coincidences: or, what Alan Watts, Neil Gaiman, and “Alice in Wonderland” teach us…

As dawn rises over this new day, I am filled with wonder and love for the bedrock of books. Books wise and curious, which draw me in every morning and sometimes allow for a marvelous coincidence to take place, a flame to flicker, as if the authors were hovering nearby, with smiles growing wide, because someone finally got it!
This morning, the light of wisdom was sparked by an accidental discovery in Alan Watts (The Way of Zen) that led me back to a book I just finished rereading yesterday: the obscure, frightening, and yet comforting story called The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. (Hmmm. I suspect Gaiman’s story contains more wisdom than appears at first glance. To do: read it again some day!)

The passage from Alan Watts comes from his explanation of the intermediate stage in a student’s life as he (or she) pursues Zen Buddhist training:
“The continued practice of za-zen now provides the student with a clear, unobstructed mind into which he can toss the koan like a pebble into a pool and simply watch to see what his mind does with it. As he concludes each koan, the roshi [master / teacher] usually requires that he present a verse from the Zenrin Kushu which expresses the point of the koan just solved. Other books are also used, and the late Sokei-an Sasaki, working in the United States, found that an admirable manual for this purpose was Alice in Wonderland.” (The Way of Zen, p. 167).

The passage from Neil Gaiman comes from the climactic scene where the seven-year-old hero is standing in a field as night falls, careful to remain inside a circle in the grass, as voices and shadowy figures taunt him. His friend, Lettie Hempstock, led him into that circle and instructed him to remain there no matter what happens. So he does. But it is so hard.
Here are some key moments from the passage, and the coincidences I heard along the way. Do you hear them too?

I sat down with my back to the dead tree in the center of the fairy ring, and I closed my eyes, and I did not move. I remembered poems to distract myself, recited them silently under my breath, mouthing the words but making no sound.
Fury said to a mouse that he met in the house let us both go to law I will prosecute you… I could say all the poem in one long breath, and I did, all the way to the inevitable end.
I’ll be the judge I’ll be the jury said cunning old Fury I’ll try the whole cause and condemn you to death.*
[…]
“You are hungry,” said the voice in the night, and it was no longer Lettie’s voice, not any longer. It might have been the voice inside my own head, but it was speaking aloud. “You are tired. Your family hates you. You have no friends. And Lettie Hempstock, I regret to tell you, is never coming back.”
I wished I could have seen who was talking. If you have something specific and visible to fear, rather than something that could be anything, it is easier.
“Nobody cares,” said the voice, so resigned, so practical. “Now, step out of the circle and come to us. One step is all it will take. Just put one foot across the threshold and we will make all the pain go away forever: the pain you feel now and the pain that is still to come. It will never happen.”
It was not one voice, not any longer. It was two people talking in unison Or a hundred people. I could not tell. So many voices.
“How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. … You can come out, and we will end it, cleanly, or you can die in there, of hunger and fear. And when you are dead your circle will mean nothing, and we will tear out your heart and take your soul for a keepsake.”
“P’raps it will be like that,” I said, to the darkness and the shadows, “and p’raps it won’t. And p’raps if it is, it would have been like that anyway. I don’t care. I’m still going to wait here for Lettie Hempstock, and she’s going to come back to me.”
There was silence. … I thought over what I’d said, and I knew that it was true. At that moment, for once in my childhood, I was not scared of the dark, and I was perfectly willing to die (as willing as any seven-year-old, certain of his immortality, can be) if I died waiting for Lettie. Because she was my friend.
Time passed. … The moon rose higher. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness. I sang, under my breath, mouthing the words over and over.
[“The Mouse’s Tale” from Alice in Wonderland morphs into a snippet of a song by Gilbert and Sullivan, from Iolanthe]:

You’re a regular wreck with a crick in your neck
And no wonder you snore for your head’s on the floor
And you’ve needles and pins from your sole to your shins
And your flesh is a-creep for your left leg’s asleep
And you’ve cramp in your toes and a fly on your nose
You’ve got fluff in your lung and a feverish tongue
And a thirst that’s intense and a general sense that you haven’t been sleeping in clover…

I sang it to myself, the whole song, all the way through, two or three times, and I was relieved that I remembered the words, even if I did not always understand them.

***
(from Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane [New York: HarperCollins, 2013], pp. 132-133, 138-140.

* “The Mouse’s Tale” in Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—chapter 3, “A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale”.

***

The lesson: “I was relieved that I remembered the words, even if I did not always understand them.”

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Ripping off the Bandaid, or must moving become existential turmoil? Remember the worry-wort centipede!

Now that it is only four weeks til D-day, I have felt touches of that sickness known as nostalgia. It starts with a slight taste of nausea that spreads to the temples with dread and then cloaks the whole body in heavy, dank sadness. I know it well, having lost my mom just three years ago and my dad in 2008.

I hate nostalgia! I hate thinking about the past, wallowing in sorrow for babies grown, marriages sealed, friendships ended. I hate thinking all the time. The Mind, it was revealed to me during the past 18 months since I discovered meditation and T’ai chi, is not necessarily a friend. It does not naturally have any compassion for you. It can attack you, remind you of weakness, and torture you all day long if you let it. Moving your household is an activity that gives Mind free rein, because when you must spend several hours a day poring through cupboards, drawers, and shelves, choosing and tossing vestiges of the past, Mind creeps in easily and emotional turmoil may ensue, believe me.

The conflicting emotions whipped up by the storm yesterday have subsided to mental nagging today. As Peter Ralston points out, “We have a tendency to get caught up in things that don’t serve being ‘in’ or being responsive to the present moment and condition—we become enmeshed in figuring out, being anxious, upset, angry, fearful, reactive and so on.”

His solution is a brilliant series of mind experiments and exercises designed to unify the physical core and the Mind. It does work if you remain calm. Being calm for me requires preparation: doing T’ai chi daily, concentrating on even breathing, and holding a correct spinal alignment at all times. As Ralston writes, “Instead of trying to make those things disappear, we can simply let them be, not feed them energy and attention, and let them float in the base we now call being calm” (Principles of Essential Power, 6). But when you suddenly rediscover a handknit baby blanket, a cute old photo of your kid (whose present self isn’t quite so cute or unproblematic), or even a yellowed bank statement, emotions are prone to fill the idle Mind.

Better to channel that emotional richness into creativity, as Bob Klein, Twyla Tharp and so many other sages have advised. Therein lies our life’s purpose. Creativity for me is writing (a little) and especially sewing. Sewing is a bond to the past and a disciplined way to beautify the present and make people happier, if only for a few minutes now and then. My intentions are kindly, the results are heart-warming, and that is enough for me.

But our world does not promote such simplicity, and it never has, as long as humans live in community and compare our fate to that of others. Faced with our own mortality and limitations, we humans can easily become off-balanced and fall into existential turmoil. French literature testifies to this fact all the time: just think of Victor Hugo’s poem, “The Slope of Reverie,” Jean-Paul Sartre’s works Being and Nothingness or Nausea, and Beckett’s entire absurdly depressing oeuvre.

Why is that? Because most people in the West are dominated by a tyrant named Mind or conscious logical socially-conditioned thought patterns. Mind tries (and often succeeds) to convince us that only Mind can keep us together.  Only worrying holds us upright, gets us out of bed and off to work. Only other people’s opinions of us count. If we stop worrying and trying to measure up to external standards, we will fall apart and turn into mush. That is a powerful lie. But each must realize it in his own time.

Remember the tragic fate of the worry-wort centipede!

The centipede was happy, quite,

Until a toad in fun

Said, “Pray, which leg goes after which?”

This worked his mind to such a pitch,

He lay distracted in a ditch,

Considering how to run.

 

–reproduced in Watts, The Way of Zen, p. 27

 

image reproduced courtesy of Kaneki and a Centipede Plush ||| Tokyo Ghoul Fan Art by verticalforklift on Tumblr

day four, what is real?

Hello on day four of the five-day meditation in a mirror challenge,

It is already after noon yet the house is very quiet today, after yesterday’s tornado of family conflict, stress and strife, during the “birthday dinner.”

Today’s setting: the downstairs hall mirror–a full-length mirror ca. 1910–and the downstairs bathroom mirror–another heavy, gilt-framed antique that came with the house. I opened the closet door to allow the full-length mirror to reflect the bathroom mirror, and as I stood there I moved it slightly to see how they reflected each other and the things in between.

We think mirrors are “true” reflections yet look how easily I distorted “reality”: by slightly moving the door and camera’s focus, it is easy to create doubles. The camera shows doubles: doubles of the mirror, of me, of the Picasso print of a girl (Head of a Woman in a Hat, 1962): all those doubles are merely reflections created by the border in the glass of the full-length mirror.

So what is real? right now, cold feet and thirst are real. My ears resound in silent static and my intellect feels wary and weary of things social.

As Alan Watts writes about awareness, “This very simple ‘opening of the eyes’ brings about the most extraordinary transformation of understanding and living, and shows that many of our most baffling problems are pure illusion. […] Because awareness is a view of reality free of ideas and judgments, it is clearly impossible to define and write down what it reveals. […] The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates, not by building, but by hacking away.”  (Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity, 76).

Letting go of a past “Identity” is scary. This applies to adults who must let go of one Identity, of being PARENTS–law-and-order border agents, battling evil to keep their children safe–and undertake a different Identity when those tykes grow up (anywhere from 18 to 35 years later).

From PARENTS, we must accept to exert less power and control over our children. We must let go of our PARENT domination and accept a new role as a kindly, non-invasive partner–merely a fellow human on a chronologically-defined journey we share with those people from birth (theirs) to death (ours, if the chronology works the way we hope it will).

That letting go is scary and hard. Words may help:

if in our anger, we realize

the other person is suffering,

we can free ourselves

from anger

and from suffering,

which also helps free the other.

–Shi Wuling, Path to Peace, Feb. 8

Sometimes abstaining from action and thought, what the Chinese call wu-wei, is the best action.

Especially when we’re all so tired of each other. Maybe we should all just tread lightly and remain silent for a while, like Honey Girl here.

 

meditation on a sound–the red-winged blackbirds are back!

Walking down the hill to the river with Honey Girl tonight, I got that weird feeling of déjà vu; a flashback suddenly took me to another me, another present, walking the dog around these same streets in winter 2015-16.

Like many thoughts that come from nowhere, this one was elicited by a sound. It was the sound of a red-winged blackbird, sitting in the river grasses and singing at twilight. (You can listen to one singing here.)

Back in winter 2015, I was thinking about red-winged blackbirds a lot. I was thinking about black a lot and thinking about death a lot too: my mom had died in early spring that year. When spring came around in 2016, the blackbird’s call took my breath away. I had forgotten all about spring. It made me laugh and cry for sheer happiness to feel alive again, to hope and try again.

The bird belongs to a story I wrote and illustrated to present at a conference on wild children (les enfants sauvages) in Paris in December 2015. The story concluded a post-colonial analysis of the jeune fille sauvage de Champagne who I first studied years ago for a book called The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster (2002). Instead of seeing her through the prism of European artists, through woodcuts and crude engravings that depicted her in insulting primitive stereotypes, this time I depicted her as a healthy young girl running through these woods in pursuit of bluebells, chipmunks and daisies. I saw her as an Amerindian growing up in this region near Lake Michigan.

Although the archives record the quiet death of an outsider to Paris, in my little story-book, Native Daughter, Marie-Angélique gets the last laugh. She does not die with despair, like Europeans–she lives on!  First she becomes a black alley cat, and then a red-winged blackbird. The book ends with the reader hearing that incredibly sweet trill that I just heard tonight.

I was lonely and wistful then, and felt some kind of grudge toward the French who “took” Marie-Angélique from her home, “showed” her for entertainment, and “graced” her with a pension to live–and doomed her to a lonely life. I tucked my emotions neatly into Native Daughter and decorated it with collages cut from books on Indians, guidebooks to Midwestern plants and birds, and commentaries on Parisian society. One copy ultimately ended up in the hands of the conference organizer: a scarily famous French writer… who has since become a dear friend.

***

Like me, the setting sun was sentimental tonight—the lower horizon was ocher and cinnamon layered with tangerine and blood orange, ending on top in a bit of peachy froth, or that pinky-orange foam on the top of an Orange Julius, against an eggshell blue sky and a half moon. (Not exactly like the hills of Tennessee, seen here, but you get the orangey feeling!)

Speaking of which, Rich served a blood orange and red onion salad with dinner tonight! (the oranges and onions were sliced thin, and had just a trace of extra virgin olive oil and sea salt. It was sweet, tangy, soft and crunchy).

***

You cannot know how surprised I am to see the words I just wrote. After all those years of striving and judging and aching with academic isolation, angst, and frustration, I feel the weight is finally lifting. I don’t care if my writing seems silly. If you don’t like it, click out!

Life feels good again, like it used to in childhood. Alan Watts’ Wisdom of Insecurity describes the feeling like this:

“When you realize that you live in, indeed that you are this moment now, and no other, that apart from this there is no past and no future, you must relax and taste to the full, whether it be pleasure or pain. At once it becomes obvious why this universe exists … Obviously, it all exists for this moment.

[…]

How long have the planets been circling the sun? Are they getting anywhere, and do they go faster and faster to arrive? How often has the spring returned to the earth? Does it come faster and fancier each year, to be sure to be better than last spring, and to hurry on its way to the spring that shall outspring all springs?

The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course.”  (Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity, 115-16)

***

BTW: Can anybody tell me where does the spring “return” from?  And where does winter “go”? Those metaphors are bizarrely misleading!  Not to mention that the two seasons overlap. Just go outside if you live in the northern hemisphere and walk around right now: you’ll see what I mean. Winter is clearly here. And so is spring. Change is in the air again… but then, it was all along. As was the present. Which is now the past.

***

Advice: Sunsets are free entertainment. Walk up to a hill, walk down to a beach, or gaze over the valley to the West. Stand there and watch one, some time this week. Enjoy every moment.

life is an event

The neighbors may wonder why a small figure stands in the window of my house each morning. She can be seen in different windows depending on the day. Just standing there, she looks out. Sometimes she bobs up and down, stretches side to side, or reaches up with arms outstretched. Sometimes she’s still as a reed on a deep-summer day.

Why do I do it? Because I listened to Master Peng.

But first of all, I observed Master Peng.

I observed him over time and with deepening wonder at what I saw. Every time he arrived for our weekly class, he glowed. He said with a smile, “I feel great!” One day, he explained why. He told us that he was in the habit of getting up at 3am every morning and standing in a meditation with his heels touching, and feet at a 90-degree angle. For three hours!  He stood like that daily from 3am to 6am. (One assumes this was possible because he was on sabbatical leave during the year spent at Notre Dame, but maybe not?!)

This habit of standing meditation is not unusual in Peng’s hometown, it seems. He told us that a man from his village learned he had lung cancer one day. Since he was already in his 60s, the prospects looked dire. So the man withdrew from the world and stood meditating, with heels touching and his feet at a 90-degree angle, for three months. At the end of the three months, he re-emerged and resumed life as usual. He is now in his 80s and feels great!

Well, you can think what you want about the tall tales told by t’ai chi teachers. But no one will ever convince me that Master Peng felt anything but good during the months I spent studying him and his supple movements in class.

And that is why I do the standing meditation for 30 minutes, with my feet at a 90-degree angle, each morning. My hip joints do feel different as does my spirit–more expansive and elastic. My hips move more smoothly now and I have no fears about arthritis. I feel strong and supple.

This comes back to the point about life being an event.

This morning while standing in the sunroom window, I gazed at a bird in a nearby tree. You can see it in the top photo. Meanwhile, downstairs, I could hear the front door open and close, and footsteps moving around as Rich and Honey Girl came back early from their walk. I wondered why. Then I heard something, saw some drips of water, and understood. After opening the window to let in the gentle sound of rain, it was easier to still the Mind. I became silent and waited. I let my vision blur so that the bird was in the periphery of my sight. (As in photo no. 2, you’ll see he’s still there. My Mind kept wanting to check on him!) I tried keeping the focus acute yet blurry, so that despite my earthbound state, I might experience the sky like a bird.

If you ever doubt that your life is part of a larger event, just look out the window or go outside. In the little universe outside my window, a flock of three crows flew in, one by one, and perched on a tree. The little bird turned and hopped a step or two. Then it turned and faced away from the ruckus, looking off through the misty air and seeing who knows what event coming along next.

What comes along next?

That is up to you.

For me, weekends are for creativity: a world beyond anything but the simplest words. Yet my imagination runs wild with textures and colors, stitching and molding fabric into designs. Yesterday I made a pillow for the grad seminar I’m teaching–ROFR 63490/40453: my creative project for class  honors the sensuous fabrics described by Zola in Au Bonheur des dames (The Ladies’ Paradise, the department store novel). I used the wonderful vintage satin that I inherited from a friend’s grandma, and stitched a variety of hues into a hoop-skirt design, added onto a woman’s silhouette, on a black-and-white flannel of fashion plates from the 50s.  Later on, I began piecing together the beginnings of the SPARK quilt, too…

The morning meditation serves as a grounding mechanism. It helps still the Mind. It reminds us that we participate in the seasons. Like the trees, we are always breathing and always in flux—today, the boughs moved only slightly, less than yesterday. One yellow leaf fell to ground.

During the school week, I treasure these 30 minutes as a vacation from work and the busy-ness and complexity of that ever-thinking Mind.  It is a little present of peacefulness, given to me from me.

***

Alan Watts explains the difference nicely between considering life as linear sequence of things or chores to “get done” (the Western mindset), and life as organic event unfolding as it will (the Zen mindset).  He reminds us how Western parts of speech do not account for change with the example of the word “fist.”  How can a fist [noun] suddenly disappear when a person opens his hand? Where does it go?

As Watts writes, “The object miraculously vanishes because an action was disguised by a part of speech usually assigned to a thing! In English the differences between things and actions are clearly, if not always logically, distinguished, but a great number of Chinese words do duty for both nouns and verbs—so that one who thinks in Chinese has little difficulty in seeing that objects are also events, that our world is a collection of processes rather than entities.”*

To shift into creative mode, remember it is work too, even if it is more gratifying for the spirit. As Twyla Tharp says: “It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that’s both painstaking and rewarding.”**

Walk on!

 

*Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, 1^st ed. 1957 (New York: Vintage, 1999) 5.

**Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 9.

how to stop battling your mind

Well, not every day can be a winner. Today’s mood and the dark, stormy weather inspire more sober thoughts on the battle between the Mind and the Body-Mind. (Even Honey Girl seems a little tired and droopy this evening.)

The desire for certainty and safety prompts people to identify their mind with their self-image. It [the mind] cannot let go of itself. It feels that it should not do what it is doing, and that it should do what it is not doing. It feels that it should not be what it is, and be what it isn’t. 

To cling to the mind’s self-image is thus to be in constant contradiction and conflict.  Hence [Zen master] Yün-men’s saying, “In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don’t wobble.”

In the end, the only alternative to a shuddering paralysis is to leap into action regardless of the consequences […] We must enter into it without second thought, without the arrière-pensée of regret, hesitancy, doubt or self-recrimination. Thus when Yün-men was asked, “What is the Tao?” he answered simply, “Walk on!”

— adapted from Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, 1st ed. 1957 (New York: Vintage, 1989), 138-139, 141.

Bon courage! and let’s hope tomorrow brings more fun!