Cirque du Malaise

I was talking to a friend who needed help editing a paper. She said she was having a hard time getting the wordcount down to fit the requirements of her assignment. I said, hand it over, because if there is one thing I am good at, it’s throwing away words.

Other things I am good at:

1. Cleaning out closets (my own or yours)
2. Giving things away that I actually really like just because someone else said “hey that’s nice”
3. Washing glasses before you were done drinking that thing
4. Not finishing my food
5. Breaking up with boyfriends

Hmm. I am sensing a pattern here. One might say that I have a fear of commitment, but actually, that’s not it. I have a fear of garbage (see #5). I’ve always had a thing about not wanting to accumulate too much stuff. I like to know that the amount of stuff I have is manageable. I live in a very small cottage with hardly any storage. My closet (my one single closet) holds less clothes than most of my friends have in the trunk of their car. When I buy a new pair of shoes, I have to get rid of an old pair.

It’s not that I’m not materialistic. I am. I love things.

It’s more that I’m fickle. I like to think of it as “Buddhist.” I try not to get too attached.

Along those lines, I have an ambivalent relationship with the concept of owning books. On the one hand, I am a writer who gets paid for writing, so it would seem reasonable that I would believe in supporting other writers by buying their books. On the other hand, my extreme aversion to accumulating things (and to excess in general) has led me to a philosophy of sharing books.

I used to collect books as a testament to my readerly accomplishments. For many years I lugged boxes and boxes of books around every time I moved. After about my 4^th cross-country move, I finally took a cold hard look at my collection of books and what it stood for. Did it stand for my convictions about reading and supporting writers? Did it stand for my adoration of storytelling? Or was it simply an ego-based testament to my reading accomplishments?

The truth is, I rarely read a book twice, and if I do, it’s decades later. There are too many books to read and this life is too short. (There are exceptions to this rule, as there are to every rule.) Also, I really like to support the library system.

In the end, I got rid of all my books. Except, you know, my Chronicles of Narnia and my Little Prince and my Maggie B and my Julia Cameron books and a few others. I ran into an old friend yesterday, and we had this very same conversation about books. He said that he always keeps his books, and has shelves and shelves of them. He said: “Books are treasures.”

That they are, my friends. That they are. But for me, they are treasures whose energy I love to pass along.

I’m really into making pottery. I don’t talk about it all that much, partly because it’s hard to talk in words about something that happens purely from the right side of your brain, and partly because, well, it’s my thing, and I don't always feel like sharing it. Sometimes it’s nice to have just one thing that you don’t share with anyone else. I go to a pottery studio once a week and make things. And usually my favorite part of these evenings is putting in my iPhone earbuds, blasting some Chopin, and tuning everything and everyone else out.

Last night though, was different.

I was feeling sad when I got to class. I have terrible jet lag this week, it’s been rainy and glum in Mill Valley, and then, fuck it all, Steve Jobs died yesterday.

I know it’s a little weird to get emotional when a public figure dies. I did not know Steve Jobs and I really do have bigger problems to worry about. But Steve Jobs was that rare public figure whose existence actually did touch my life, personally, and the lives of those around me. He impacted my own life deeply with his brilliant product innovations at Apple, but also with his creative vision, in which way he was truly a role model. THINK DIFFERENT. He was a legend, and he really did the change the world. He definitely changed my own life. Everything I’ve ever done that matters, I did on a Mac.

So when I got to pottery, I was feeling heavy-hearted. I didn’t really want to be there. And I definitely didn’t want to talk to anyone. I wanted to stay home and worry about what’s going to happen to the world without someone like Steve Jobs in it.

I put my headphones on, and I started throwing pots. But then, a funny thing happened.  I somehow ended up talking to the guy next to me — a new face at the studio — and ended up having a really meaningful evening. He was a visiting ceramic artist who gave me a whole bunch of insightful tips about how to throw on the wheel. Some of them were useful practical tips: “Get in, get out.” “Keep your elbows in close.” Others were more philosophical.

I watched him give a demo on how to throw off the hump. This is where you take a huge pile of clay, sloppily center it on the wheel, and then make little objects (bowls, mugs, whatever) from just the very top part of the wedge. In this way, you can pop off a whole bunch of things really fast without having to keep wedging, centering, and cleaning off the wheel. It also gets you away from the rabbit hole of being obsessed with centering the entire lump of clay perfectly, which can be a real time consuming OCD endeavor.

My favorite part of watching him throw off the hump was that he kept spinning these beautiful creative pieces, cutting them off the hump of clay, holding them up for everyone to admire, and then smashing them on the floor.

He said: “pottery is not precious.”

And this is what I love about pottery. You can’t take it too seriously. It’s a transient creative format. You can focus everything you’ve got on the most brilliant piece of artwork you have in you, but there are a million things that can go wrong. Even if you manage to throw it successfully, cut it off the wheel without warping it, carry it to the shelf without tripping, and trim it without fucking it up, you never know what’s going to happen in the bisque fire, or the subsequent glazing fire, or when some silly person picks it up to admire it and then accidently drops it. There might be an earthquake, or you might put a glaze on it that ends up sucking. You might get it home, only to have it break in the dishwasher, or slide off the edge of the table, or maybe the handle just breaks off one day. The thing is broken before it was ever born.

You’ve all probably heard the fable about Achaan Chaa, the Buddhist master, who loved his tea cup. His disciple said, how can you teach us about non-attachment when I see you always use that same mug? In the words of Mark Epstein:

“You see this goblet? For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”

Pottery is all about nonattachment and it’s also about getting over yourself.

I left the studio in a great mood last night, grateful for a few lessons learned. And then I came home and watched one of the many Steve Jobs videos circulating around the Internet in memorium, the one in which he said:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

When I write articles for Elephant Journal I am often humbled by the agreeable comments from readers who are able to phrase things far more precisely and eloquently than I managed to. (I am also often appalled by the confrontational nature of anonymous commenting, but that’s a different story.)

This week, I posted an article called “Mercury in Retrograde is not a good excuse for you to be an asshole to me.” It's about theism, kind of.

I quoted the marvelous Pema Chodron, and in return, my Elephant colleague Scott Robinson (who goes by the “nom-de-blog” Yesu Das — and yes, I wish I came up with that cheeky play on words) posted two oldie but goodie quotes that I have to share.

The first is from a Somerset Maugham book that rocked my adolescence: Of Human Bondage (yup, I was a book nerd with a flair for dramatic titles, even then):

Yesu Das’s setup: “…in which Phillip, the semi-autobiographical protagonist, met a dissipated and largely unpublished poet in Paris named Cronshaw, who gave Phillip a remnant of a Persian carpet. The carpet, Cronshaw told him, held in it the answer to the meaning of life. Phillip kept the remnant for many years, through repeated failures and almost relentless suffering, as he tried to find what the world called “success” in life. One day, long after the carpet fragment had been lost, Phillip realized, with the abruptness of revelation, the truth that had eluded him for so many years: life does not have any meaning.”

“His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty. What he did or left undone did not matter. Failure was unimportant and success amounted to nothing…(T)hat was why Cronshaw, he imagined, had given him the Persian rug. As the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the pleasure of his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life… Out of the manifold events of his life, his deeds, his feelings, his thoughts, he might make a design, regular, elaborate, complicated, or beautiful… In the vast warp of life (a river arising from no spring and flowing endlessly to no sea), with the background to his fancies that there was no meaning and that nothing was important, a man might get a personal satisfaction in selecting the various strands that worked out the pattern. There was one pattern, the most obvious, perfect, and beautiful, in which a man was born, grew to manhood, married, produced children, toiled for his bread, and died; but there were others, intricate and wonderful, in which happiness did not enter and in which success was not attempted; and in them might be discovered a more troubling grace… His life had seemed horrible when it was measured by its happiness, but now he seemed to gather strength as he realized that it might be measured by something else. Happiness mattered as little as pain. They came in, both of them, as all the other details of his life came in, to the elaboration of the design.”

And then there’s good ol’ Billy Shakespeare, from King Lear:

“his is the excellent foppery of the world, that,

when we are sick in fortune,—often the surfeit

of our own behavior,—we make guilty of our

disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as

if we were villains by necessity; fools by

heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and

treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,

liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of

planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,

by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion

of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish

disposition to the charge of a star!"

Nice, right? Thanks, Yesu.

The man has taste. You can read a blog he wrote about theism here.

ARTIST: Vanessa Fiola

I recently I went up to Spirit Rock Retreat Center for a daylong mindfulness workshop called “Wisdom 2.0.”

It was hosted by Soren Gordhamer, founder of the annual conference of the same name, and Will Kabat-Zinn, son of Jon “Wherever You Go, There You Are” Kabat-Zinn. I was excited about this daylong because technology and spirituality are two major interests of mine, and the possibilities for discussion seemed endless.

At places like Spirit Rock and events like mindfulness daylongs, it goes without saying that electronic devices are generally frowned upon. There is ubiquitous pressure to be device-free at “spiritual” events. If you even glance at your iPhone during such a thing, people will judge you as an under-present douchebag. It’s a faux pas punishable by social annihilation to bring a cell phone into a yoga studio. We’ve all hated on that one person who dared to bring her Crackberry into class with her and lay it on her mat while practicing her day’s yoga. She could be a doctor on call for brain surgery for all we know, but in yoga, all that matters is the sanctity of the $20 yoga moment, right? Hmm.

Read the rest on Elephant Journal...

I once had a teacher tell me that my extreme neurotic tendencies were due to my incredible imagination. I have long held on to this extremely optimistic interpretation.

Lately I’ve been relying on my imagination to keep my spirits up when things get tough. For instance, when I was feeling panicky about entering into my first ever silent retreat a few weeks ago, I decided to pretend instead that it was the 1800s and I had TB and had to go to a sanitorium for some life-saving R&R. This tragic make-believe story cheered me up immensely and made me feel like a heroine in an Emily Bronte novel.

While I was in the retreat (which actually did feel kind of like a recuperative mission for my mind and body) I variously entertained myself by pretending I was at fat camp (due to the delicious but extremely low-cal meals), an asylum (also not that far off base), and prison camp (that was just for added dramatic flair).

Now that I’m back in action and spending a lot of time onsite on the 22nd floor of an office building downtown—one that I’m positive was built before the invention of the concept of earthquake-proofing—I truly rely on my imagination to keep my spirits up. Today, when I found myself shivering under a green knit shawl while eating spoonfuls of cold, congealed steel-cut oatmeal and being bathed by fluorescent light, I decided to pretend that I was a poor Irish peasant during the potato blight and that the oatmeal was my one and only meal of the day. That thought gave me such comfort. There’s nothing like some good old fashioned romanticized drear to lift flagging spirits.

My imagination has a life of its own. When I’m not paying attention, it can swiftly hijack my thoughts, not to mention the destructive power it has over my meditation practice. I know it’s just trying to help—bless it’s heart—but sometimes I have to gently remind it that it’s not invited to sit down with me on the zafu.

My creative mind is particularly insidious when I’m asleep. I have fucked up dreams. Luckily, during this last silent retreat, I was reminded once again that I am not my mind. So when I wake up from a nightmare, I can more easily shake it off and be like, good one, mind, but I know you don’t control me.

My cats do.

When I was growing up, my single mom was fond of the riveting car game “let’s see who can be quiet the longest.” My brother and I were very competitive about this game, but because I was older and therefore had more patience, I usually won. That early training—along with a childhood spent playing invisible at my dad’s weekend 70s parties and burying myself in books most of the time—gave me an advantage when I recently attended my first weeklong silent retreat at Spirit Rock.

Unfortunately, it turns out that a mindfulness meditation retreat is not a quiet contest. Nor is it a place for competition—even with oneself. On some level, I already knew these things going in. I’ve dabbled with vipassana long enough (and spent enough years in the yoga world) to have had most of the competitiveness conditioned out of me. Truth is, I was never very competitive to begin with (except at spelling bees and Scrabble).

Read on at Elephant Journal...

My new animal totem, the almighty sloth

Way back in February, after my first night of my dharma course at Spirit Rock, I wrote a post about the five hindrances to meditation and how Sloth & Torpor are my particular nemeses. That, sadly, has not changed. Sloth & Torpor (and just plain ugly laziness) continue to hijack my sitting practice on a constant basis.

I can be running around like a crazy anxious freak all day, and the moment I sit in the meditation position, I basically fall over. I know what you're thinking—that I run myself too ragged and of course I fall asleep when I calm down. But no, that's not it. Even on the most absurdly indulgent amount of sleep, an adequate but not gratuitous amount of caffeine, and with all the stars and my monthly hormones aligned, it still happens. It happens regardless of time of day, day of week, circumstance, or situation. I try to meditate; I fall asleep.

It's gotten to the point where the mere suggestion of meditation makes me sleepy. This last week as I was making the long, serene drive up to Woodacre for my evening class, I was heavy lidded at the wheel. I'm pretty sure I was actually asleep for some parts of that drive.

Of course, the moment I leave class and get back in my car, I am wide the freak awake.

I have asked a few of my meditation teachers what they make of it. This is what Frank Berliner had to say: "You're probably hiding from something."

Awesome, now my own mind is hiding something from me? That's just terrific. I feel like I'm going to end up on Oprah one of these days, telling the whole world that I suddenly remembered some horrible event from my childhood that my subconscious has been suppressing all these years, and suing my parents to within an inch of their life.

Mark Coleman calls this aversion "the pleasant coma." And that's the problem. It actually is quite pleasant. It's the same thing that happens to me when I get acupuncture or a massage. Utter and instant slumber. I have been known to sleep through more than one power yoga class.

The problem is, I feel gypped that I don't get to experience the other hindrances. Just once, I want to spend my meditation session in a state of aversion, or craving, or doubt. Sloth & Torpor is kidnapping my mind.

Or maybe I just have a mild and lingering case of mono?

Talking on the phone gives me panic attacks. Luckily for me, I don't get cell phone reception at my house, and since I work from home and am basically a shut-in, that works out nicely.

Oddly enough, I do get text messages at my house. Apparently God wants me to type out all of my communication (which is obviously fine by me). Unfortunately, my friends and clients aren't always on board with God.

I get a lot of flack about the phone thing. Some say, "It's so much easier just to pick up the phone than to try to type out a message." Hmm. Easier for YOU maybe. I can type faster than I can think. On the other hand—and maybe this is a holdover from the days of my childhood spent endlessly dialing a rotary phone—I don't particularly find phone conversations to be quick.

First of all, you always have to do the formalities thing on the phone. That bugs.

And I never know when it's my turn to talk. Maybe it's PTSD from whatshisface (my last boyfriend) who would threaten to have me excommunicated every time he perceived himself as being interrupted by me, but I am always anxious about interjecting my words into the conversation.

I tried an experiment for a while where every time I talked to someone on the phone, I would wait patiently for my turn to talk. I would not interrupt anyone, under any circumstances, ever. But what I found, with some people, was that they were so uncomfortable with silence in a conversation that they would simply keep talking until interrupted, keeping us in this endless loop of being on the phone basically forever while they repeated things over and over again and came up with all sorts of imaginative filler statements.

And then I started to feel like I wasn't being patient and mindful, but in fact I was being cruel by letting this poor person spin out to depths of anxiety that could easily have been placated by my compassionate interjection.

Also, when you throw in the whole Right Speech factor, it's much easier to pause and think about the skillful way to say things in an email versus over the phone.

Maybe it's the misanthropic writer in me, but if I could have all of my interpersonal communication take place electronically I would be pretty happy.

My adorable little murderer, licking her chops

It’s no secret that I am obsessed with my cats, Budapest and Luka. Sometimes, though, it can be a little trying dealing with those little murderous effers.

Budapest’s main pastime and dharma in this life is to kill things. I don’t begrudge her this and realize that nature is cruel and that it’s a cat’s God-given instinct to hunt. I am secretly proud of her every time she brings home a tiny warm dead body to show off. Budapest had a mysterious and unquestionably challenging childhood and I find it touching that she has managed to not just thrive but that she has taken to cold-blooded murder so cunningly. It warms my heart that she has found her path.

However, I am also an aspiring Buddhist with my own path and so have an obligation to protect life whenever possible (or at least, convenient). So, when the baby bird she brought home today looked to still have its wits about it, I felt compelled to pry it out of Buda’s jaw.

That was only the beginning. Once freed from the clutches of certain death, the baby bird dropped to the kitchen floor, panicked, and ran under the stove. So then I had a quandary, because I certainly wasn't prepared to leave the baby bird to die a slow, lonely, terrified death under my stove. I am partial to "freeze" in fight/flight/freeze situations, but after I got that over with and looked around, I realized that no one else was going to deal with the situation, so once again, I was on my own.

I quickly inserted fresh batteries into my headlamp so I could see under the stove (I had a premonition when I finally bought them at Home Depot the other day), found a long stick in the back yard, and went about gingerly compelling little tiny fragile bird out from under the stove with the stick. Mission eventually accomplished, but of course as soon as it hit daylight it panicked again and ran behind my fireplace, with both cats in full pursuit.

Jesus Christ. I won't bore you with the rest of the sloppy rescue scenario details, but I did eventually manage to get the bird in a box, after a few more cat-jaw-prying incidents. I took a look. It was in shock, breathing rapidly, eyes wide open, but didn't seem to have a broken neck and no tooth-mark stab wounds. It wasn't moving, but it appeared lucid. So, now what?

After a series of panicky space-outs and pointless phone calls to local vets, I eventually ended up on the line with the after-hours dude on call at the Humane Society. He offered to swing by and pick it up. So, I took my box full of freaked out baby bird onto the front steps to wait for him (it's kinda tricky finding my house and I didn't want to waste a moment). I ended up sitting, and waiting, and sitting... for quite a while. The whole time, I stared intently at the baby bird. Monitored it's breathing with my eyes. Made sure it was still coherent. Watched its eyeballs track my movement. I felt confident that it was gonna be okay.

Turns out it was more than okay. The moment the Humane Society truck pulled up and I turned my attention off the baby bird for one split second, it suddenly jumped up and out of the box and sprinted off into the bushes. Leaving me with an empty box and a lot of explaining to do.

At first Humane Society Dude eyed me skeptically as if I just made the whole story up for a little attention on a gloomy Monday night in Mill Valley. He informed me that he had a wounded fawn to save up the road. "For God's sake!" I said, "Go to the fawn! Why did you come here first?"

Just then, we heard an unbirdly loud chirp from the bushes to my right. H.S.D. said, "Does that sound like your bird?" Now, keep in mind that I had known this bird for an extremely traumatic and brief half hour and that I had heard it chirp only once in a blind panic as it raced around my kitchen trying to escape. Also keep in mind that my cottage is surrounded by birds that chirp nonstop at all hours of daylight and at every possible pitch. So, for me to discern if that particular chirp was "my bird's chirp" was kind of a tall order.

Sure enough though, it was. Because a moment later, we glimpsed said bird screaming through the underbrush. So, H.S.D. decided to believe me that there was, in fact, a bird to begin with. Which was nice. But, unfortunately, it wasn't nice enough to actually help us find the bird and help it. At this point, of course, I was starting to wonder if my maniacal fixation on "helping" it was actually any help at all.

So, H.S.D. took off to deal with the injured fawn, and I retreated back into my cottage to chastise my cats for being such bloodthirsty sociopaths. They gave me blank stares.

I have no idea what the moral of this story is, except that obviously I should just put the Humane Society on speed dial, at this point.

Last week in my dharma class we were asked to pick one of the Five Precepts. Loosely stated, they are:

• Refraining from destroying living creatures
• Refraining from taking that which is not given freely
• Refraining from sexual misconduct
• Refraining from incorrect speech
• Refraining from intoxicating drinks and drugs which lead to carelessness

They are kind of like a hippie version of the Ten Commandments, and also very similar to the Yamas and Niyamas of yoga.

The idea was to choose one that makes the most sense for you, and focus on "trying" to follow it for a week. (Keyword: try)

I chose "Refraining from incorrect speech."

The interesting thing about this experiment has been sorting through my intentions around the way I talk and the things I choose to say. For instance, I don't necessarily think that swearing is grounds for losing points. In fact, I've always been a big fan of swearing for it's colorful, dramatic flair, and I definitely don't want to stop. Sometimes I try to swear less around small children, but for the most part I admire and respect women who swear candidly and with fervor.

And lying is not something I struggle with or find myself doing very often. Except... here's the tough part... those "little white lies" we use to abstain from hurting someone's feelings. We also use them (at least, I can only speak for myself) to avoid confrontation. This is a big one for me.

I loathe and abhor confrontation. I get shaky just thinking about the possibility. So if someone asks me something entirely innocuous, point blank, like, "Do you want to go to come over and hang out with me?" I have a very hard time just saying, "No, thanks, I'd rather not." Instead, I say something like, "Wow I really, really wish I could but I have to go to this awful dinner party that I really wish I didn't have to go to." And then the person inevitably says something like, "You poor thing! Well, if you get out of your dinner party, please come over." And then I feel like a total snob for bagging on a dinner party that I actually do really want to go to or, even worse, having made up the dinner party in the first place.

So this week, I am trying to refrain from saying things that are untrue, mean, hurtful, bitchy, or meaninglessly negative. (Keyword: meaningless)

I consulted with my team of advisors, and they agreed to one exception:

I can say whatever I want, if it's funny. Because if it's funny, then, it becomes art. And art trumps Buddhism every time.