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I sometimes upload pictures to Flickr. But I'm not shooting as much as I'd like to lately. |
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As a last step before breaking the ground with a shovel, I mix a superstitious cocktail to shake in over each bulb: fertilizer, bone meal, mulch.
— October 11, 2004 |
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Perhaps this is why it is man alone who laughs: he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. — Frederich Nietzsche
I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship. — Louisa May Alcott
The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. — Virginia Woolf |
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"The Real Work" by Wendell Berry (recently discovered on Keri Smith's journal and promptly stolen for my own use).
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I can be reached at romanlily ~at~gmail.com. Or you can join the notify list here. |
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October 10, 2005
Dancing with bruised knees
Pema Chödrön, that wonderful Buddhist nun, gave a talk a few years ago about the practice of beginning to meditate and quiet your mind. She said,
"...It's like your mind is a pool of water that's all stirred up by winds — it's very restless and chaotic. So then you begin to meditate. And you think that your mind is going to calm down. And, yes, that actually does happen. Then you think that that's going to feel very peaceful. What no one ever tells you is that when the water calms down, then you can see the old tires and skeletons and tin cans and corpses — all your misdeeds leering up at you from the bottom of this still pool...."
My car was stolen a couple of weeks ago, two days before I was supposed to move into my new apartment. I was working downtown at the time; the car was just parked at the Marta parking lot, minding its own business. My dumb 11-year-old car with the broken air conditioner and the seats stained with magic marker ink. I came back to the parking lot at the end of the work day and it was gone.
It took a little while to sink in. I walked for a while in a dazed circle around the parking lot. Now, I know I left it somewhere around here.... It was the end of the day; there were only about ten cars left in the lot by this time, so I didn't even have a lot of vehicles to choose from.
I called the police, filed a report. The police officer gave me a ride back to my house. For a few days I hitched rides with friends, took the train to work.
A couple of days after the theft, when reality was starting to sink in and I was starting to really worry, the car was recovered at a tow yard an hour south of town. The ignition had been ripped out, so I had to start the car with a screwdriver, but it was driveable.
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I had the car repaired, and it's running fine. Everything is back to normal, at least in the obvious ways. It's only now, a couple of weeks after the fact, that I am beginning to feel the full impact of the theft.
The whole thing left me feeling really vulnerable. Someone took my car so easily. And I was miles away at the time. Insurance was not going to offer me anything to replace the car. I paid an unbudgeted $400 to reclaim from the tow yard and fix the things they had broken. The aftereffects of some fiend's joyride in my shabby car are still snaking through my nervous system, through my bank account.
Besides vulnerability, what I've felt during the past couple of weeks is mostly fatigue. The accumulated intensity of all of the changes of the past year seems to be catching up to me. I think I could probably nap for two or three weeks straight.
And there is this low-grade anxiety that hangs like smog in the air. Is this the point at which I should sign up for antidepressants? I'd like a strong wind to come push the smog away. It feels like I'm moving in the direction that I want to go, but some days are very hard, and on those days my head will get so full of noise that it feels overwhelming.
When this happens, I'll stop cold, get out a piece of paper, and make a list of all the things I am worried about. This process is always illuminating. Shining a light on all the tin cans and skeletons down there. Apparently there is no end to the irrational things I can worry about.
A small selection from today's list of worries:
- That I am not going to be able to pay my bills this month or next month or the month after that (or the month after that, etc.).
- That my car is going to get stolen again, or break down, or that I'm going to get in an accident
- That I am going to get breast cancer and die (naturally, this will be my fault, and a direct result of the stress of the past twelve months)
- Major natural disasters. Hurricane Katrina. The Pakistani earthquake. The melting of the polar ice cap. Man, articles like that drive me crazy.
- That I don't know how to care for or sustain myself
- That my life is headed toward even greater instability
- That I am not able to trust that everything is really going to be okay.
Most of the things that I worry about are way beyond my control. Or they're giant, vague fears that drape over the whole future like a heavy black tarp. What is the satisfaction in worrying about things like this? There is no point in reserving my most powerful reserves of fear for what is completely inevitable and natural (death) or what is mostly beyond my control (ice caps, breast cancer).
The place that I go from here, curiously enough, is gentleness. Gentleness with myself. Learning how to care for myself in a way I never have before.
Its taken me a long, long time to believe that it's not self-indulgent (or even selfish) for me to be very good to myself. "Being good" here doesn't involve lying around on a couch reading Vanity Fair and eating Nutella straight out of the jar; it's more about regarding myself in a spirit of kindness and friendship and large-heartedness rather than animosity and mistrust. (This is another thing Pema talks about a lot in that recording — Good Medicine).
I do this for my friends; I believe that I can and should do it for myself.
Strangely, it's taking a lot of practice to learn to do this. For some reason, most of us find it easier to beat ourselves up than to care deeply and thoughtfully for ourselves. I wonder why this is.
Tonight I'm going to have dinner at my parents' house. It's Mom's new rule: family dinners once a month. Afterwards, I'll stop at a friend's dance studio to raid her closets: she has run her own studio for years, and apparently has a giant closetful of costumes of every variety. I want to dress up this year for Halloween. At this point I'm envisioning something silly and colorful and high-spirited. A tipsy princess with a big filmy skirt. Maybe a tiara.
Dancing at times like this seems totally irrational. Shouldn't we be calling a summit of world leaders? Shouldn't we be anointing our heads with ashes? I don't know the phone numbers for all those world leaders, and I don't know what else to do. So I'll just light a candle. I'll say a prayer. And I will keep dancing. Bruised knees and all.
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