I Don't Mine

This week's "topic" for classes is "What *Can* You Take With You?". I woke this morning with "Can't take it with you" running through my head and I wanted to consider what it is that folks do take along, from lifetime to lifetime, creaturedom to plantdom, humandom to sentient specks in the airstreamdom.  The quick and dirty answer, to me, seems to be the universe of creativity, the deeper well beneath us which is constant and full, larger than us not out of some kind of SUV superiority (and their sales are on the decline with rising gas prices, by the way!) rather, just out of a "natural hierarchy" as Chogyam Trungpa would put it - we are the four out of a million visual bits per moment we can digest - or, we think we are only that, anyway, that plus the constructed whole we make from those parts and then some - and underneath, emanating far more and receiving back the core of our actual lives, often bigger than even we can see, is that - that universe, that creative force, what some call god, some call spirit, and what I tend to just call "universe".  As John McQuade, my Miksang teacher, puts it: "just rely on the universe to do its thing - it is far more creative than you will ever be. Let the universe take a photograph of ITSELF." As Natalie Goldberg puts it "A moment so great that you were able to get out of the way enough to write down". None of this is meant to be derogative toward that ego, that personality, that bit more than the parts that makes the whole - we need who we are, and when it's not getting in the way, it's quite lovely, actually. However, when it comes to creativity, which I suspect is far more of our lives, in the natural science of nature all the way to creating the things we call "art"; when it comes to creativity, the universe has it together better than four bits a moment, so we best move out of the way.

My Marquette students would balk at this - I can hear them in my head. "What about reason?" Yep. Reason helps us drive a car. Reason has helped us get this far and this far is nothing to not write home about. But what about beyond reason? Even Einstein didn't think that reason was everything. I certainly don't denigrate it, but there's no reason to believe reason every time anymore. 

***

"Sleep comes, it's like a dream...I don't mine." Listening to Psychedelic Furs again a bit lately, and thinking of my teenage years. The period especially, the "blue" period as my therapists would call it, between the deaths of my parents. What is mine of that period and what is not? So much of adolescence felt like a dream, still does, and does now to many teens I know. A very lucid dream. The kind of nightmare when you wake, realize you are dreaming, and are awake in the dream knowing your are only asleep, but not really awake, and won't until the dream has let you go. Hard to own things in that space, this unowned space, where the universe is in pure creation, psychological shaping, and control is lost, reasoning lost, to the whimsy of wired together memories. Like those braces connectors so many of my friends had to wear - wired heads worked mouths closed over the sleeping hours so their inherited teeth could straighten their speech upon waking. I feel like I am still straightening my speech sometimes, frozen in a postmortem scream at 19. That sounds so dramatic, and I apologize to the invisible "you's" for doing such imagery in a period when I don't feel that way most of the time. But the fact is that it has been the long slow orphan thaw since then, and only just now does it feel like I can begin to own what happened and when, distant enough, my own voice full and rich, used to lull others into contemplative states. 

***

The other facet of the assignment is this: "Who benefits from this class?". It's a bit of a trick question - the trick question we've been playing this whole session - if you say you, it can't not benefit others; someone else means secretly you as well. The bodhisattva question, the tonglen question, the question of deep interrelatedness that doesn't go beyond reason - no, reason is perfectly capable of handling it, as reason itself was created and can handle any creative adaptations. No, the question is this: is there anything we take away that is just for us or just for others? As Chogyam Trungpa puts it - "No privacy". This idea terrified me when I first heard it, new to - and quite enjoying, thank you! - boundaries at the time. This is not what *I* think he means, though. Rather, that what you think is yours is just as much the universe's as it is yours and vice versa. John calls it "anorexia by choice" - that the world is rich, just outside our door and we refuse to go out and glory in the gore and beauty of it. Refuse. Outright. 

So "I Don't Mine", as the Psychedelic Furs put it. Not because I don't want to benefit, but because when I privately close class each night or morning myself, turning off the lights, whispering the Dedication of Merit to myself, I also think of how so many teachers have put it to me over the years, and I slowly, slowly seem to see this understanding, bigger than reason and even creativity: "if you want to be happy, think of others; if you want to be miserable, think of only yourself." Why? Because there is no "mine". This isn't about self-deprivation. It's about reality.

Creation and Destruction

I have been thinking about certain words we use, certain binaries/dualisms we rely on a lot in life, and two of them have come up in class, as well, this week, as if to further my inquiry in a group setting filled with curiosity: accidents versus synchronicity, and strengths versus weaknesses. In life, it has seemed to me that we rely on these being not only opposites, but also places of blame and credit. For instance, if something horrible happens, it's an accident, but if something wonderful comes out of the blue instead, it's "synchronicity." As well, if something we do out of habit seems to contribute to our own well being or others' in a direct and measureable fashion, it's a strength, and,well, you get the gist.

One student addressed this directly in her writing this week when she got the quote from The Book of Qualities by J. Ruth Gendler (which I used as a prompt for the week): "Confusion is very accident-prone. He lives from crisis to crisis." She spent her writing time exploring what this means - what does confusion mean, and when is it helpful, as opposed to direct honesty, for instance. Others who got that quote this week really looked at why confusion happens, and how helpful it can be; an indicator that things are about to clear up, a little indicator from the universe of its own form of resistance. Confusion, for one student, brought up how she can more finely see the distinction between what is an accident and what is synchronicity - when she bumps her legs against the tables of friends' houses she is staying in now that she has broken up with her partner, is that an accident or assistant? The bruises remind her of her confusion and are a helpful (if slightly painful) indicator of where she is at right now and that that isn't going to change that quickly. Why do we judge confusion and accidents, "negative happenings" so closely, so critically? I think it mostly comes from a wish for distance - aspiring to believe that the universe "did these things to us" renders us victims, that we, ourselves, would never invite something horrible to happen, karmically or even just out of sheer inattentiveness, much less that the not paying attention could be an indicator in itself.

Then there are the strengths and weaknesses. We got into a longer discussion about the idea that your strengths "come from" your weaknesses, this week in one class. All of a sudden I said outloud something that had been percolating in me for a long time- "What if our weaknesses are only weaknesses because they are our strengths but turned inwards against ourselves?" So, for instance, say I really like chocolate (let's just say for sake of example, it's not real, of course, and here's my addy where you can send me chocolate...). Not a "problem" until it causes undue weight gain or eating problems or pimples - basically, excess, which is a desire, not inherently a bad thing, turned in on itself and into something else. Not that anyone would call loving chocolate a strength, though, so let's pick something more contentious. Anger. Anger isn't a bad thing on its own. Needed, often clarifying. But when used for its own ego aims - to manipulate, to disrupt, it could be a weakness. When used to compassionately understand someone else's cause, it could be a strength...

Anyway, all things to consider. Thank you classes as always for teaching me so much!

More visual than verbal lately...

So come visit me at my flickr page:
www.flickr.com/photos/herspiral

De Novo

"De novo mutation, a genetic mutation that neither parent possessed nor transmitted."
I am continuing to work on Orphano, which has a stronger drive (probably connected to the total fiction element) than the "family novel" did. There's a fair amount of background science involved - though I'd prefer the book to be "speculative" fiction rather than "science" fiction, the fact is that I set up a premise which relies on somewhat accurate, or at least, believable future science, in order to work out for the other factors - the characters, how they got there, what the settings are.

This I stumbled on while reading an article in the Sun, in fact, an essay by a woman who was trying to decide whether or not to "keep" a son who would likely be born with a genetic mutation in her family that is carried by the women and exhibited in the men. She mentioned that Abraham Lincoln had Marfan's Syndrome, and, as Laine and I are always curious about Lincoln (fascinating guy!) I mentioned it to him that night and we did some research. In reading about Marfan (it turns out most people think that the "parents of children with Marfan" group of the times made it out to be a case that hasn't actually been proved), I discovered this reference to "de novo mutation", as it seems that 25-30% of children with Marfan receive it not from either parent, but just out of thin air, so to speak.

Perfect. This was the puzzle piece I was missing. I know so little about mutation, and I didn't know what my chances were of making something believable come out of thin air. Turns out, without getting into specifics, that they are quite good. Bad for potential parents, worrying about the health of their upcoming kids, good for novelists in need of a deus ex machina.

I also related to this new concept in my own personal way, as is my way. De novo - of new. Fresh start. Visiting with my therapist yesterday we talked about how things have been going. I started some SSRI meds to counteract what had become quite severe PMDD, and although I have been hypersensitive to side effects, the actual desired effect has been great. We talked about how removing those two weeks of high anxiety (some months!) from my life has really cleared the air so I can deal with emotions on their own level, and actually enjoy the successes of teaching, for instance. Then, he congratulated me on being so successful so soon (I had to add another class of 7 this time around so that I could accommodate all the new students from the Isthmus article a couple of months back) and even though earlier on in the day I had written about how *I* got myself here, how much *I* am responsible for this success, I needed a moment to turn around something and credit things I think of as "negative" characteristics of my parents - my father's work-aholism and my mother's extreme sensitivity to others - as being part of the whole picture. I realized for the first time since seeing my parents more and more as "real" people with "real" faults that everything has many sides, and, as the Buddhist parable goes, enlightenment is just as much in a pile of feces as in a wheat or flower field (paraphrase).

Of course, he turned it back on me, and gave me credit, making sure I didn't pass it all to my parents. But it was good to see all three, then all the other factors of course which (or in some cases, whom) have contributed to my being here, right now, doing what I am doing and doing it well. Every day feels so new - sometimes hard new (one student wrote this week about the Eleanor Roosevelt quote - "Do something frightening once a day" and she said "sometimes getting out of bed is that one thing"), sometimes delightful new (I actually feel like the last two weeks off *were* vacation for the first time in a long time!), but always new.

This is reality's one guarantee. A life of constant mutation.

Understand What I've Become (It Wasn't My Design)

-The Cranberries/Ode to My Family

Working on the "novel" (or whatever it is!) about my family has become too hard. I thought I might reach a point like this, where trying to talk about the history of my family would go from therapeutic to harrowing, and it did. Sherryl, my godmother and mom's best friend from college, came up to visit a few weeks ago, seeing my house for the first time, and her pain and pleasure combined when she saw things of my mom's intertwined into my own. We talked a lot over a bottle of wine - never directly about the novel, but more recounting stories, which, usually, spurs me to writing even more in that story. But somehow the truth of who my family was, each individual person, I just couldn't handle the complexity anymore of fictionalizing them.

So two projects have become of the novel. One is a novel that came to mind late one night, a few steps away, but where I can direct a lot of my pain and energies about the role of family and being an orphan - "Orphano" (working title), a book that, now that I've read Parable of the Sower (thanks Steph!) reminds me a great deal of the gist of Butler's masterpiece. A book told from the perspective of only orphans. Without getting into all the details, as it's too early to recount them without putting the novel in the way of other's interpretations, the only folks alive are not only parentless but also incapable of reproducing, from the same cause. Struggling with what family means, what parents mean and being children - not just young, but coming from someone - has come SO MUCH "EASIER" (read: emotionally) writing in total fiction. The emotions don't feel fictional, but the story, which edges on science fiction, certainly is. I think I needed to write half the "family novel" in order to get to this. And who says the "family novel" won't come back? It likely will, some day when I can get far enough away from it. Right now it's just too close, and the wrong kind of close, a claustrophobic kind of close.

The second project is a memoir. Natalie Goldberg finally put out her memoir book, a fitting "follow up" to Writing Down the Bones , called An Old Friend From Far Away. In an interview in the Shambhala Sun, she points out that younger and younger folk have been coming to her workshops on memoir over the last few years, and that she has gone from believing that only those in their fifties or older can write memoir to believing that, if done right, even a teenager can have enough material for a memoir. If there's one thing I've got, it's material. Jesus.I realized after reading the article how hard it was to keep myself out of the "family novel", and it was killing me a bit to do that. So I've begun a non-fictional memoir, the exact opposite of the "family novel" project. It feels really, really good, very clean and clear, and sure. I am excited about writing again, instead of feeling like it's my "job" to write out my family's history.

This has also lead to me making a mix (it's been years since I've made a mix!) to entertain me and help me ponder how music has contributed to my relationships to my dead parents over the years (this year it will be 18 YEARS since my dad died - I have lived "an adult" amount of years without him). Suggestions are welcome!

Here's the rough draft: (copies available of final draft for those who ask!)
ORPHANO MIX
Cruel, Crazy Beautiful World - Johnny Clegg and Savuka
Mommy Says No! - Asylum Street Spankers
Mothers Talk - Tears for Fears
Roses - Kanye West
Kyles Mom's a B**ch - Eric Cartman
Deadbeat Daddy - Alix Olson
Mother Stands for Comfort - Kate Bush
Oh Father - Madonna
(Every Woman I Go Out With Becomes My) Mother (In the End)- The Police
Look Mama - Howard Jones
Digging in the Dirt - Peter Gabriel
My Father as a Guitar - Martin Espada
Ode to My Family - the Cranberries
Angry Any More - Ani DiFranco
I Am Weary (Let Me Rest) - The Cox Family
Tell Your Mama Come - The Black Eyed Peas
Mama, I'm Coming Home - Ozzy Ozbourne
I Will Never Forget - Kimya Dawson

Other potentials - that great Mama song by Phil Collins/Genesis - I need to track down a copy, but ever since the This American Life episode where Starlee Kine interviews Phil Collins, I've been thinking about that song...
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=339

Finally, this might sound kind of funny, but for so many years I hesitated to use or think of the word "orphan". There's a lot of history around this, but for the most part I assumed that "true orphans" had two characteristics: both parents died before 18, and that they are only children. The first part got debunked in a study I was a part of a few years ago, which in theory was going to turn into a book, though I have yet to hear of any results. The study's thesis was that if a child loses both parents before THE AGE OF 30 (my age) the results are as deleterious as losing both parents before 18. I was a part of many discussion groups about this, and the results the participating "orphans" decided on were that, yes, in fact, 18 means little in terms of actual adult life, and that 30 is a better gauge of when one becomes a "real adult", so losing one's parents before this age causes just as much confusion as losing them before 18, though, in most cases, fewer "complications".
Second part of the "inner definition" I had made me feel "guilty" about using the word, because I have two brothers, both older, and so I've never really been going it alone. But one of my characters in the Orphano novel is very curious about what it means to *be* an orphan, so she looks up the definition and, lo and behold, so did I, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE.
Parentless. That's all it means. Of course, dictionaries aren't common usage, and are often an inaccurate representation, but somehow reading this validated my feelings of loneliness (maybe a false ground - we all feel lonely a lot, with or without parents!) for a small moment. Not like I'll start using the word more often, but it's good to know some kind of external, "unbiased" authority validates that even though I lost my mom at 19, I can still feel lonely about it, with brothers or not.

Funny how hopeful all of this feels. I described to Dylan that dealing with my parents as real people, especially my father, coming to terms with what it is I actually lost, is hard, not easy, and yet, when one is ready (and I feel more ready all the time to get at the nuances, with time) it feels a bit more like a styrofoam wall than a plastic bag - something I can work with and through, rather than fight against with little success.