Asset 3

Posts from the ‘Creative non-fiction’ category

At Home at Spirit Rock

on July 6, 2017

Originally written around 9/30/2016

The retreat center sits up in Marin County, past Sausalito and Mill Valley. You get to it after you pass everything notable, all the shops and restaurants and neighborhoods, and there are just trees and hills and hills and trees for a few minutes. You’ll see a little offshoot on the right with a simple sign, and you’ll know you’re in the right place if you pass the horse at the front. Keep going.

That main road will take you everywhere you need to go — all the way to enlightenment, if that exists. You just park your car in the dirt lot and haul your luggage up into the hills, where you’ll notice the wheels of your suitcase are the loudest sound for at least a mile in each direction. Pass the half-closed Tibetan-looking gate, the wild turkeys, and dining hall, and settle into your simple dorm.

I’m pretty comfortable with Spirit Rock, now. I’ll have spent 21 days here in total this year. I’m a few days shy of that currently, so I guess I only needed about 18 days to feel at home. This isn’t true everywhere. I don’t actually feel so at home in the house we’re renting, and I don’t even know what city feels like home or where I want to settle, even for the next couple of years.

I first noticed how at home I felt at Spirit Rock when I told new folks where to find the aprons and that they should tie the ends of them before they put them in the laundry so that they don’t get tied up in the washing machine. These are instructions I’ve heard each time I’ve come because I’ve worked in the kitchen every time. Yogi Jobs, they call them.

Upon hearing me describe Yogi Jobs, a friend sarcastically remarked, “Sure, we’ll call them ‘Yogi Jobs’ and say it’s part of the practice.” And while she makes a decent point, a major reason I feel at home is because I do this menial labor. This is the kind of work I only do in my own home, and it’s the kind of thing that makes you care if someone else comes along and makes a mess. Washing pots in my first retreat actually guided me to extinguish my gag response to touching other people’s dirty, smeared, probably spitty, food vessels. I really did learn that I could be with disgust and just see it arise and pass.

The Yogi Job is probably my favorite part of retreat because it’s most like real life. You have to interact a little bit with other humans, — handing pots over or asking staff what to do with something — and you’re doing stuff you’d normally do in your own home, except, here, you’re in a highly sensitive state, even if you aren’t actively trying to be mindful. Not speaking or staring into a glowing rectangle of digital hypnosis seems to go a long way toward naturally heightening the nuance of life. The color of a leaf can be catalyst for tears.

Doing my little bit, washing my few pots, seems relatively important to making things run smoothly. I’m grateful to the cooks who used them, (the food is excellent) and I want them to have nice clean pots ready for the next meal. If I didn’t wash them, it’d be more work for someone else. I feel needed, appreciated, and frankly, quite accomplished about my pot-washing abilities. If I left early (which I have once before), I’d feel quite guilty to leave my Yogi Job undone (which I did).

I’m pretty sure the effects of the Yogi Job are not an accident. Being part of creating the experience for everyone makes you more invested in it and more empowered to fix something if you feel it needs fixing. It makes a meditation retreat different than going to spa and being a client who gets to complain about the water being too cold or the towels being too fluffy. You feel more like family, since you’re not only getting your hands dirty, but you’re also indirectly taking care of others.

The Yogi Job only takes about 45 minutes each day. It’s a tiny investment, and at the end of it, there’s still time to go explore the pristine land, land that seems to remain in centuries past, well-before colonization, somehow silent despite the sounds of the breeze bending the grasses and the evening chirping. The hills hold the refuge like fingertips pressed through the cloth of the ground. Maybe it’s the fingers of nature, or of god trying to scoop up this one spot and hold it a little closer. There’s a safety, a trust that they won’t collapse in, that it will be just the same a hundred years from now.

I’m Not Busy

on July 6, 2017

Originally written 9/24/14, updated in 2017

It’s a Wednesday afternoon, and I’m not busy. I haven’t been busy all week, as a matter of fact. I have a list of items that I could be working on, but no pressing deadlines or meetings. My humble number of clients are either out of town or have cancelled because they’re just getting back into town and don’t need me yet.

I feel fine about this lack of busy-ness at the moment, but this is a relatively new experience.

Prior to writing this article, it occurred to me that maybe we are all trying to be busy to distract us from something that’s difficult, the same way procrastination consists of your mind finding the need to fix the tiniest of aberrations on your fingernail as far more important than completing your essay. But just as I finished filing my nail, a NYTimes article came out on exactly this subject. The author referenced research that indicates people would rather give themselves electric shocks than be alone with themselves without external stimulation. It discussed “busy” as meaning overcommitted and overextended with little time to reflect and how people want to be busy to avoid difficult reflection.

From there, I found an earlier and more entertaining NYTimes article, in which Tim Kreider distinguishes busy from exhausted and notes that “busy” is mostly self-imposed. He suggests that we want to be busy to avoid facing the meaninglessness of our lives.

Being busy implies that we’re valuable. We have stuff to do because people want us to do that stuff and are likely paying us because we’re worth it. I’m not sure we’re trying to avoid meaninglessness so much as we’re desperately seeking meaning. Except that we mostly don’t find actual meaning or a sense of being truly valued. We find substitutions that look like it from the outside, and it seems we would be extremely embarrassed to admit that we aren’t really finding meaning through our own constructed busyness.

For most of us, we perpetuate this blueprint probably because this is all we’ve ever seen. Our friends or colleagues seem to be happy, so we should do what they do. If we’re not actually happy while spinning six plates and dancing on a ball, we assume the problem is with us or that those aren’t the right plates. Perhaps it’s because there are so many people following this path of constant distraction that it seems like it must be the “right” way. The shared reality is that we’re supposed to be busy, and if we aren’t, something is wrong. It’s a strong subliminal force.

Aside from people overtly telling us that things are going well and they’re really busy, this force seems to function through our automatic interpretation of lots of external cues to be indicative of the internal states of others, like walking quickly indicating the need to be somewhere important. For me, the relief to my confusion was in seeing these implicit comparisons in action.

A few weeks back, I attended a non-residential meditation retreat, meaning that I’d do meditation stuff from 9-5, but I still went home to my apartment at 5pm, interacting with the world only as my commute necessitates. For that week, I wasn’t producing anything at all. I wasn’t, to the naked eye, busy. The first couple of days were rough. I kept feeling this sense of guilt and emptiness that I couldn’t really shake. I tried to justify it to myself: this was something I had planned for, an experience that would build skills and insight, that I was actually doing very important mental work. I truly believed these things, but the guilt persisted.

We did an exercise where we took a subway ride — something common in our daily lives that we don’t usually bring mindfulness to — and then wrote a list of what we recalled noticing.

On the train, I sat down and looked down at the floor, in typical New Yorker fashion. Some very nice feet in sandals entered my view. I overtly noticed her clean pedicure, but there was also this very subtle sense of comparison happening. There was this knowing that she was better than me. It wasn’t even a thought in language. It was just a hint of a feeling, like a belief that is pre-existent. She probably made more money than me, was respected by her boss who probably wouldn’t respect me, she probably has a shiny little husband who loves her but who wouldn’t like me. I didn’t think any of these thoughts but I would have agreed with them if you had asked.

In listing what I remembered from the ride, I could see this happened with disturbing frequency. I noticed good-looking guys in suits, but there was this slight assumption that they wouldn’t be interested in me, of course — they were valuable and I wasn’t. I stepped aside to let a suited man go out of the subway before me, since he obviously had somewhere important to be and I didn’t.

The pattern pivoted mostly around nice things (bags, suits, shoes) that I interpreted as an indication of importance. Indications of being more important than me, more specifically. I could see that the beliefs about myself extended from there: I should be out making money rather than literally paying to do nothing for a week. Since I’m not making money, I’m not valuable. The guilt got heavier with the recognition of that simple belief. There was also some sense of unfairness and futility, like the world doesn’t see my value; I was defending myself by blaming the world.

If these thoughts are any indication of my mental patterns in general life, this would probably explain my incessant low-level anxiety. I may have been nearly constantly experiencing some negative emotion because of this pattern of tacitly comparing myself negatively to others. It’s no wonder why I generally feel some struggle with my self-worth when I’m not working or in school. I’ve been constantly telling myself in various ways that I suck and everyone else is better.

The next day of the retreat, I kept an eye out for these sneaky comparisons. I also gave my mind almost no room to create them by staying in my senses, focusing on the sounds and the feelings on my skin. The guilt evaporated. It no longer seemed like I was valueless for not being busy. The concept of busy vanished, along with the concept of value. It was just me and my senses, without interpretation. And I was okay, apparently.

For me, this seemed to be how the gravitational pull of the Busy Delusion was exhibiting — in an almost unobservable, multi-layered belief structure, falsely equating having expensive stuff or being well-groomed with value. Since observing these patterns, I haven’t felt the same strange nauseous anxiety on days when I’m not busy. I still don’t like being unfocused or unproductive when I’m intending to be, but that sensation doesn’t have the same guilt-soaked undertone.

Maybe people don’t want to be alone with their mind if they’re subject to similarly painful patterns of self-deprecation, but it was extremely helpful to see them occurring in something I do everyday. Obviously, it wouldn’t have been helpful if I thought those beliefs had merit. I needed to be able to see that just because people appear to have it together doesn’t mean they do. Just because people say they’re busy, it doesn’t mean they’re enjoying their life or that they’re busy with the things they want to be doing. It might even mean the opposite.

Perhaps we are confusing being submerged in an ocean of obligations with being engaged in an activity. While I wasn’t busy in the way people usually mean it while on that meditation retreat, I was doing something. It’s just not a thing that most of society would look at and judge as worthwhile. Maybe society doesn’t know what’s best.

Our First Felines

on April 12, 2017

I had moved into a bland apartment with my first serious boyfriend. We were in college, which seemed easy, so we spent most of our attention on each other. We were fast to be serious with each other — six months in and talking about what we’d name our kids.

While doing the final sweep of his old apartment, a black cat wandered inside. She seemed to be investigating the layout, but when we beckoned “kitty, kitty” she confidently glided to us, slinked around our legs, and looked up with bright green eyes. With no hesitation, we named her Dinosaur and took her with us.

The vet told us that of course she’s pregnant, she’s a friendly cat; Friendly cats are always pregnant. He felt around in her abdoman and suggested at least two kittens would materialize in about 2 months. He gave us flea medicine and sent us home.

Two months later, we found her laying in our closet, the little miracles ready to emerge. Except they weren’t emerging completely. Just a few paws were poking out into the air. My brother happened to be around, and he instinctually knew to grab a cloth and gently help pull. Kitten number one arrived feet first, marble colored orange and black. Kitten number two came out on her own, head first, looking very similar to her sister. Kitten number three was black and white and male, also feet first. A few hours later, Dinosaur had cleaned everyone up, and fallen asleep while they had breakfast at her tummy.

The kittens stayed in the closet for their first week or two, stumbling and struggling to hold up their heavy heads. I came home one of those early days to find only two of the three kittens present in the closet, peeping emanating from somewhere in the house. After a few minutes of searching, I found the little one in the cabinet under the sink in the bathroom. Apparently Dinosaur had carried her there, opened the cabinet, put her in, and closed it. I had no other explanation. I plopped her back in the nest, and my 18-year-old self scolded Dinosaur for being a terrible mother. Later, it would turn out that this kitten had seizures and a strangely dead gaze. Dinosaur refused to lick her clean after that, so it was part of our evening chores.

Slowly, the kittens became mobile, adventuring out into the bedroom. The first kitten tended to maneuver sideways, like a crab. She was a goofball, spinning around with her mother’s confidence. We named her Banana. The strange one swatted at the air at what I don’t remember. I was finishing up a degree in music at the time, and named her Toscanina. Nina for short. The boy we named Tyrone, Ronie for short. We kept them all, and my brother took Dinosaur, bonded by the experience of assisting her in her struggle.

Ronie meows at me at I type these words, his purr bubbling the sound. He yawns widely, showing his old broken canine, and the pink tongue that has eat thousands of dry food pellets. He comfortably squints before leaping to my desk to stare out the window. His sisters, now overweight, sleep in puddles of their own skin against the walls of my office, quietly snoring on the in breaths.