Meditative Prose
Saturday, 15 December 2007
The Nest — Photo by Sarah
When I moved to Vermont with Sarah about a year and a half ago, we didn’t have jobs, a place to live, or a bed. It was as close to starting from scratch that we are likely to come in our entire lives. Since then, we’ve been involved in the slow process of turning the space we inhabit into something like a home. The other night, we couldn’t help but look slowly around this room, with its plain white walls and hardwood floors, and appreciate what it has become. We framed shots with our hands, and everywhere we looked was beauty, not planned but not random, a kind of cosmic feng shui that just happened as a result of living and loving in this space for more than a year.
On the window sill is an empty blue sake bottle, from when my brother and his girlfriend came to visit, and we drank the clear, almost tasteless, rice wine and played basketball in the dark. One window is bare, but the other is covered by a bamboo blind, which I’ve always loved for its simplicity. It came with the house, as did the white paper lantern overhead that glows like the full moon when the bulb is lit. There’s a hand-dyed silk scarf hanging on the wall, yellow, orange, and pink, a gift from a friend. There’s a bookshelf overflowing, a silent red-brown djembe, and yoga mats resting in the corner. On the floor is the new rag rug that matches the brown hand-made quilt on our bed.
The Nest, Part Deux — Photo by Sarah
And there are the plants: a red ivy begonia on the small white dresser, fighting winter and blooming still; a tiny jade, a cutting of another one — a gift that outgrew its small hand-made pot; a big aloe, raising its spiny arms to the light, good for my dry skin during the winter; and a new little Christmas cactus, tipped with hot pink buds that are just about ready to open. The plants make me really happy. Sarah and I are learning to listen to them, to see what they need and respond. Just having them here makes this room feel like my home in Pennsylvania, where my mom kept plants on every windowsill and would sometimes ask me to water each one.
I don’t know what we are making: maybe it is a space like a mirror, reflecting every part of us, from the lowliest & messiest to the holiest. Maybe it is just a nest. Whatever it is, it is beyond our conscious control — a humble work of art, taking shape as the days pass by, changing as we change.
Saturday, 8 December 2007
Christ, you know it ain’t easy. You know how hard it can be.
The way things are going, they’re gonna crucify me.
— John Lennon, “The Ballad of John and Yoko”
Twenty-seven years ago today, John Lennon was assassinated by an agent of the U.S. government. The establishment was so threatened by he who perfectly embodied the message of Jesus, so threatened by the possibility of an awakened society, that they finally had to resort to taking his life just to keep us asleep. He was the most dangerous man in America specifically because he refused to be violent, and for that they killed him. The same old story, over and over again.
I don’t really know what to say except this: Peace to you, John, wherever you are. We could sure use your help right now.
Saturday, 8 December 2007
I’m not very good at yoga, but how beautiful that it doesn’t matter. You can practice alone or in a large group, but it is always your practice, and the point is to know your body & your breath. The challenge is to breathe mindfully through each pose, to feel the stretch at that moment, the pleasure & pain of it, and not live in the past. You use and appreciate your body completely. At the end, you surrender and for ten minutes you are a corpse. When you rise from the dead, you are grateful for life, and you look around at your neighbors — people, plants, trees, billowing cumulus, bright snow falling — and relate to them: Namasté.
This morning one woman started crying.
Wednesday, 5 December 2007
Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
— Henry Thoreau
No website is an island, entire of itself — and neither is this one. I realize now that one of the reasons my previous websites failed is that I treated both my life and my space on the web as somehow wholly separate from other people’s lives and other websites. I wanted a desert island website where I could write sad, beautiful prose in the sand about my lonely life on the island Ego. Now, a little older and wiser, I want a website that reflects the infinite extent of my relations: to culture, through books and art and music; to other humans, through sharing ideas and visions; and to the rest of the internet, by linking to other sites and allowing my content to be freely redistributed.
What that means to you, dear reader, is that you can expect me to quote and link to smart people frequently, to post images (paintings, photos, or drawings by myself or others) alongside entries, and to extol the virtues of important things that did not originate in my own head (like yoga, or free software, or Vermont secession). You can also expect me to remain meditative at times, observing the world and myself, and treating this site more like a journal than a blog.
I used to think those two modes — introverted and extroverted — were incompatible, but now they seem like two sides of the same coin. Both are necessary to my continued well-being, and this website will reflect that balance.
