The first day of Dathun, the arrival day, involves no practice. So there was a massage party in my room.
Not that I update particularly regularly, but over the next two weeks, I will not blog at all, nor have any electronic access to the outside world. I will be on Dathun, for two weeks. I go with both sadness and joy, eagerness and fear, anticipation and dread. I am ready as I can be, or at least, I will be as ready as I can be once I finish packing up all of my comfy warm clothing suitable for meditation.
Last night, I spent some hours in the company of three dear friends, all of whom I adore, all of whom are brilliant geniuses full of amazingness, love and keen insight. And they flatter me much, telling me how unendurably sexy I am, which I appreciate deeply, despite not quite believing it. I went to dinner with one of them, which was a delight I will have to repeat whenever opportunity arises. And perhaps we shall see where the exchange of flirtation takes us. I sense a broadening avenue of possibility.
But there was someone I wanted to have dinner with last night, but could not. I am sad of this, but the sense of resolution there will, alas, have to wait until she and I are back both in Boulder.
On a related note, there's something, I find, about letting go--the less tied to or invested in a given situation with a person, the more free I am to participate in it fully. As Atraya and I are gradually moving in separate directions, I find myself more easily open to a friendship there, instead of the usual sort of bitter breaking off of relationship that I've experienced in the past. There's still sadness, angst, longing, regret, etc., but there's also this freedom to relate to her as myself in a way that I couldn't within the expectations of our relationship as it was. Maybe I was protecting her, maybe I was protecting us, maybe I was just stuck in habit, who knows? Whatever the case, now there are bouts of genuine enjoyment in the midst of everything. I appreciate that.
See the Friend Directly
There's no cure, except the retreat into love,
For the suffering of subtly afflicted hearts.
See the Friend directly, or burn in longing for Her---
What does the whole world matter, apart from that?
To arrive, at last, at the vision of the Friend,
Keep your soul prostrate before the image you have of Her.
Stay standing before Her like the foot of a lamp;
A thousand graces are poured out to the noble.
In this contingent universe, you are powerless;
When will you find the origin of time?
When physical vision has transcended space,
Another sky opens to the eyes of the soul.
Your body is a saucepan, the soul its food.
Place this pan on the fire of divine passion
So its flames can make boil the truth within you.
Then you won't need anyone else's poems or teachings--
You yourself will know the value of your state of soul.
Rumi, regendered
So caught up in it am I. So caught up in it am I. So caught up in it am I.
Not genuinely drunk per se, but I have consumed (care of a coworker holiday party):
- one glass of savignon blanc
- one soynog with a shot of rum
- three shots of sake
- one beer
Just say it out loud. Just tell me what you really want; let us cease dancing around it. Human negotiations require trust; perhaps we might offer it to each other and see to where it brings us. Oh G, I know why you wait, why you content yourself with a lingering simmer. It is you, yourself you are experiencing. The longing possesses a realness in its empty grasping. So long as you are reaching, so long as you are looking, chasing, wanting, lingering in gaze and thought, you are alive with an intoxication that exceeds that of any wine. The desire is a perpetual motion machine that keeps you pushing past yourself, outward and onward and inward. So long as there is a the lingering simmer, the back-burnered sense of postponed satisfaction, you keep moving, What would happen with true fulfillment? Can you ever be contented? What would happen if you stopped dancing around it, stopped navigating a sidewise course, and came to stillness and rested with it, not alone in silence but with it out there, out loud, in the open, in the space of things that are seen?
I find myself seduced into a languor by the very idea; shutting down, down down or perhaps that's the hour of my usual expiration, to shower and to bed to sleep perchance to dream of the desired of me and the space or merging between. Lethargy, laziness, looping thoughts spilling over the bough as each breath crashes over the bowspirit of mind parting the waters of consciousness. It's a deep, dark place down there, beneath the surfaces I intentionally skim. G, you're such a silly girl sometimes, self-secret gothy angst self-perpetuating for the sake of the desired texture, like watered steel cutting jaggedly through raw silk or something similarly ostentatious and not particularly me. Give me denim and leather and other rugged, practical materials. No, give me a hot shower and jersey sheets and a cat to keep my feet warm.
Sleepiness is either a defense or a habit--I remember marathon conversations lasting up until 4 or 5am, when the sense of all sense would be long past us and we drift into errant babble that sounds like, for all the world, the deeper meanings of the universe. As I edge toward a similar space in mind I find myself getting sleeping, ready to drift into dream. Depth of thought and willing vulnerability of emotion evoke morpheus. My upcoming weeks on the cushion may yield the same, although I hope I might gain the wakeful stamina quickly. Oh, to sleep, perchance to dream wide awake in meditation. Two weeks on a cushion! Meals pure oryoki! Chanting! Breathing! Rote rota rotation of the days events like clockwork, like sunrise and moonfall and the rhythms that cause the cock to crow and the hen to coo and the cat to meyowl at me annoyedly when it's time for her breakfast. Falling into pattern and making myself a willing slave of it.
O! Lash me to yourself and making a willing nonsubserviant and rather actually wholly independent and self-sufficient and self-directed and self-authorizing slave for you. Okay, nothing like a slave at all, actually, save in name, for perhaps a moment, just to experience how pinned the moment, how pinned to myself, how pinned to the reality of an embodied heartful immanence I am, just then, caught in the crosshairs of your gaze. Butterfly on wax, crucified by a hatpin so as to entertain the gaze of those who like the glitter of my wings. Catch my not so carelessly but freely flung gaze and know that I mirror project expect and toss back all that you might suspect to see. I am not what you see before you, nor are you what I see, but we two are that moment of seeing when eye meets eye in timeless self/other other/self other/other self/self regard. Be that moment in a beyond we, know it as such, let it go but remember.
O! Gods, but I am a romantic fop, sop and fool. I am oversoaked with drink and love and the flow of being, Wring me out, set me by the sinkside, and forget me a while. I need to dry and shrivel and harden, become impervious again to all but the hottest flood so that I may function again in the world in my usual broken way. Leave me to moulder by the forgotten dishes grown crusty with misbegotten miso. Better I stay there and remember the wetness fondly, distantly, than drown in it.
O! But I want to drown! Every nightmare of drowning (which I have as often as an person of fears heights dreams of falling) ends with me learning how to breathe underwater.
How I miss you.
Last night, I went out to First Friday with a troupe of three female friends. First Friday is Denver's monthly all-women club night. I'm not sure what time it starts (8? 9?), but early in the evening, it's an older lesbian crowd. As the night waxes into midnight, successively younger crowds of women are there. We left at 1am, which I feel is when it was just starting to get good. But we were waning, and I had a long drive to make home. We stopped in for a brief visit with M's SO, which is where M and E were staying that night. A and I drove back to Boulder, and I to the Mountain House.
Although I drove us to the club, I believe would not easily find it again--it was somewhere in what felt like an industrial district, accessed via a winding road that passed under many overpasses. We found parking without hassle, and bustled off to the club excitedly. From the outside, we glimpsed the hundreds of women. Gazing through the large windows at the crowd within, I ceased feeling the cold and my uncertainty, and felt an old familiarity creeping into my bones and seeping outward into my muscles.
After our IDs were checked and our $5 covers taken and our hands stamped, me made it inside. I felt the gait and length of my stride change as my walk eased unexpectedly into something of a leonine saunter which stuck with me all evening. E lead us full circle through the crowd around the periphery so that A and I, newcomers to the First Night scene, might glimpse the whole of the place. We found a place to put or check coats, and stood together for a moment, taking it in. I felt both stunned and ready to bounce out of my skin. There were women of all ages, although at this point in the evening it was an older crowd of 40s, 50s and up. I'm saw at least one octogenarian, and breathed a sigh of contentment at the sight.
M located some friends of hers and E's, and names were exchanged around. We half-circled the place to the big elliptical bar, where I bought Stella Artois for A and E, and M got a drink care of one of her cute friends (whose name I forget, mea culpa). I got my old barhopping favorite and emblem of refreshing simplicity, the vodka gimlet.
Over the course of our first round of drinks, we mostly wandered around, took in the sights, chatted as best we could over the loud music, talked about how sexy we thought each other were, and so on. We went to the men's room at one point to tipple whiskey from a flask in E's purse, whilst we stood in the one accessible stall at the end of the room. Since there were perhaps 10 men in the whole place, the men's room was a quick-to-pee alternative to the line for the women's room. As I commented to A, it's the safest I've felt in a men's room, even as fellows came in to use the urinals. There is a strength in numbers, and the men who were there, of course, were of a certain disinclination to asshole-ish-ness.
At some point, E was off talking to one of her recurring flings, M was off texting her SO, and so A and I were wandering about together. I bought a second round of drinks and we chatted about our mutual brilliance in half-heard shouts. At some point, something was said about the delicious overwhelming beauty of it all, and I said something about this becoming the derangement of the senses--and lo, my senses were spilling into each other and overlapping. (I can hold that first drink well, but since I rarely ever have a second, the effects are exponential rather than logarithmic.)
There was both the familiar and the utterly unusual feeling in my body in relation to the setting--so many women, so much dancing and joy, so much gazing and seeking, plus the everpresent undercurrent of sadness, loneliness and longing. I felt the floor throbbing under my feet, the beating of the music reverberating in my lungs, the sudden contraction of my irises as the disco lights washed over me, and the tingling in my fingers from the vodka, the tidal pull of desire, the taste of clove cigarettes still at the back of my tongue. Each sensation was distinct and yet it all swirled together in a delicious overwhelm where I lost my usual sense of mundane selfness and merged into a space that was bodies, light and sound. I wanted to dance and lose myself in it. And so I did, finding my way to the center of the crowd, care of E, whose imposing height allows her to part crowds at whim.
Whenever I drink enough alcohol to feel essentially drunk in the sense of "I am so not getting behind a wheel for the next three hours" sort of drunk (I kept track of the time, as I was to drive later), I find myself thinking of Chogyam Trungpa. I'm not sure why he pops into my mind at such times, but there is a strong historical relationship between that particular Tibetan fellow and the Drink. With that image in mind, I called on him and the teachers of his lineage to help me live these moments fully. (I feel kind of silly about this in retrospect, but, whatever.) And so, I did. Even recreation can be practice or a means of continual advancement on the path, and I suspect perhaps it should be.
Dancing was an unexpected experience. I expected to dance, certainly, but I didn't expect the intensity of my internal experience. I shan't describe it, for it would be like describing meditation with a beat-driven soundtrack (too corny). I felt more alive and in my body there on the dancefloor in the tight press of many women and good friends than I have in such a long, lonely time. Where was I? Who was I? I felt her return, from wherever she had been and whoever she'd been to become me again. I danced and I breathed and reveled in the smoke-free-air (most of my prior club experiences have been in smoke-filled places). Dancing and breathing with the music, feeling, seeking, connecting, breaking away and into and out of myself again.
In a later session of dancing, when the music was again dance-worthy, I was looking around me as I moved, and saw that I got The Eye from another. At first, I wasn't sure that's what it was, and then I got The Eye again. Yes, I definitely was eyed, and in my surprise I'm sure my return gaze was one of startled confusion. In such moments, due to relative inexperience, I have no established sense of how I'd like to be in that moment, and so I'm just startled and uncertain. Repeat experimentation is necessary, and so I look forward to the next available opportunity.
Alas, I won't be able to go again until February. My folks will be here in January during the next First Friday, so I'll be entertaining them. Perhaps Atraya will get a chance to go then instead.
I've set many of my interests aside over the past several years, for a variety of reasons, some for the sake of the relationships I've been in, some due to life circumstances. I intend to pursue these interests, to recultivate myself.
- Travel: I enjoy travel, particularly to places rather different from where I live or have lived, and places where I haven't spent much time before. I enjoy the thrill of difference, of navigating my own way through the intensity and density of the urban maze via train, lightrail, subway and bus. I really want to see the world, all of it.
- Museums: I love art & archeology and culture. I may know relatively little about anything I see in a museum, but I see it, I engage with it, I relate to and with it and let it transform me, if only for those moments of reflecting.
- Theatre, musicals, opera, concert performance--these were major parts of my youth and early college years. Angyl is the only friend I've had all these years with whom I shared these interests.
- Horses: I loved them as a girl (don't all girls?). I don't think I've sat horseback since I was 12. I want to cultivate equine relationships again, riding or no.
- Snobbery: I believe one should cultivate a little snobbery -- not in the sense of disdaining that someone's favorite beer is Coors -- but rather, in the appropriate scoffing at someone who walks into a local microbrew and complains that they don't serve Coors. In otherwords, one should try to not be a Philistine. This makes one appear to be a snob to the Philistine, and that is perfectly alright.
- Having goals: There's something I want to do with this life, something that creates positive change in the lives of others and is not confined solely to friends and family. It may be a political life, it may be high level administrative/directive, it may just be teaching, consulting or counseling, but it will be something that necessarily requires me to learn and grow constantly.
- Dilletantism: I still cultivate a wide variety of interests and tastes to some degree of relative shallowness, but I've not pursued it as an art in many years. I will do so again, but I think I'll call it an "interdisciplinary approach to human culture"
- Willingness-to-be-touched: In the emotional sense. Watching a film like Born Into Brothels and being willingly swept up in the pathos. Joining a microfinance organization like Kiva, so I can be curious about and find out how a distant other is faring in the world with my help. Keeping informed as to the state of political unrest or economic exploitation anywhere in the world, and wondering what I can do. Keeping informed as to the state of the environment/climate, and wondering what I can do. In short, looking at immense, systemic problems, and not despairing, but instead hoping for the better and wanting to participate in that process of improvement. I am willing to be touched by the world, willing to use my soft-heart as an energy for motivation, rather than shield it and shut down and go numb, like I see so many others do. I am open to the potential for positive change with my soft heart, and I know that it requires far more of me than any human intimacy. In the long run, this means working for social justice, in some form.
- Teaching: In part inspired by the good teachers I had in high school and my own unfolding under careful tuteledge, I've often considered going into teaching. Not primary or secondary school, unless it was in a hard-assed place where the state sends minority students to be forgotten about between preschool and imprisonment*, but preferably in a college, where I might engage students in the hard-thinking processes of opening their hearts and minds to truths larger than themselves, such as the systems of privilege and oppression and their places within that system, and figuring out what they might do to rebel against that system, starting within themselves and working outward. I don't know how I'd fare in a hard-assed secondary school, but I'd be willing to try.
- Feminism: 'nuff said. I'm sick of being guilt-tripped by patriarchy customers for not buying into their paradigm.
- Lesbian/bi/queer women's community: I don't know what it is, or what it looks like, but I want to participate in a community-of-similarly-identified, even if identity politics is so modern and essentialist. I am nourished by interactions which remind me that I am not alone in this world, and I am not the only one who feels this way, who has had these experiences, who loves in this way. It's also a good way to meet other women, frankly, as well as have the kind of conversations I find so stimulating.
- Ironic self-parody: usually, it's like a private joke that only I am in on and laughing at, but my closer friends who've known me long enough start to get the gist of it when I'm in ironic self-parody mode, and join in the laughter at the metamythometaphorical self I can play at being. It's a kind of state I find most often on the meditation cushion, but it also comes out when I engage in genuine flirtatious play with another.
- Computer geekery: it's been a long time since computers were unbelievably cool for me. The transition happened somewhere when computers and gadgetry ceased to be a hobby and really became a job. The way around it, I think, is to keep me learning new things all the time, playing with new software and hardware, or at least new processes and methodologies. I could probably get into teaching&learning technologies. But my main motivation to go in that direction is for the good income, so it will likely never be a passion for me.
- Aesthetic self-cultivation: taste and refinement are the domain of artists, not the wealthy. The goal is not to be the most or best in any arena of aesthetic, but to develop an inner compass and be genuinely moved when it points true south. And then, move through the world without self-compromise, with abundance, with dignity.
- Relationship: monogamous only. If you don't have the stones to invest that level of emotional and mental and sexual energy into me, if you can't meet me in that intensity, then I won't have naught to do with you.
* I really believe the state has little if any any regard for lower socioeconomic status and minority youths. Otherwise, why would eduction funding be the thing that gets cut more each year, while the wealthy get their tax breaks and the military gets larger bankrolls (and enlistees get fewer benefits and less pay). And I don't know what to do about it, other than to fight within the system.
The world is changing and I am changing with it although I do not want to. I am changing and so the world changes and I might take comfort in that save for the fact that who I am changing into is never quite who I ant to be. Maybe I should work on a five year plan, neatly outline things like career, income, home, car, vacations, no children, lots of friends, maybe a dog, but no room for grief, strife, anguish, anger and disappointment, whichi is what my life is overfull of now.
It occured to me today that one of the major bummers of Buddhism is that it's so damn solitary (in my experience of it so far). There's never anything like a prayer group that comes together to offer silent and loving support to someone who's going through something. The only space in buddhism where one can show up and be messy is on the cushion, in solitude and silence, even when in a room full of people. And on that cushion, one must maintain the posture.
Not that I'm griping about the meditation practice -- it's a very good method. I just don't think it's the swiss-army-knife of contemplative practice I'm looking for. How do you stay with grief and let it ride you, course through you, chew you up and spit you out? How can you do that in a way that you are simultaneously held (in whatever sense) and seen (visually, perceptually, relationally)? Sitting meditation ain't for that. It's like the hammer in the toolbox when what I need is a crowbar, a piece of felt, and some carpet tacks. And feathers, lots of feathers. A hammer just won't do.
This morning I happened upon the Wickedary, which fills me with delight. I'm only faintly acquainted with the writings of Mary Daly, having read only a few chapters of Beyond God the Father for my Queer Theory, Feminism & Religion course. This would have come in handy then, since part of the ongoing learning structure of the course involves string tests.
String tests are short essay quizzes--the student is presented with three terms or concepts from the most recent assigned reading, and any readings prior. (String terms are included in the course syllabus, so one can make note of them while reading, take notes, and so forth.) In the quiz, the student must craft a paragraph or two which uses the three terms in a way that clearly communicates both the meaning of the terms and the relationships between the three.
However, just having the definition of a term like allocentric perception is obviously insufficient to understand what it means.
After a long online conversation with another treasured friend* last night, I found myself awake in the middle of the night or wee hours of morning, unable to sleep, and thinking. Now, this is a rather rare occurance for me--usually I sleep straight through the night. Anyhow, so I woke, and my head was full of thinking not specifically related to the conversation I shared, but more that my thoughts took it as a kick-off point.
"There's no such thing as perfect desire," I said to myself. "You may have visions of who you'll be, how balanced, how mentally/emotionally/physically/fiscally stable you'll be, and how you'll find and meet and desire the Other who is the perfect complement to your well-ordered life, but frankly, she doesn't exist, nor do you."
All desires that you experience for any other are necessarily expressions of who you are in relation to that person. It's always going to be a little sticky; we're always casting webs of projections at each other, even in the best of circumstance. Even the adoration and loves you experience for your friends, family, and cat are caught up in this.
I wonder about religious/spiritual pursuits of deity-as-lover, the ecstatic contemplation of a divine Other, in union with (or as) self. I don't know, but I get the sense from memory that there are such practices in various religions throughout the world, including Christianity. Perhaps there's a particular practice with some yidams in Tibetan Buddhism that steps into this sort of arena.
I wonder about this simply because spiritual pursuits seem to be the best-suited area in which to explore one's extremes of idealism. Not in an organized-religion sort of way, but in a private (individual or spiritual community) contemplative practice: forms of meditation, chanting, prayer, dancing, movement, and so forth.
I remember a tremendous multimedia art project by Fausto (his surname is lost to memory, but he was in my Religion in Human Experience class), which included one of those desktop calculator machines with a paper reel. My father used one when doing the accounting for the steelworker union. Fausto had written all over it in black marker: "God is not my accountant; God is my lover."
I may carry an ideal of perfect desire and a perfect lover, but I know from personal experience that in the moment that I am with my lover and step forward into her arms, she welcomes me and all of my messy sticky brokenness, all of my self-recrimination, all of my fierceness and shyness and insanity, all of my joy, all of my sadness; it is a complement to her own mess. Together, with all of the best and broken, is the only space where we may create the perfect love which is no ideal, just real.
* I am fortunate to have such a variety of excellent friends to treasure.
