Taking My Seat (Again)

Well, I'm back on retreat - two weeks of a dathun, or month-long meditation retreat, back to room 229, room wiz flies, but only two. Room wiz dead outlet where table lamp ought to be, right down the hall from room wiz baby. (A first.)  I was irresponsible about following through with registration, so at first it looked like I would be wizzout dathun, but it worked out as things often do, thanks to a little help from Juan the Gardener and friends. (Thank you, especially, Ella.) Tune, who had just sat the first two weeks, loaned me her oryoki set, comprised of three beautiful ceramic bowls,a pair of red lacquer chopsticks, a spoon and setsu (little spatula). We met in front of the hoagie place in Lyndonville. She looked radiant.

"Did you have a good time?" I asked.

"Did you ever do part of a dathun before?" she smiled.

"Yes," I said, remembering the two weeks I had done last winter. "I guess asking if you had a good time is sort of ridiculous."

"Dathun is everything," she said. "Everything."

I had been considering one of the benefits of dathun to be an opportunity to slim down a bit. Meals are delicious, vegetarian in my case, with rice, fruit, soups and salads. Three times a day. Eaten with chopsticks while chanting, and turning the tiny pages of the paper chant booklet as big as my thumb, if one's memory tends to falter. It is a beautiful ceremony, but requires precision and concentration; attention to detail. Spacing out does not work. Wondering if I left my shampoo in the shower is not helpful. There's no pint of Ben & Jerry's waiting in the freezer.

"Someone told me you lose about three pounds a week during dathun," I had announced with some glee in the kitchen at home.

"There's no goal in dathun," someone at home had corrected. The idea is to meditate fully and open-heartedly. Save the lose weight idea for the fat farm."

"The fat farm?" I asked.

"In your case," the person at home continued, "You wouldn't get into a fat farm - you'd have to gain some weight to qualify."

Maybe, but the pants feel tight. And the butt isn't shrinking.

So, I'm here to lean into meditation, and oryoki and everything that is certain to arise. Wish me luck.

Practicing Discursion

I sat on my meditation cushion in the Pavillion at Karme Choling and listened intently as the senior Buddhist teacher gave instruction in meditation practice. I tried to sink into my heart and breathe from there, but I couldn't find my heart and the person to my right was exhaling like a bellows. Didn't she undertand that we were all trying to relax? When I'm meditating in a group I need people to be quiet and not move. If a bug creeps a milimeter along a windowpane 100 yards away, I can feel it, so noisy exhalations are out.


I switched my attention to the 7-foot flannel-shirted giant who blocked my view of the teacher. Didn't tall people know they were supposed to sit in the back? Chairs were positioned along the wall  for that very purpose. Next, I reviewed the points of my posture: sitting tall, back muscles relaxed around a strong, supple spine, legs crossed comfortably; although, my left ankle was stone cold pins-and-needles asleep. Soft belly that belied an aggressive life-long tradition of sucking it in, and buying skinny jeans that are a size too small.


Which reminded me of those internet ads flashing cartoon people holding their hands over their ample bellies, feet twisted in anxiety when you are trying to find a synonym for 'strode.' In these horrid adds, the cartoon people's bellies shake. There is a blue arrow pointing to the right and a caption which reads: 1 Trick to a Tiny Belly. Follow this weird tip to... Basically, nowhere. Other ads suggest that the banana you have just eaten for breakfast, having forgone pancakes with yogurt and maple syrup, is causing you to gain weight. Should you be stupid enough to follow the link to discover these non-existant tricks and tips, you are directed to part with $129. Thank you, no.



Where was I? Oh, yes, my hands placed palms down upon my thighs, shoulders released from their normal prison of rigidity, eyes half-lidded as if gazing without seeing and cast roughly 4 feet in front of me - or boring into the 7-foot giant's lower back at an intersection of red with blue plaid that swam and merged despite my best intentions to see nothing. I imagined the crown of my head lifting toward the ceiling and beyond to open sky, my bottom centered on the cushion, supported by the vast earth beneath.


I was envious of those able to sit in a serene Buddha-like pose, legs crossed pliantly at the ankles like practiced yogis. They were getting it. My mind clicked like falling dominoes, tumbled in skeins of memory, internal conversations, fantasy. What was for lunch? Why was my seat so far in the back? That guy was pretty cute... Cougars are amazing animals. Are they the same thing as Catamounts, Vermont's elusive mountain lions?  I saw one once many years ago at the bottom of my meadow at my Landgrove house, down by the swampy area where all the stumps were buried. Its powerful tawny shoulder muscles undulated below the skin as it slunk along. I had thought: Golden retriever? Then my eyes had traveled along the twitching feline tail. Some people (Juan the Gardener) don't believe me. No one, it seems, has found Catamount scat. But, I know what I saw.


I yearned to change position. My right shoulder burned. My facial muscles felt contorted into a mask of anxiety. It's not that I couldn't move, this was a gentle practice, an exercise in kindness to me, whoever I was if I was, but somehow, I was embroiled in an internal battle: a commixture of perfectionism and masochism. There was some sort of twisted satisfaction in suffering. While I tried to follow my breath, I envisioned myself leaping up and shrieking: I'm failing! I'm failing! I can't even breathe!


Then, there was a subtle displacement in the room, as if everyone had released a collective sigh, a sort of smiling aaahh. I looked up and out through the windows into the blazing blue October day and saw a tempest of delicate white puffs sailing out over the meadow. They glistened and danced in the sun. A zillion milk weed pods rained down in a delicate magical shower, like blessings.


Things had shifted. Who knew? Perhaps enlightenment was only a breath away. Not very likely in my case, but possible.

Chapeau Rouge

Even though I itched to, I didn't go to the gym yesterday during break. I went to the little store across from the front porch here, to not buy some of those beguiling little foil-wrapped chocolate truffles. Instead, I bought a modest amount (4) of those Ginger Chews that leave that peppery-sweet taste on the tongue. I can easily down a bag of them, even after I have tossed them into the back seat of the car out of reach. Sometimes I have to pull over on I-91, wrench around and re-claim the bag. I mean, who am I kidding? I know the minute I spy those candies with the little Ginger Man reclining on a purple velvet pillow on the front of the package. (They're on the shelf right next to the Panda black licorice at the Hanover Food Co-Op.) I know I will eat the entire bag. It's a ridiculous tactic, as well as an exercise in DENIAL to pretend I will dole them out to myself at spacious intervals throughout the day.

Just like corn candy. I think: Wouldn't it be nice to bring a bowl of candy corn to the readings tonite? That is, until I get them back to my room - my new room, the one Wizzout Flies. They send me sneaky subliminal messages: You've been writing for an hour now. One or two of us would be a sweet reward for such intense creative momentum. They're right! I have been working hard. What's the harm in a small handful? Soon, it's: Oh, it's such a long time until lunch; perhaps a few more to tide you over? Well, right again! Another handful or two still leaves plenty for my fellow writers. And so on. In the end there's an empty bag of corn candy in the garbage can on top of the M&M wrapper from last night and the first empty bag of corn candy...

I used to buy packages of Oreo Double-Stuffed cookies for my son, Will, who said to me one day, "Mom, I don't even like those kind of cookies."

"Just admit it," he said. "They're for you."

So, I spent 80 cents on the ginger chews, and then I spied some beautiful hand-knit woolen hats. I tried on three, and chose a red one. I asked Gary, who sat behind the desk, how he thought it looked on me. "It almost matches your shirt," he said. Being a newly annointed 9 by Eneagam standards, I have to ask many people - legions of them - what their opinion is first. Then, I can make my own decision. Sometimes. I'm just that way, and it's okay. Obama, it turns out, is also a 9. So is Ringo Starr. And Marge Simpson.

I didn't have enough cash, so I asked if it would be all right to leave an IOU. (It did occur to me that it would have fit nicely under the shirt it almost matched.) Gary said that would be fine. I exited the store with my new red chapeau upon my head, and called back to Gary, "Thank you for trusting me."

It's just horrible to feel guilty for a passing thought. It can lead to embarrassing statements that leave people wondering huh?

Pinching

I stole a blue pen from someone's desk this morning. I'm fairly certain you're not supposed to do that if you're a Buddhist. I don't think Pema Chodron would approve. Or not approve. But, it wasn't offered. It was just there. And it wasn't just there, either. It was in a cluster of pens encircled by a rubber band in someone's glass on someone's desk in someone's office.

I wasn't really stealing the first time I helped myself to something. It was only candy from the glass dish at the dressmaker's shop, where I waited impatiently for my mother, who was having a dress altered behind a curtain. The magazines were boring, pictures of dresses. Yuk. Fancy ladies wearing fancy clothes. I had had to fight to get the blue Keds, rather than the red ones, which were for girls. The white Keds were simply impractical for someone about seven years old, who was the only girl invited to the boys' baseball birthday parties, and who preferred going to the hardware store with her father - even if the owner of the store sang "Once in Love with Amy" when she came in - to hanging out in fancy ladies' dress shops with photographs on the walls of glamorous ladies and their glamorous daughters.

I helped myself to a handful of those round hard candies that tasted like lollypops and shoved them in my pocket. I mean, no one said I couldn't.

"What are you eating?" my mother asked me when we were in the car.

"Nothing," I mumbled, packing a cherry flavored candy into my cheek with my tongue.

"You're clearly eating something. Now, what is it?" she persisted.

"Just a candy," I said.

"Where did you get the candy?" my mother continued.

"From the dish in the store."

"Did anyone offer you the candy?"

If I had known the words, this is where I might have said to myself, I know where this is going.

"No, but it was right there in the dish."

"How many did you take?" my mother asked. I noticed that she hadn't started the car.

"Only one," I answered, my sticky hand sliding to my pocket.

"What's that in your pocket?"

"Nothing."

"Let me see," my mother said.

I removed the hand from the pocket which contained four or five hard candies and opened it, palm up.

"Amy, you know that's stealing," my mother said in a voice I didn't particularly like.

"It is? "

"You have to go right back into the store and apologize to Betty for taking something that doesn't belong to you."

If I had known the phrase, this is where I might have said, "Are you fucking kidding me?"

I marched myself back into Betty's store and stammered out some kind of an 'I'm sorry.' I remember that Betty, with her kindly, crinkly eyes looked like Mrs. Tiggywinkle from the Beatrix Potter stories, standing there with her cloud of white hair in her flowered dress and stockings and flat shoes. A tiny round pin cushion was attached to her shoulder. The pins were silver.

I'd like to think that in that instant in that store for fancy ladies with its little glass dish filled with tempting lemon and cherry and lime and grape little round hard candies, a felon was born. But, it's possible the felon was there all along just bursting to break free.

I was good. The trifles came from Woolworth's in the glory days before surveillance cameras: the shiny tubes of cheap lipstick, the sticks of mascara, the pieces of Bazooka Joe's bubble gum. The mini-collectibles were from Steins: tiny lugers, flintlock rifles the length of my finger, enamel Redcoat figures, tin tanks with turrets. The rush was exquisite. The quickening in the belly, the liquid lightning in the veins. The practiced look of disinterest. The grazing fingertips amongst the contents of all those bins. Once, I stole a slingshot.

The feigned deliberation of a shoplifting 10-year-old: no, not that pen or that Venus Coloring set. I came in for, hmm, what was it again?

Hand to chin, head cocked. The seemingly careless circumambulation of aisles. The chosen item secreted in the hand, the hand idly making its way to the pocket. The sneakered feet inching toward the door.

Having observed the browsing habits of my mother, I knew to call a cheery "Thank you!" over my shoulder. The door within reach. My hand grasping the handle, turning it slightly. One blue Ked on the sidewalk. The door clicking shut behind me. Freedom bursting Pop! in my heart like the bubble from a pilfered piece of Bazooka Joe.

Back to the snarfed blue pen (okay, and the white legal pad I "borrowed" to write morning pages.) Of the five basic Buddhist precepts 'not to steal' is #2, right after 'not to kill,' which is #1. On one of her precious teaching tapes, Ani Pema tells a story of arising at an extremely early pre-dawn hour and wending her way through Gampo Abbey to the showers. She disrobes, steps beneath the soothing hot water and then discovers she has forgotten her shampoo. There are cubbies holding other nuns' shampoo. Surely they wouldn't mind if she helped herself to a fractional amount. Her sister nuns with full-hearted generosity would want her to have some. But, Ani Pema is steeped in the pitfalls of mind. She shuts off the water, shrugs on her robe and makes her way back in the cold pre-dawn hours to her quarters to fetch her own shampoo.

It wasn't a mighty leap from a small child's purloined candy to enamel soldiers and a sling shot slipped under a jacket, and later on, to Fair Aisle sweaters, and a few bucks here and there from my mother's wallet. (Well, a lot more than a few bucks from my mother's wallet.) Eventually, though, the thrill of thievery and other adrenalin-charged behaviors no longer served. Even though I like to clench my habitual patterns in a death grip, even though I resist with ferocity, most days I do choose to change. For me, the real freedom lies in gentleness, and - believe it or not - in trying to live a virtuous life. I can smile at my felonious mind and return what doesn't belong to me; I can replace what isn't offered.

Wizzout Flies

So, I'm here on retreat in Vermont to write. I have a corner room with 37 cluster flies dancing on the ceiling. Minus the one that just made a final death plunge onto my keyboard. The room is aqua blue. There is a small bureau with the drawer missing. Someone else's long-sleeved black tee shirt occupies the empty space. People walk silently here and dress in black. There is a long black hair on the pillowcase, which makes me feel glad I'm not sleeping in the bed, but only using the space to write. Or not write, depending. There is a red rug on the floor and two of those sliding half-screens in the place for hanging clothes. Closet would be an overstatement. Why don't I begin by telling you about my process - take today for instance.

Actually, let's take last night first.

There were the dishes and decomposing fertilizer pellets in the sink to welcome me home, the smear of butter on the worktop - I like 'worktop' better than counter. I think it's British. I think the mystery writer Elizabeth George uses it, among others. The empty styrofoam container on the floor by the garbage can near the cat's dish. The carrot shavings, parsley twigs and apple shreds in the juicer. The cloud of fruit flies. The pomegranate juice/dishwashing liquid fruit fly bait dish with a few tiny carcasses floating on top.

There was Wayne (or, as he prefers to be called when depicted in a less than favorable public light, Juan the Gardener) sitting on the couch, mala beads in one hand, clicker in the other bunched in a quilt watching the Giants. Flip flops strewn across the room. The empty pint of Ben & Jerrys. The spoon sticking out. That smell. In reality, it is only two barrels and an ash can of damp wood ashes and musty basement with perhaps a soupcon of kitty litter, but to me it is a representation of degradation. With a capital D.

"Hi, Sweetie," he calls. "How did your day go?"

Because things are so degraded, I cannot bring my precious self to snuggle next to him, so I perch on the arm of the couch.

"Okay, but there was a problem about printing the writers' work this afternoon, something about a thumb drive."

Besides being one of the writers, I am also the Program Coordinator, which makes me feel somewhat testy. My duties are fairly simple. There is a view. I have a folder. But, copies have to be made; suffice it to say that before the thumb drive incident, I had already stashed 40 copies made in error in the recycling bin. Shh. Don't tell. Also, if given a choice, I prefer to be irresponsible. I may fool myself into believing I enjoy a position of quasi-authority, but I'd really rather slink off to the kitchen, say, for more carrot cake.

"Sounds fairly typical," Juan says, eyes locked onto the TV screen as if monitoring air traffic.

"But, this is a writers' retreat," I say. "We need to print the work."

"Um hmm. So, did you figure it out?"

"Eventually. Ema helped me." Ema is my Ukranian friend who speaks in Russian accent without articles. I think of Boris and Natasha Badenov from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon show whenever she speaks. She mans the front desk at the retreat center and is clearly responsible person. When I mentioned the flies, she promised me room "wizzout flies."

A slight pause. " By the way, have you noticed how grimy things feel around here and sort of disgusting?"

"Not really. I did the dishes this morning, and I went shopping. I got you apples and more of that soy stuff. I saw you were out."

"It's the wrong soy milk and things smell."

"I can't do anything about a smell now. I don't smell anything. I'm not sure there's anything to smell."

"You've said you smell it. It's kitty litter and ashes and now it's probably mold. Deadly black mold."

"The Yankees lost." This is a low blow, and he knows it. In fact, he says it with anticipatory relish.

I decline to respond.

Upstairs, the bed is unmade, but I climb in with the kitty over clean long underwear and two pairs of sox. Juan the Gardener joins me, draping his leg over mine and leaning his head on my shoulder so I can't read in comfort.

"I missed you today," he says. "I just don't do that well without you."

"I can tell," I say.

"I'm depressed from watching 5 hours of sports."

I poke him in that spot under his arm and he tries to pin me.

"No! Don't tickle me!" He pleads.

"I'm glad you came up," I say.

"It's a one run game," he coughs, "So, I have to go back down in a while. I just wanted to hang out with you."

After he leaves, I heave myself into a position preparatory to my one hour of solid sleep before the endless tossing, and aching shoulders, and flinging of covers dependant upon body temperature, and lengthy dream struggles with sharks take over.

Maybe we'll just take today later.

A Boy and His Toys

When I went to visit Will on Sunday in Burlington, he took his accustomed seat behind the wheel of my car, and we set off for lunch. As I chattered away about radio programs I had listened to on my drive over, he maneuvered the car into a parking garage. We paused before a green John Deere machine of some kind with a blade on the front.

"I drive that," he said. We rolled on up to the roof like a marble going backwards up a ramp and he pointed. "I push the snow up here and over the edge there."

We wound through Burlington and on over to Richmond, wheeling through parking lots where he plows during the winter or mows islands of grass during the summer. Machines were everywhere: crawlers and backhoes, and I remembered a childhood litany that accompanied his road building forays through the sandbox:"Loader, backhoe, dumput, excavator, crane, brrrumm, brrrumm." He had a favorite book featuring a stocky truck driver named Joe who drove tractor trailers, Peterbilt, I think. I got him to eat his peas because the fictitious Joe ate his. Joe ate spinach and butternut squash too. We went to Santa Monica when he was about 3 and as we walked the sidewalks he chanted, "Corvette, Volkswagon, sedan, Chevy, Lamborghini, four wheel drive, Mercedes Benz."

The matchbox cars he clutched in both fists became permanent appendages. We were going into Stein's Stationery on Long Island for a tiny shiny red fire truck when his big sister Katherine was hit by a car driven by a little old lady whose head barely peeked over the top of the steering column. The car was blue, a Ford Fairlane. Will and I rode in a real ambulance to the trauma center, while Katherine flew above us in a helicopter. As she lay immobilized in traction for several weeks, recovering from a spiral fracture of the right femur and a broken pelvis, Will drove his toy trucks up and down the sheet mountains on her bed.

When he was a freshman in college, he called to announce he was going to take flying lessons. My heart rose in my chest like a hot air balloon. I made a few inquiries at the flying school.

"No, ma'am, he'll only be a passenger. The pilot flies the plane," someone assured me.

"Mom! Mom! I flew the plane, a Cessna 172!" he exclaimed after his first flight. "The pilot said I had natural aptitude. Oh, and they told me you called. Don't ever do that again." He emailed photos of the instrument panel. I saw the plane once, silver wings folded like an insect's. He made touch-downs and executed fly-bys. As I pictured his cloud-skimming flights, my heart clenched and released. I let him go.

He calls from the cabs of really big machines. He cuts brush in the woods and carts it away by truck or skidder. He plants trees at UVM.

We had steaming bowls of mushroom bisque at The Ice House served by a tall young waitress with long dark hair and lambent brown eyes.

"Do you want me to pay?" he smiled playfully, reaching for his wallet.

"No, I got it," I said.

As we drove back to his place, I asked him if he had plans for Valentine's Day. He shook his head.

"No, but I thought our waitress was kinda cute," he said. "Wonder if she's busy."

It Can Be Complicated

We went to see It's Complicated last night, muttering beforehand that it would be (sigh) an obvious Hollywood movie, another romantic comedy for old folks. We are movie snobs who prefer Indies and foreign films, but on a drear Sunday night in St. Johnsbury Vermont, after a spate of recent bone numbing temperature plunges had triggered mid-winter blues and strange eating neuroses, it was an alternative to couch sprawling and really bad tv.

The plot, however, is disturbingly familiar: After many years of divorce, and even though one of the couple has since re-married, lechery is sparked and an intense comic affair ensues.

During a trial separation from ex#2, I wondered if I had made a mistake in divorcing #1, the father of my children. I had been so busy hating him - plotting tire-slashing and house demolishing revenge - perhaps, I mused, the flip side of all that murderous passion was love. Within seconds of my having phoned him, we were cavorting on my dining room table. For days fountainous bouquets of flowers fell on my doorstep. We plotted a weekend rendezvous in the Adirondacks with the brilliant idea of carting our then 7 year-old son along.

"You're w-what?" my highschool age daughter Katherine stammered.

"We're seeing each other," I said meekly.

"Oh, boy."

During the drive from southern Vermont to the rustic romantic cabin owned by my uncle in the heart of the North Woods - a place where in years past our family had fed deer by hand, hiked among towering ancient conifers, and fished for trout - our son remained mostly silent. He had been 2 when we divorced and his memories of us together were dim.

"Did I lie on my stomach on the kitchen counter with my face in a tomato once?" he asked finally.

"Yes," we said.

"Did I stomp blueberries into the floor and then sit in them?"

"You did."

"I remember lying on a giant yellow sponge in the bath tub," he added thoughtfully.

"You had chicken pox."

"And taking the hinges off the closet door."

"Yes! Yes!" we chorused.

Grappling on the dining room table or living room rug is one thing, but sharing a room with the ex in front of the family - some of whom, nostalgic for inebriate poker games and vacations to Culebra, wanted us back together - was awkward.

When we took Will for a hike, he stode ahead of us dragging a stick. When we suggested fishing, he put on his own orange life preserver and went solo in a canoe as we trailed behind in a row boat. While we offered paddling direction, he glowered. While we struggled to make sense of us, he caught a shimmering rainbow trout with his cousin. He fed corn to deer as his sisters had, pre-divorce.

I wanted to give him his family, untarnished. I wanted him to know his parents without eye rolling, without hurling, "You know how crazy your mother/father is!" at him, without shouting and slammed doors and tears. I wanted us whole. Intact.

The experiment failed. The we I sought was truly gone, and I went back to my husband. For a little while, anyway.

Last summer, our daughter was married. Following the ceremony, her proud papa and I led the guests down a garden path into the Japanese lantern festooned tent arm in arm. We boogied with the wedding party and he escorted me gracefully back to my seat. We gave toasts. Mine was better. At Christmas time, there was some confusion about trees. I had just taken Buddhist refuge vows, so a Christmas tree felt wrong somehow. When I went into his florist shop looking for poinsettias, he came out from behind the counter with a tiny table top boxwood tree in both hands.

"Will tells me you're not doing a tree this year," he said gruffly.

I didn't tell him I had bought 2 Norfolk Pines.

As I opened my mouth to say thank-you, he interrupted.

"Now you've got one," he said.

Today I asked my 22 year-old son if he remembered the North Woods weekend, so I could steal his emotions for my blog.

"I don't remember feeling anything," he said. "But that rainbow trout stayed in Dad's freezer for 5 years."