly I wasn’t thinking when it came out of my mouth.  I wasn’t thinking but I was being, being in a room full of people who have given the better part of each of their days to being with people in pain and sickness, to offering their time, intelligence and love in the service of other human beings.  When I think about this I am humbled and amazed.  Amazed to see the world in all its suffering and chaos, when I know that every person strives to prevent suffering in those they love.  So, who do you love? And why does this strategy seem to have gone so awry sometimes?

One of my daily practices is to ask what do I really need?  Strangely, the answer is mostly that I need to give and receive love.  Or maybe that isn’t strange, but it feels like the one thing that from day to day, I don’t know if I have done enough.  “Love is the oxygen of our lives” says one of my teachers, Jeffrey Yuen  (http://www.daoisttraditions.com/jeffrey%20yuen.html) and he is a celibate Daoist priest.  Because I live in metaphor most of the time, this statement makes the whole situation completely obvious to me in some ways.  Just love everyone and all will be well.  But we all know that this is a task akin to the likes of learning to fly without the aid of machinery.  And when I am not living in metaphor, I am looking for ways to make the literal definitions match the energy of the metaphor.

So, love is oxygen, not oxycodone.  Love will not anesthetize us to the reality of our world.  Love will not prevent pain.  Again, I think we all know this, but what I find to be such a compelling inquiry here is the fact that though we know this, we attempt over and over again to use our idea of love to cure all ills.  And there I think lies the nugget of trouble, our idea of love.  Any idea we have of love prevents us from being unconditional in dispensing it.   Meanwhile, we can’t live without love, we can’t wait for the time to come when we have no ideas about it, before we begin accepting the medicine we need.

View from the porch

So I am sitting on the porch.  I love the rain and the slow dark of 7:30 p.m. in June.  I love the fireflies and the wet grass.  I love the smell of damp and the smoke of mugwort as it floats up from my toes.  Basically, I could go on and on about all that I love as I sit here and look around.  I am filled with oxygen.

Tasha posing in front of our joint sidewalk creation

Agape:  wide open, speechless, a state of wonder

Eros:  the love of love, the desire of desire, yearning

I have been contemplating these notions of erotic love and devotional love for a long time.  It is Springtime and both are in the air.  Both the air and my emotions are highly volatile.   So easy to mistake one’s wonder and love for the world for the impulse to surrender to another, to align all the natural beauty and energy of our world with one human being.  But is this fair?  Is it fair to your lover?  Is it fair to your teacher?  Suddenly, one person is everything, whether they are your lover or your teacher.  The question is does this person in either capacity expand your world? Or do they narrow your world?

The very notion of agape, the speechless open state of love, the surrender to the sacred, whether it be in the natural world or in a chapel or in a living room suggests the world become more vast, more spacious.  Eros, on the other hand, seems only to work that way temporarily.  We feel more vast when we fall in love, but when the “lover” wants to know when we will be home for dinner, the vastness disappears, our world narrows.  And it narrows to the things that we often find troublesome, the ordinary daily digest of bills, meals, clothes and washing.  How do we nurture love that is both vast and precise, energetic yet relaxed, spacious yet willing to see and know the details?

We are hard-wired to love at first sense, any of the senses in my experience.  Evidenced,  it would seem in the fact that our newborns love us.  All our misery, all our creativity and all our promise seems to arise from this same source, our capacity for love.  What drives love?  How is it different from desire?  For me, I always say that if I had not fallen in love with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who I never actually met, I would surely have gone insane, killed myself or otherwise short-circuited my possibilities in life.  Yet, some would say that love for one who can never return that love is its own insanity.  Even after 26 years, I love my guru in a way that powers my life, loosens depression’s grip and nurtures my capacity for compassion in a way that nothing else does.  Am I insane or healthy?

Healthy Spring brings longing, the ache of reaching and growing.  Just the sight of some bare arm or back can arouse deep longing.  Longing for what?  For connection?  For liberation?  In the spring, the world seems endlessly beautiful and tender.  Like new leaves on the trees in that electric green.  Everyone looks equally beautiful, no matter their age or features.  We soften and move with impulses that have lain dormant in the cold.

And often, I simply stand in love and wonder at the glory of green.

Even in green, one can feel pretty foolish with their mouth wide open…

Every year when December arrives, I fantasize about hibernating for the winter, getting in bed and not getting out for at least a month.  I am not depressed.  I just need a rest.  Like all the other large animals on the planet, I need a good long rest when the days get short and the nights get long.  Most years I have managed to set aside at least 3 days and sometimes up to 3 weeks to do a retreat.  Most often I use my retreat to practice meditation sitting up or singing and chanting, only part way meeting my need to really rest.  This year I decided to lie down.

I lit the candles. I laid out my sleeping bag on the floor of my upstairs room, which is a lovely gabled attic space, and I laid down.  For the first day, I fell asleep about every hour for at least 15 minutes and maybe even half an hour, I’m not sure.  I began at sunrise (7:34 a.m. on December 19) and I planned to lay down until sundown (5:19 p.m.).  Then I didn’t know what I would do.  Specifically, I planned to do nothing.  I brought my hot water in a thermos and some seeds and tangerines upstairs with me.

I got sore, so I had to lay on my side as well as my back.  It was strange to have my gaze at floor level when I wasn’t sleeping, so usually I closed my eyes which is probably why I fell asleep so often, but after the first day, I fell asleep a lot less.  Doing nothing felt great to my body, and not so great to my mind, my mind which has been going at warp speed trying to adjust to working for somebody besides myself for the first time in my adult life.  So the ensuing struggle proved to be very interesting and informative.

Doing nothing is always a lot harder than it sounds.  I have tried it before, but then it was with a lot of support; somebody else made the food, somebody else made the schedule and somebody else gave talks on how to do nothing.  It was, even then, a difficult but very rewarding experience.  What is the reward, you might ask?  The reward, the “I never asked for this” reward is finding out that you are not who you think you are.  You are not your work.  You are not your family.  You are not your friends.  You are not who your family and friends think you are.

But sometimes, you are “the dew on the morning grass and the burning wheel of the sun…the white apron of the baker and the marsh birds suddenly in flight” to quote one of my favorite poems, Litany by Billy Collins.  And then again, you are not because you cannot be reduced to something that can be identified by anything or anyone in words or gestures.  Until now, this had proved to be a great relief.  A relief to discover that I could be whatever it is I happen to be at any given moment, because for all intents and purposes, I have never been until that moment and may never be again after it.  This was greatly disconcerting to the parts of me that wanted to be known or seen, and greatly comforting to the parts that did not.  Until now.

Now, I am not comforted at all, not relieved, but rather agitated and even angry to find that I cannot simply lie down and drink in this darkness, this cool stillness that I crave because instead my mind is careening wildly from working to dreaming to sleeping without stopping for even a break.   Now, I realize I must stay awake if only to catch the moment when there is actually nothing happening, that precious millisecond when there is only light and space, noise and silence, weight and floating air.  So strange, staying awake to see if I am awake, waiting for the gap or in the gap, confused by the chatter that says there is boredom or breakfast or bedbugs waiting for me.

Darkness comes.  I don’t want to leave the floor.  I want to keep staying awake here in the darkness with nothing to do.

I’ve been itching to write a blog entry for the last 2 months, mostly the last month, really, except for the 2 and 1/2 weeks while I was in China.  Finally, here I am, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, beginning to settle in here in North Carolina.  I have had a lot of resistance to coming back to the U.S., a resistance only overcome by the strong desire to start my job here.  I did not really want to come back to a life with a car, a house and a lot of bills to pay.   I have been considering the notion of contentment rather regularly in this process.  Where it used to seem I needed some things to feel content, now it seems the very thought of having them is creating agitation.  In any case, I love the sun here in my new home, an old house with 4 over 1 windows, strange little spaces and a great falling-down front porch.  It is quirky and bright but for unknown reasons, no one seems to have ever had a phone line or cable that worked for internet here in the main house.  Fortunately, the young men in the apartment built from the carriage house in the back have got cable and we are now sharing it, so I can start writing here from the comfort of my new home.

I am still a little confused about why I rented this house.  It seemed a very sketchy situation, but something about the house spoke to me (not the ghosts, I checked!).  As I set up each room, that room becomes my favorite.  I am managing about a room every two weeks.  First it was the bedroom, a spacious but cold room with 7 giant windows on the north side of the house.  I actually have a mattress for the first time in my life, believe it or not.  And for the first half of September I just loved going to sleep since it meant getting into bed.

After I got back from China in early October, my stuff arrived from Vermont.  I went to work on the kitchen, getting out the things that meant I could cook in the oven, and putting up a rack for extra provisions.  Painted a nice warm orangey color with black appliances, a fake granite countertop, and a window onto the woods behind the house, the kitchen has a very cozy appealing feeling like cooking is a good thing (which, of course, it is, but I don’t always feel that way).  I started spending a lot of time cooking, putting my computer on the half wall behind the sink so I could listen to music while I was cooking.

Next, I went to Target.  Now after 12 years in Vermont, 6 months without a car in California and a year in Taiwan, it has been probably 15 years since I have been in a Target.  Wow!  I bought a great black futon couch that works like crazy in my new living room and needless to say it was within my budget.  So, then, I started spending a lot of time on the couch.  I just laid there feeling smug and happy to have a cheap but stylish couch and feeling oh so comfortable.

Then, one day, I started moving boxes in the study.  Suddenly I had a place for the lovely Persian rug that had to live in the shack in the back in Vermont.  I had a chair, two bookcases and a writing desk, all with the morning sun streaming in.  I sat like a cat, sitting and sipping in my little white rocker, admiring my sleek black writing desk and ignoring the 15 boxes of books that somehow still had nowhere to go.  No matter, I had my study and my sun and my rocks and my books and I was happy.

Then, today, I started organizing the attic.  There is a space under the eaves for storing things that needed a lot of attention to be functional, but there is also a big, low-ceilinged, wood-floored space with nice windows and a nook for well, something that involves sitting or lying down.  I set up the majority of this space as my meditation/yoga/study dharma space.  I set up the nook as a sitting area/guest room and now, all I want to do is sit here. basking.  It is glowing in the late afternoon warmth, quiet and roomy, rich colors roaming on the white walls, reminding me that anywhere is home when you actually get there.  And finally, I am here, still in process but quite content.