January 7, 2010 January 7, 2010

Squished Body Parts as Shamatha.

In Buddhism, shamatha is a form of meditation focused on holding, without intrusive thought, a single object in the mind for a desired period of time. (It is also known as “single-pointed concentration.”) Ever since quitting my real job in 2006, I have sought a path to a more compassionate life. Writing is part of that, bringing into focus my own beliefs, fears and obstacles in recognizing and empathizing with my fellow beings. A regular yoga practice teaches me acceptance and patience (with the added bonus of staving off, I hope, arthritis, dementia, osteoporosis and flab!) Reading is huge: others have tread the paths now before me, and studying their words allows me to learn from their insights. But while devotion to this, my personal trifecta of bliss, has completely transformed my life, it hasn’t quite resulted in an ability to look at myself and say – Aha! So here I am, Annie Maier, the person I was born to be. I am not, in Caroline Myss’ words, fulfilling my “sacred contract.” Because I absolutely believe in this theory, which suggests we are born with a specific responsibility to ourselves and others and much of our stress and anxiety (the second of which I have in frightening abundance!) can be attributed to not recognizing and/or meeting this responsibility, I’ve consulted an amazing and varied assortment of priests, astrologists, shamans, therapists and friends on how oh-how to figure out exactly what it is I am supposed to be doing. Though each of them was to varying degrees helpful, it was the astrologist, the wonderful Steve Nelson who can warm a room simply be being in it, who pointed out that I was in layman’s terms “stuck.” For those of you who study taroh, the place of my self-exile is the tower. For those of you disinclined to such mysticism, the tower can be seen as a symbol of coming change, chaos or an ill omen. My own someplace in between interpretation is that I have remained hidden, ensconced in a hand-picked, self-made fortress under the vastly misguided notion that I was protecting myself.

According not only to Steve but also my own internal wisdom and that of everyone else I’ve consulted, including the priest, what is missing on my path is meditation. Ah. So simple. So peaceful. So… impossible. Not impossible it can’t be done, but impossible, I haven’t despite hours of study and a world of desire made the commitment to take 10 lousy minutes out of each evening to contemplate my navel. But today… An epiphany. In, of all places, the radiology department of Presbyterian hospital, where I stood, naked from the waste up and (okay, disclaimer – this might get graphic) with my right breast sandwiched between a most improperly impersonal slab of stainless steel and a 6″x 9″ plastic tray. Really, you haven’t lived until you’ve placed at least one but preferably two of your most sensitive body parts into the careless, vice-like jaws of a self-propelled machine three times bigger than you as it steadily, slowly tightens its grip. Picture it then, envision me there - well, don’t envision me there, try some faceless, stick-figure woman and call her me - naked before a machine kneading my breast like Play-Doh, while the oh-so-kind radiologist (torturess, masochist, dominatrix, whatever they’re called…) said, “Okay, remember to relax and breathe!” HA!

Now, I don’t dread this day like many women I know. It is after all, just a breast and honestly the entire thing can’t take more than ten minutes. Squish, turn, squash turn times two and you’re out of there. In the meantime, everyone around you is feeling your pain and so breaking their necks and backs and schedules to take the time to be nice to you. All in all, it’s really a quite pleasant experience, minus the squishing.  That said, it’s not exactly a day at the beach either and I don’t necessarily look forward to this yearly putty-fest. (I won’t dwell on the fact, but I’m sure this has far more to do with issues about self-image than pain. I mean, if they were squashing my clothed breast, it would probably be a lot easier to take. Sad, but true.) Which leads to the epiphany. Just as the machine rotates its first turn, a thought appears. How, I wonder, can I rise above this situation? And viola! Without further ado, I began meditating. First with my eyes shut, but then, because I was afraid some beatific, spaced out look might appear on my face and freak out the lady in the lab coat, with my eyes open. And I am happy to report – it worked. I was, briefly, transported. The room was warm, I had a drape over my soon-to-be exposed left breast and what the hell, didn’t even notice what was up with the right. And in that moment I knew – if I can will myself out of a situation like that – I can escape that damned tower.   

To Boulder with me, then. Following Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman and Jack Kerouac (my new hero – please please read The Dharma Bums) and my friend Celina Mincey out west chasing her dream and my daughter Lauren up north hunting down hers, into my sacred destiny.

With maybe a little navel-gazing along the way.

 

The Power and Beauty of Words October 6, 2009

October 6, 2009
A helpful friend pointed out that for a blog purportedly devoted to words (and the people who love them), I’ve said remarkably little about the art and practice of writing. I hadn’t thought of it that way – for one thing, my mind connects everything back to words: experiences are mused upon, distilled into a reasonable facsimile of thought, written and sometimes shared. For another thing, talking about words seems a bit redundant, harkening back to the number one rule of decent story-telling – show, don’t tell.
I do, of course, spend hours thinking of words as entities in and of themselves - they swirl about my head during the day as I’m driving to or from my local coffee shop, where all creative endeavors are born. They swirl in the evening, as I sit on the porch listening to the sounds of the afternoon winding to a slow and inexorable close. And they swirl at night, fretting my brain and rousing my curiosity, rendering sleep fitfull, if not impossible. Occasionally, they desert me, fleeing in the face of a blank page or empty computer screen, but that is thankfully rare. For although I often struggle to string five spoken words together without a pause or stutter, nearing incoherence in my enthusiasm or reserve or some combination of the two, given any implement of written communication I find it difficult to stem the  flow.
Not that whatever words appear are always clear or concise or even interconnected. Sometimes they simply dance and flutter, just within the reach of my fingers, spilling from brain to pen to paper in a continuous flow of consonants and vowels that may or may not express whatever it is I’m trying to impart. But that’s the beauty of words – given time and space to expand and grow, they inevitably come together, like cumulus clouds on a fall day, to form something new and beautiful.
I recently read a gorgeous, disturbing book – “Madeleine is Sleeping,” by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum – about a young girl who runs away to join a circus. In the course of the first few beautifully written pages filled with torments and dreams and desire, I realized my heart was pounding, agitated not only by Bynum’s characters and descriptions but even more so by her language. Barely into the second chapter, I was scrambling for pen and paper, jotting an inspired list of words that I couldn’t believe I had never used together in any one piece of work. I won’t give them all away, but among their ranks are the familiar – translucent, contortionist, topiary. And the new – cattleyas, petomane, proscenium.
Since making that list, I’ve penned ten poems on an array of subjects I had long puzzled over but had been unable to unite. Inspired by the possibilities of words at once strange and beautiful, I’ve written for hours at a time, expounding on subjects as varied as a wedding, Parkinson’s Disease and what happens when we stop breathing (permanently, that is). The poetry itself has been a gift, but what I’ve most enjoyed are the emotions and opportunities the new words inspired – as well as the subsequent lists I’ve made (books to be read, writers to google, dreams to fulfill) based on a previously unexpressed longing dredged to the surface by something as lovely as a “nocturne.”