Glass Museum

(Side note on sources: This title is probably a title even more apt for the last entry's photograph than this week's entry!
: )

I like to take titles from the music I am listening to and adapt my writing for the entry to it. This is the title of a Tortoise track, a sort of electronica/wordless emo band from Chicago. The album is titled Millions Now Living Will Never Die. Just thought credits' sake was due...)

Saw Capote a couple of nights ago - the film based off the book about the book by Truman Capote entitled In Cold Blood (did you follow the meta-authorship on that one?). It was a perfect first-few-days-of-winter movie - a period film, silent fifties, dressed down without cell phones or computers or much by way of televisions and radios. Even the high class cocktail clientele was silent in comparison to the larger parties I now attend. Even Capote's rapacious behavior was silent somehow - well-directed, spaced, spacious. Glass-like, in fact, in it's delicateness, despite his torrid social errors and confused state of being.

I've been experimenting with my own delicate self lately. Wandering over the new ice, not yet grey, and late with new people into the night, feet the first to find some kind of ground under a foot of large-flaked snow. How late can I stay up and still be awake the next day? How far in can I dance with someone and keep my toes when I walk away? I certainly hope to evade any of the tricky moral ground Capote was infamous for not only visiting but inhabiting, and yet, those lines are delicate at best.

A museum of glass. Thousands of rustling stones below the glass floor. Silence, and small cracks. Very winter: active, warm on the inside, exterior cool and blond and collected. Capote and I, both.

Don't deal with yourself harshly

Don't push, don't hassle, don't say "the world is going to end. if you don't perform." Relax.

How does one do that, and not feel strangely, obtusely that one is going to be left behind? I have been very laidback lately. I have kind of changed my priorities, from being motivated and charged and hyper to being slow, lost and unsure. Confused. Because that is the way I am. I can behave in different ways - social pressure, social ambition pushing me - but I can't be that.

So this past month, I have done nothing on time. I have not ticked much off my task-list, I have forgotten and forgiven, not bothered to get angry.

I have enjoyed drawing again, have drawn a lot. And I have watched myself. I will not do things which take me away from being peaceful. At any cost.

Living in Mumbai can be a hassle. So little space, such long distances, high-pressure work. Can I survive? Maybe. I don't want to do too much. Just as much as I can. Get rid of my debt, learn about things I pretend to know a lot about... be lax and easy with myself. Be good in my relationships...

Mumbai is in a way - fun to drift through. Fun to move around, not pretending to be in a rush, and not bent on getting something done.

I will be staying as a paying guest near my office. I have my own house in Ahmedabad. Does it puzzle me - why am I here? what am I doing? Sometimes. Otherwise its clear. I am here to practise, doing things, being things, seeing things. Practise meeting people, bonding with people in a different way. In a way, which feels honest, personal.

First in Flight

(The picture is from Erika's opening reception at Barriques. It isn't of her work - this is the selection of empty wine glasses at the end of the night. Right after I took it, a friend said he was glad I took it, since he didn't have his camera and had been staring at it for awhile, appreciating the light and wishing he had brought his camera. It was, fittingly, the last photo. Closing time!)

Last night a friend and I began an 8 week course with local Professor Richard Davis on Racial Healing. The man is chock full of boundless, loving energy, and is definitely another teacher I was asking for without even knowing it consciously. We started the course, which is mindfully based in meditation and listening silently and respectfully to each others' understandings of and experiences with racism, with a video called Color of Fear. Veterans of the course - or rather, I should say - die-hard come again fans, call the experience "story hour with Richard Davis". I have been craving more and more places where people come to listen to one another. I certainly strive to create it in my classes, and I think I succeed well. I always love to see it manifested again in other ways, especially around something as explicitly important to address as racism.

Mindfulness. Someone recently described to me that trying to understand animals is like trying to understand God, which I took in the most general sense - trying to describe mindfulness is similar. The irony of using language for it can feel nearly sacreligious. Yet, it is done, again and again, mostly through stories. The group Blackalicious has a song - First in Flight - in which they describe everyone's knowledge as being just that - the first time ever, beginner's mind. First ever, every time. I have known for years I was coming back to this, to the beginning, to the emptiness I have run from, struggled to get away from, for so long. I can sit with it now, sometimes, or look at it from across the room. The big, pink, empty elephant. Each time is the first time, it feels like.

Tonight a new friend who attended my writing class asked how I deal with pedagogy versus experience in class. I told him about one experience, from tonight, after class, in which a woman had described an experience of hers for which I knew the exact Buddhist description. But it wasn't the right moment to share that. I just felt that. Ironically, the decision to let experience speak for someone, or to someone, is intuitive, and itself based in experience. This is for sure the beginning of a long journey for me, and I am so far loving it. There's nothing like that thrill in the beginning, when you first take off, your face empty and open, wings spread, launching up and out and over.

Water

So the bookstore has my news. I announced I will be leaving by June 1 to them last week, and then I went off to a mostly fun conference in order to get some space from the store. Everyone is generally supportive of the "Miriam-goes-to-grad-school-and-teaches-too" idea, though my plans aren't exactly "hardcore activist". Dealing with me leaving, logistically, and in terms of community, will be more complex, but we have a few months to do it. I am confident I can transfer most of what I know in a transparent way (which is needed, anyway) to the system here so as not to leave the rest of staff and volunteer collective in lurch.

And I feel relieved to have made official announcement. It's been quite the process. Honestly, I felt pretty shitty the couple of days after announcing: very doubtful of self and path, etc, then I went to teach, and, big surprise, I felt much better. Sticking to the moment.

And here is the plan: I am applying to Naropa's Contemplative Education Master's Program. I am required as an applicant to have an active teaching practice. I was nervous to ask them if me teaching independently "counted" and they replied that yes, oh yes, it sounds just right. (I am, after all, teaching contemplative writing, so private or not, it makes sense it would count). Applications are due end of January. Then, I sit around and wait, prep to leave my job, teach a bunch more, as much as I can. If Naropa takes me, I will plan to travel before going to Boulder for a month in the summer (I am due there for one month out of each summer, but otherwise the course is a long-distance one), then for a month in the fall. I want to go to India and see Prayas (with a sojourn to Tibet), as well as Australia to see good friends in Perth. On a likely separate journey, Tobias has just fixed up a new warehouse flat in East End, London, and so I think I am due to go back that way over the pond in order to check up on the Euro contingency and allies. So that will be another trip sometime this next year. If Naropa doesn't take me, same idea, only I might make all the travel at once, over summer, when teaching is in a lull, and come back and teach and do whatever else I can. Honestly, I am quite confident about Naropa. I think it is a good match. But one must always have contingency plans...

I am in the water between islands. This last weekend I was at a cooperative business conference, and I flailed in my attachment to responsiblity, anger, aggression about control. I took stuff out on myself and other people. It is interesting to watch the release when I let go and swim free. When my mother died, 9 years ago this January, I couldn't stand to swim free. Now, I practice each week, with some conflict or other, letting go and giving in. Then, when the big stuff happens, swimming doesn't feel like drowning, except for those first few minutes; arms in the air, legs rigid from expectation, breath tight and hard. Then I breathe, take some water in and kick it back out, move my arms and swim. Water. I'm an earth sign. This is a new thing, to chose to drop the islands and float on the sea. But it feels natural. After all, I am 90% water, right?
: )

Spaciousness

(Photo from Castro in San Francisco)



There is a characteristic of the Midwest, which before dealing with recent difficulties, had always disturbed me. The fields. The open-ness. The lack of mountains or even high hills. Sometimes I felt comforted that I could see so many miles ahead and back, sometimes that felt like the wrong kind of distraction. Yet it is true. Mountains intimidate me.

But today, I appreciate the spaciousness in the Midwest. The lack of head clogging, visually. The ability for hard things to face to float for a bit before me, not be crammed in by strangers or even by skyscrapers. When I was in the Bay Area recently, I took a lot of photos of space (not surprisingly, a major element in Miksang conceptual work), and really appreciated what space I could find there. Here, it is everywhere. And for now, it is a strange comfort - being that space, with all of it's motility, is not comfortable at all in some ways, it is a sailboat on the sea, always in motion. Yet, once one rests into movement, there is a comfort. Not comfort in the sense of lulling. Just, spaciousness.