SuspendedAnimation

right speech

Compassionate inquiry into our reactions and strategies is fundamental to the process of awakening. We are encouraged to be curious about the neurosis that's bound to kick in when our coping mechanisms start falling apart. This is how we get to the place where we stop believing in our personal myths, the place where we are not always divided against ourselves, always resisting our own energy. This is how we learn to abide in basic goodness.

It's an ongoing practice. From the instant we begin training as a boddhisattva until we completely trust the freedom of our unconditional, unbiased mind, we are surrendering moment by moment to whatever is happening in this very instant of time. With precision and gentleness we surrender our cherished ways of regarding ourselves and others, our cherished ways of holding it all together, our cherished ways of blocking our tender heart. In the process of doing this again and again over many challenging and inspiring years, we develop an appetite for groundlessness.&mdash Pema [of course ... as usual]

This is the story of how I suck at being what is referred to in dharma as a 'spiritual friend.' That's not a guru—it could be, but it isn't necessarily—it's just a fellow traveller, someone who is your companion in commitment to your truth. Or I could further alienate the non-dharma audience by saying it this way: it's someone who has total confidence in your buddha nature and supports you in connecting with that.

I have a friend who has gone through hell. And it was my strong conviction that there was some stuff my friend could let go of, that would lighten her up to rise out of that hell. I was thinking in terms of the quoted paragraph above. For a long time I was seeing, and questioning myself about what I was seeing. I have a healthy skepticism about my own opinions. I look for my own biases, and in this case, my own biases were hale and hearty, so—you know how when you buy from the salad bar, they call it 'tare', they subtract the weight of the plate?—I was really trying to make generous allowances for the weight of the plate. Not feeling adequate to being able to speak wisely and well, for a long long time I was silent. But I saw acute suffering, and over months and months I felt increasingly what a terrible coward I was, as I saw suffering unfolding over and over again and said nothing to the point.

So eventually, I couldn't stand it any longer; I tried to speak. But I just wasn't able to do it right. I could have the choir chime in here and tell me that 'some people just can't be reached.' If you are contemplating leaving a comment like that, please: don't. I don't believe that there is anyone who can't be reached. The right words, the right time, the right attitude, and anyone can hear what needs to be heard.

Mind you, I still am aware that I might have been wrong anyway. There's so much I don't know, so much that no one outside another's situation can know.

But in a way, it's all irrelevant. I failed, and I lost a friend, and I accept this with sadness and a will to look hard at myself and think about whether I can know myself a little better tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.

aw man,

too. damn. good:
When someone says they've come to terms with something I nod but actually I have no clue what they mean. I suspect it usually comes down to giving up, surrendering in exhausted defeat and calling it a truce. People have to live with themselves.

this is smart, and funny; the rest of it is both funny and smart.

career self-counseling

I need not apply to any advertisements for proverb writers. Here's the beauty I pulled out my nether regionsjezizgahdwhatwasithinking unconscious yesterday, which I now copy and paste from an email:

You can put a book in front of a cat, but to the cat it's just a clump of thin fibrous sheets stuck together at one edge.

knocked the breath out

the signal memory for me, literally, a punch in the gut.

i must have been just seven years old, or maybe eight. walking home from school, and that was only a block and a half. We lived on a corner, in a neighborhood of more or less identical post-war ranch houses. Some people displayed affluence by slapping a second story onto them; every couple of blocks was marked with one of these pop-ups. Next block over, an asphalt path cutting between two houses led to the school playground, with the yellow brick school past them. Just ten classrooms; but then, the coatroom between Room 7 and Room 8 was converted to a classroom too, or at least there was a table in it and we had classes there: Room 7 1/2 ... so, my point, a small school, a neighborhood school, and we all knew one another. So I certainly knew him: I knew his little sister, Beth, who was a year younger than me, and she and I had met on the block and played sometimes, and just as we kids all felt how the families with the pop-up houses had  displayed some kind of distinction in this homogenous stretch of suburb, so I also knew that Beth's house (less than two blocks from mine) with the kittens tumbling out the broken window and the rusted automobile carcass in the yard had been marked, too, in a different way.

So good young girls were afraid of this boy, Beth's brother, named Greg: a year older than me, and he already, so young, had a cold look in his eye, it seemed. They said he smoked cigarettes. And I was walking home from school, and he came from the other direction on the sidewalk; and when he got to where I was walking, without a word he punched me in the stomach, hard, and kept walking. who knows why? I didn't. I had never told a tale about him, we had never exchanged a dozen words. something about my existence just made him mad, that day. I was doubled over, I was angry, humiliated, I straightened out and went home but of course you just can't forget that.

A couple of times I had restless dreams where Greg cornered me, dreams that at that age I couldn't have recognized were erotic.

But we didn't have anything to do with each other, over the years. Still, it wasn't a big town. The people you knew as a child were the people  you saw in high school.

In my high school, if you were one of the people who smoked pot fairly regularly, you had fellowship with the other students who would sneak out to what we called The Dumpsters, but they were not dumpsters--they were empty containers or tractor trailers on the edge of the high school grounds, past the fields, and why the narcs didn't bust them regularly I don't know. But people I didn't hang out with, I'd see them there, and that's how I re-formed a nodding acquaintance with Greg who was continuing on a rather steadier path of dereliction than my own erratic and half-hearted one.

When I was fifteen, he showed up at my house one afternoon with two of his friends, also slight acquaintances, and invited me to go get high with them. Well, why not? We went to the grassy slope behind the development that led out to the creek and the path to Salter's Pond. Sat on the grass and smoked a joint. It was a mild afternoon, shading off to dusk. And then I'm seeing looks being exchanged among the three, and Greg's two buddies are finding they must be off somewhere. Good and stoned though I am, the warning flare goes off in my dozey brain and I jump up and excuse myself, though Greg is showing signs of obvious disappointment and trying to think of some way to convince me to hang around. oh no sir, I skip back to my house quick.

a few days later, i am on the receiving end of one of those ridiculous teenage phone calls in which you know another party is listening in. one of the pals calls to sound me out about whether i'd be interested in being Greg's girlfriend. oh no sir. "well, what do you have against him?" and even at that moment, i'm thinking resentfully of being socked in the gut, though truthfully  the tubercular-looking, pale-eyed Greg held no appeal for me anyway. "i've got nothing against him, i don't even know him."

two years later, i was working in the Shop-Rite supermarket as a cashier. one of the other cashiers, Pearl, is a sweet girl. she's tall and thin and just a little anemic looking, with dark blonde wavy hair and mild eyes. and she didn't look much older than me, so i was surprised to find that she was married and had a baby. she talked proudly about her husband, obviously adoring.

and he comes in, with the baby boy. it's him, it's Greg, and i'd never noticed before that Pearl's last name was the same as his: not an outlandish name, though not Smith either. Later I learn, Pearl dropped out of high school with this pregnancy, and there they are, the family. But some other time he comes through my line on purpose, and he's talking to me. He looks like he's more than half used up his life, someone should tell him to button his shirt properly, his chest sunken and his eyes still so bleached and somehow grim, but he's trying to flirt with me practically in front of his wife, and in my peripheral vision I can see her eyes narrowing at me, at me.

not any better

just as much coursework crushing me

compounded by periodic icepick stabs of loneliness

tune in later in the week for perky banter

oh, and of course: happy mother's day. yes, they were good to me. no, I don't deserve it.

pardon me while I drown

too much work; nothing to say except: damn. too much work.

guest blogger as requested

"Once there was a cat that was very greedy and it was very hungry. It wanted a nice juicy mouse for a snack. So it thought it should go to the pig yard because pigs have lots of stuff in their trough. So the cat went over to the pig's yard and asked, 'Do you have any nice mouses in that trough of yours?' and the pig said, 'no, but I have some noodles and a donut--would you like to try?' and then the cat said, 'what's a noodle? yuck!' and the pig said, 'if you're going to talk about my food like that you are going to have to try,' and then the cat said 'no way, I don't like noodles' and the pig said, 'you've never tried them--try them.' And then the cat said, 'well okay' and the pig gave the cat a big noodle and the cat took a little bite of it and said, 'Hmmmm, hey, I like this!' And that's how the cat learned to be a good tryer. Do you like it?"

how to create a wise-ass little monster

[calling from my room to hers, realizing that I've been hearing a nonstop stream of lively chatter that does not resemble the sound of pajamas being donned] Are you putting on your pajamas?
[calling back] No, I'm getting my bed ready.
Well, in my opinion you should be getting your pajamas on.
Well, I need to get my bed ready.
Well, I'm the mother and I say, get your pajamas on.
Well, but it's my choice
Well, but it's my daughter.
Well, but it's my body.
Well, but it's my house.
Well, but it's my room.
[I can't help laughing at this, thereby undermining the teensie smudge of authority I pretend to wield.]
[Actually, I'm generally pretty heavyhanded.]

hey! it's Jill! don't ignore!

That post title was really, no really, the subject line of an email I sent today.

But there's an explanation. I sent the email to my faculty advisor, and he is very Active In Professional Service this year and literally gets hundreds of emails a day. So, he explained, to us, if you send him an email, well ... he might not notice ... unless you give it some kind of hysterically urgent subject line. And the above formulation was my attempt to do that, so that he'd send me the class handouts I was missing.

Still and all. The appropriateness of my choice of words does not elude me.

This is what I said in an email to someone else today on this topic:

... I know that I have this really weak ego that keeps begging to be reminded that I exist, from external sources. so I realize that it's my problem, but I'm grateful for people putting up with me and sometimes even loving me anyway.

So there's that. In addition, there were post-birthday blues, and they're not what you think. I bet you think I build up in my mind some kind of wild expectation of fantastic rivers of affirmation and affection that will flow over me in a 105F  jasmine-scented mineral bath of satisfaction, but that is not the case, no. All blog evidence to the contrary, I expect pretty much nothing for my birthday, and am ever surprised and deeply gratified by any mark of recognition that comes my way.

I think post-birthday blues are just my annually aggregating disappointment with myself. I'm not much: a fistful of good intentions backed up with a wavering will; a booklet of $.50 words and little sparkly bursts of ideas on how to juggle and nudge them together, and a talent for remembering information that is moderately useful and what you said that time and how I felt about it, and what she looked like walking toward Central Square with the fat straw-colored French braid dangling down her back, and the decision not to follow her and I wonder what her name was.

Increase The Size Of Your Log!

That oh-so-l3vitr4 message is plastered all over the pages of my statistics service, reminding me that I could cyberspy on my readers in much more depth if only I were willing to pay, pay, pay. And for months now I've been wanting to include it in a post, because really the eighth-grader in me is still as green and lively as she was twenty-seven years ago. Twenty-seven years ago. Egad.

Just a few unconnected thoughts. Well. They are connected by my usual preoccupations: vanity, pruriency, tilt-a-whirl ego, what have you.

Today a twenty-four year old man tried to ask me out. No obvious deformity was in evidence, and he appeared to retain the use of all his limbs, teeth, mental faculties, and social skills, though his English was a bit halting. I'm going to hire a private investigator to see whether anyone in my acquaintance arranged for this occurrence as a sort of birthday morale boost.

Tomorrow we take off for two days to join my family for Passover. I'm roasting about twenty pounds of root vegetables (both white and orange sweet potatoes, rutabaga, parsnip and carrot) with red pearl onions and fresh sage. Does that sound like enough root vegetable for twenty-two people? We're Jews, remember. We don't drink a lot at holidays—bizarre as it sounds, we actually eat. I also have to cook two quarts of the Italian style haroset that I started making a few years ago and which is now demanded instead of the usual raw-chopped-apple-and-walnut type. It has lots of dates, prunes, golden raisins, apples, pears, ground almonds and pinenuts, along with the usual cinnamon and sweet wine.

This is what happens when you have a daughter of great personal loveliness, if you're me: you release a tiny fraction of your persistent, intensely neurotic desire to be lovely whenever there's an event that will potentially showcase both of you; instead, you lavish considerable attention on tarting up the child. This afternoon we bought the Jellybean a gaw-jus dress, lacy stockings, and a little white crochet cardigan; I don't know what I'm wearing tomorrow and need to do my laundry.

If you missed the opportunity to say 'Happy Birthday' to me in my covert pre-birthday attention-begging post, here's your chance to do it now. If you have already wished me a happy birthday in that venue or elsewhere, consider yourself encouraged to devise some other way to express your deep appreciation of the wonder that is me. If you like.