Keen Insights Into the Obvious, Om Mani Padme Hum

Gimme Shelter

October 25, 2010 tinymantras 4 Comments

I like faith.

Religion is full of thistles and barbs and egos making strange decisions in the name of morality. It’s full of rules and politics that seem arbitrary; a sticky web cast over a crowd that gets tangled under your armpits when you try to develop your own relationship with God, the universe, a three-chord pop song or a tree stump.

But faith is something else. I believe in it. I believed in it before I had any idea what my faith was in.

I remember reading Black Elk Speaks in college and being confounded by the conversion of an 19th century Oglala, Lakota Medicine Man to Catholicism. My classmates and I debated over whether he became a champion of a European religion of his own free will, or under threat of our violent tendencies. Surely it was the will of the translator, not the man.

“I think he states it pretty simply,” the professor chimed in once we’d exhausted the discussion. “He watched Catholic people worshipping, and marveled at the peace it brought them. He wanted that for himself and his people.”

We, the privileged students of a private institution of higher learning, satiated with Howard Zinn and Ronald Takaki, were anxious to believe that such a shift in faith could only be a product of oppression. That assumption, I came to realize, is itself a kind of prejudice or -ism, and not one necessarily advocated by the historians I was reading, who were really about setting the record straight and pushing students like us to make sure we questioned the legends we’d been raised with.

But something about that professor’s insight resonated with me. Faith in action looks and feels very different than religion or dogma in action. I feel we are right, even morally obligated, to question the political stances of religious institutions. But personal faith is something else.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately with people whose beliefs about the nature of the universe and the hows and whys of being human couldn’t be more different from my own. But we share the recognition that we can be spiritual together when we leave religion at the door.

For six years, I have been sitting through dharma talks, saying mantras, reading and learning about Buddhism, volunteering for my local center, even trying to see motherhood as a form of practice. But I didn’t think I had committed. I have said here before that I’m not a real Buddhist because I hadn’t taken the Refuge Vow.

It turns out I was. I just decided to formalize it a couple of months back, when I finally took my vow and received the name Karma Dawa Palmo from a teacher that I dearly love.

The Dalai Lama has said that “All major religions carry the same messages. Messages of love, compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, contentment and self-discipline. I have Muslim friends, Christian friends. All have these same values.”

Oddly enough, being around people who sometimes mention other religions by name, even in the rooms where the rules state that they aren’t supposed to, has helped me get to a place where I could make an outward commitment to my own. I find myself able to be close to people who are endeavoring to live a Christlike life as I try to work to awaken my Buddha nature.

I’ve come to realize that part of the reason Buddhism feels right to me has to do with the things it shares with Christianity, even though the differences are often what brings Westerners like myself to explore it. We share a path of faith.

Under the Whale

October 21, 2010 tinymantras 2 Comments

I tempted fate when I was seven.

I looked up at the life-sized replica of a blue whale, diving toward the ground in the Hall of Ocean Life in the American Museum of Natural History. I couldn’t find a logical reason for it to hang there securely, touching the ceiling with only a small portion of its spine. I was certain that if I ventured beneath the lines of its long, wide belly it would fall and I’d be crushed.

But I inched toward it, stretched my leg outward and planted one foot in the line of mortal danger before pulling it right back out again. I filled my lungs with air, took a full step in and dashed back out like my foot was on fire. Then I steeled myself and went under again, maybe two or three steps before my hasty retreat. Finally I held my breath, sprinted beneath the whale’s most daunting section and stood there, not blinking, for the length of a heartbeat.

I can remember doing this a few times as a child on weekend visits to Manhattan. Once I’d mustered the courage to gaze straight up into the metric ton of fiberglass whale jowls, my work there was done. I’d found the courage to face and survive my fabricated deathtrap scenario. I was ready to explore the open sea. Or the third grade.

In my twenties, I bought a big postcard of the AMNH whale on a trip back east to pin to a bulletin board that hung above my desk. A timid alternative weekly reporter who sometimes had to tackle a governor for comment or interview an ex-Neo Nazi, there were many days when I felt myself reliving that ritual. I’d stick my toe into that civic event, linger on the side, then bolt right up to that politician and breathlessly ask my hard question. Although, truth be told, I think George Voinovich reminded me more of a woodchuck than a majestic whale when I stared into his jowls.

A coworker puzzled over the postcard once when he stopped to talk to me. I explained my childhood ritual, and said venturing under the whale seemed like life in our struggling medium. He laughed appreciatively, and began whooping “living under the whale!” over my cubicle wall at me whenever he passed by. This would be, we joked during smoke breaks, the name of my memoir one day.

I’ve faced a few falling whales since I was seven, and not all of them have been a product of my imagination. This year, I feel like I might as well get a 100-foot backpack and carry the thing around. That’s just the kind of year it’s been — relentless in its bad news and losses and lessons. 2010 has some kind of point to make.

But the days of immediate stress and crisis are, in some ways easier than the days you spend in their wake. Still tired, you stand on the perimeter of the room, deciding how, or whether you should even try to face your personal boogeymammal. You start thinking about which screws you loosened in your own life that helped things fall apart. Suddenly the Hall of Ocean Life is the last place you want to visit.

Yesterday I met a friend for coffee and we reminded each other of a piece of advice we’d both been given by our wiser friends: Sometimes you have to let yourself mourn the life you were expecting, the life thought you deserved, in order to move on. In some ways, I feel like I’ve already been doing that for a while, but I’ve signed a one-year commitment to an Al-Anon 12 Step group to keep pushing through that process to a new place.

I used to think the steps were something only alcoholics do, but I no longer see it as a chore or a burden. It’s an unburdening. I feel so lucky that this opportunity to try and build a brick house beneath the whale has come to me.

I don’t know how much more I will say directly about that process here – maybe nothing, maybe a ton – but it felt important to at least say it once. Today would have been my 10th wedding anniversary, an occasion to celebrate under different circumstances. Writing this – putting that first toe back out into the line of mortal peril – is how I’m handling that.

I took my son to the AMNH this summer, where we made it a point to venture into the Hall of Ocean Life, even though he would have happily spent the entire visit without leaving its Rose Center for Earth and Space. I told him about my childhood fears. He stood under all 96 feet of whale, looking up and said “this doesn’t scare me, mom.” I thought about being hurt, but instead I said “I’m glad. I’m not scared of it anymore either.”

He honored me by buying a plush version of the whale as the emblem of the place he loved the most in New York City.

Motherhood

99 problems, but no yogurt ain’t one

October 20, 2010 tinymantras 2 Comments

Giggles erupted from my backseat a few days ago. My son could not stop laughing.

“Mom… do you know what…” (more laughing), “do you know what my friend John said at lunch today?”

I shook my head. “No, but it must have been funny. What did he say?”

“He said: ‘I have a serious problem – there is no yogurt in my lunch.'”

“And you thought that was funny?”

“No yogurt in your lunch is not a problem. If you think that’s a problem, you don’t know a problem,” he said, completely cracking up.

“What kind of thing do you think is a problem?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. Not that. Maybe… no lunch.”

Word.

Under the Whale

Invisible

October 4, 2010 TZT 3 Comments

When I went out East in August, I was beginning to feel lighter.

I felt invisible at BlogHer, but that was mainly because you have to work so hard to be visible at BlogHer, and I’m not much good at doing that on my own behalf. Having my son in tow and my liveblogging shifts, I didn’t have much energy for it. Meanwhile, my email inbox and east coast conversations bustled with unexpected work possibilities — things to consider or do when I got home and Declan started going to school full time. I was looking forward to this hard and glorious autumn full of work and schedules and cool air and time for coffee with friends during the day and possibilities.

But when I came home and started following up, my emails went out like arrows, got stuck in the wall behind the people I was trying to reach and weren’t returned. Or minds were changed. I searched for new possibilities and found some really promising ones, but the same thing happened. It’s been frustrating. The more I try to advance, the more I feel like I’ve been checkmated.

So I’ve been doing invisible things. Like spending time in places I usually drive past with the windows closed. Places that have been invisible to me. I’ve carried household things my mom or friends didn’t want to an apartment complex that used to be another blur on the side of freeway. Now it’s home to a friend who is restarting his life with little more than what people have seen fit to give him.

I’ve sat next to a hospital bed, trying to keep an ear on the medical staff as they tended to a person who told me she loved me the first day we met. Another person who has shown me that you can lose everything, that your whole life can turn over, and you can come out of it better than you were before.

I’ve spent time inside of an urban church so humble you could barely distinguish it from an old used furniture shop. I sat on one of its folding chairs and stared at its plastic purple flowers. Just like the old urban church that is now a Buddhist temple that I frequent, I have found that it’s a place of extraordinary grace.

And there’s so little I can say here beyond that about these things, which are the things I can feel in my chest the most right now, I wonder that I should be writing here anymore at all.

Oh My Ohio

Pimp walking ain’t easy

September 7, 2010 tinymantras 6 Comments

I wish I had gotten a better picture.

He spun one heel on the blinding white floor and started heading in my direction. His left leg went into a deep bend as his right extended forward, like R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural. He was wearing a brown disco hat, double-breasted tan pleather jacket, sunglasses stolen from Erik Estrada’s face and jeans that had been converted into bellbottoms with triangles of corduroy fabric hand-sewn into the seams.

He thrust his jaw forward to the rhythm of the lite funk Muzak piping into the room, and changed up his pimp walk every few steps. At one point, he was doing an exaggerated West Side Story-meets-The Hustle finger point/snap, other times bobbing his head with a small boom box hoisted to his ear. The computer-generated music had absolutely no business inspiring anyone to move that way. Clearly, he wasn’t just anyone.

He zig-zagged through several of the walkways of the department store, fully immersed in its soundtrack and his own universe. A small fleet of people chased him with cell phones, trying to catch a video clip or photographs. Others dove back into the sea of clearance racks with a nervous laugh, raised eyebrow or hushed “ooo-kay!” In a matter of minutes, he made it to the mouth of the mall and walked out of sight with a full upper-body swagger, one arm swinging behind him as he looked deeply right, then deeply left — never straight ahead.

There are plenty of places I go in Columbus where this might have been funny yet not entirely odd, like the Gallery Hop, any number of arts events and festivals, or anywhere on the Ohio State campus. They have all seen some share of guerrilla theater (there can never be enough, in my opinion). But this guy chose to strut through the heart of a Macy’s department store in one of the city’s oldest surviving enclosed malls (Eastland). It’s a dinosaur of a place where the majority of the shoppers are either 16 and willing to buy clothes that have a logo stamped across the rear end, or 66 and looking for suitable pants with plain hindquarters for senior rear ends.

Shucking, jiving, mall pimp-walking dude, I salute you. Your cartoon presence was just what I needed to combat the absurdity of sale shopping and trying on clothes in florescent lighting.

Motherhood

Kindergarten

August 24, 2010 tinymantras 3 Comments

On Children
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
— Kahlil Gibran

I’ve neglected to finish at least seven blog posts in the last few weeks. Posts about BlogHer. About New York City adventures and feeling at home, or not feeling at home. About recovery meetings and Refuge Vows. About work and changes and possibilities. But it was all leading to this week. The week that I haven’t stopped thinking about for months. It sneaked right up on me while I was looking at staircases and feeling subway steam and kissing friends I hadn’t seen in decades on the cheek.

I’ve said the words “he’s going to start Kindergarten” quietly, firmly, loudly, confidently and weakly. I’ve heard “he will be great, and I promise that you will be okay, too,” kindly, from many people who know. I’ve cried almost every time I’ve heard it. I do know this, I know.

I knew it when we arrived on the playground yesterday for orientation. He held my hand, reluctant for a few moments, but he made a friend quickly. When I returned two hours later, it took me several minutes to find him, he was so immersed in his play. His dad and I dragged him from the playground as he told us about fraction puzzles and designated quiet spaces and blocks — more about those two hours than I ever heard about a day at preschool. This morning, in his first half-day of school, he returned to his new buddy’s side immediately in the circle as one of his teachers pulled out a thick magnifying glass and said “it looks like almost everyone is here. Let’s talk about magnification.”

I walked over and kissed him goodbye. He kissed me back happily, whispered “bye,” and fixed his eyes right back on the teacher.

I have a lot of confidence that he is in a good and caring place, but that doesn’t make this any easier.

I am going to miss him so. During every crappy thing that has happened within the past five years, his large-heartedness, his curiosity and his light have been my refuge. He’s changed my perception of the whole universe, literally. He’s helped me see the better parts of people, including myself. It stuns me when I think about the things I was overlooking, or not appreciating, before he arrived. It would be greedy for me not to share him. Like every crying mommy I saw in the hallways and classrooms today, I’m just prayerful that the world will be gentle with his precious, precious heart.

Under the Whale

Endings, beginnings & my first Blogher

August 4, 2010 TZT 4 Comments

It’s a funny thing, this business of living through periods of chaos. A long term illness ends. A person dies. You’re insanely busy getting a funeral together and somehow after that, you think that things are going to get easier, that the natural rhythm of your life will return.

But chaos and I had made peace. I had gotten used to waking up in a house that isn’t my own, bracing my son, my mom or my stepdad in whatever ways I could, then carving out deliberate chunks of time for myself to make sure that I didn’t collapse beneath the constant weight of things. Crisis was this thick brush I could cut through and then look back on. There was this satisfyingly clear path behind me, slivered with grace.

But things got harder when I expected them to get easier. Grief has been itchy, with shooting pains. Sleeping has been harder. I’ve polished off a bottle of Zantac and my right foot has done a lot of tapping in the middle of the night. Another friend died. The idea that I had that I would have a real 40th birthday party for myself later, on a day when we weren’t asking “is he still breathing?” every half an hour didn’t pan out.

But nice things have happened. I’m an honored blogger at BlogHer ’10. On Friday, in New York City, I’ll find out how some visual artist or photographer has interpreted this post. I have found the organizers that I will be working with as a volunteer to be utterly gracious and accommodating to a mom who is traveling on her own with a 5-year-old son. When I went looking for a place to stay, I found a truly generous and kind roommate. I became an aunt for the fifth time to an early but healthy boy on Friday.

And when BlogHer is over, I have plans to reconnect with surrogate sisters, childhood friends, family, college friends and past colleagues. Best of all, I have plans to play with my son in the city I identify with my best childhood adventures. We will climb onto a plane today.

I haven’t had time to fret or obsess over who I’m going to meet at this conference. I’m going wit my heart open to people, not products. And I expect little, other than a mallish form of chaos, and I’ve established that I’m good with chaos.

If you’ll be there and want to say hello, look for me liveblogging at several panels, including ones about building community around a cause; grief, loss tragedy and community on the internet; whether personal blogging hurts your professional brand and transforming online places into art spaces.

I will try and tweet the links to the liveblogs as they happen. I’ll also obviously be at the gala on Friday night. Wave your arms at me if you’re one of those people that isn’t too keen on smalltalk. Hope I find you there.

Notes of a She-Hack, Oh My Ohio

Andyman

July 19, 2010 TZT 5 Comments

I’ve run along the periphery of Columbus music for 16 or 17 years, and sometimes right through its center. I’ve written about it, talked about it, consumed it, even married and had a child with one of its central stewards.

Let me tell you, it’s a world full of dudes. Dudes who play, editorialize about, promote, gloat over or criticize, but ultimately love music. Several of those dudes have only ever referred to me by my initials. Why call someone Tracy when you can call her TZT? I’m okay with that. It makes me feel like an honorary dude.

In this scene, there are jerk dudes, frustrated genius dudes, drunk dudes, well-meaning dudes, lecherous dudes, armchair comedian dudes and awkward dudes. And then there are the kind ones. The ones who are generous of spirit and might play in the realm of dudes, but you quickly discover that they are also good, decent men. They are the ones who don’t run away from you when they hear you lost your job or that your grandfather died. They see you out in the city and they walk toward you. They put an arm around you and acknowledge your loss openly, thoughtfully. They say something encouraging or offer a listening ear. The whole thing may last all of five minutes, and you may not see that person again for weeks, even months, but you walk away from a man like that and you just feel happy that you know him. Happy that you walk in the same circles and will surely see him again soon.

The city lost one of those good men this weekend. A man who gave body-crushing hugs and radiated warmth. The news broke last night that Andy “Andyman” Davis – a veteran of local radio – drowned Saturday while on family vacation, and the more that I sit with that fact, the harder I find it to accept.

I’ve seen a lot of friendships made through music. You find out that someone loves what you love, they relate to what you relate to, and suddenly, you are connected. You may drift apart or even have a falling out, but if that person introduced you to a song or artist that’s continued to keep you company, their dearness is never completely lost. Andy is that kind of friend to countless people that he hasn’t even met because he’s been the face and voice of one of our only local, independent stations for so long.

To me, he was a local media colleague and a social friend – someone I probably saw and shared words with weekly to monthly in my twenties and early thirties at my husband’s clubs, Andy’s bar or some other show in the Columbus universe.

He had been a dad for a while by the time I became a mom. Once I made that transition, I only saw him once or twice a year, but our casual conversations shifted. When I saw him at Comfest last year, I got one of his bear hugs before he held onto my hand and stood with me, looking at my son the same way I do – like something miraculous and joyful. He pulled out the pictures of his two boys and told me about his third baby coming. I don’t remember the words we shared exactly, but that feeling of belonging you get when you relate to another person about music? Change that to two music-bound people talking about being parents and the feeling is amplified by a zillion. I love being a mom. I know he loved being a dad. That’s what has my heart caught today.

I’ve been through a fair bit of grief and loss lately, but please don’t feel the need to console me for this one. There are certainly hundreds, likely thousands, who are feeling this loss. Between social media and the airwaves, you can sense our community grieving. My hope is that every one of us who has felt that warmth from Andy, be it first-hand or through the airwaves, can reflect it back to his family — especially his wife Molly and their three sons — and surround them with it for years to come.

You can find information about a memorial fund that’s been established for them at the CD101 web site.

Future Folklore, Under the Whale

Applesauce

July 12, 2010 TZT 4 Comments

My son and I went to the grocery store today. It had been days.

As we finished up in the self-checkout lane, an older woman behind us didn’t wait for us to finish bagging before she threw her groceries onto the conveyor belt. One package of applesauce cups came flying down to us. Then another. And another. And another. We could tell where our groceries ended and hers began because of the growing barricade of applesauce.

“Sorry,” she said. But she didn’t stop what she was doing so that we could finish bagging. She looked hurried and preoccupied. I flung the rest off our things into bags and got out of her way as quickly as I could. Not that she noticed.

“That was a lot of applesauce,” said Declan. “Do you think maybe her husband is very sick? Or maybe he could be dying.”

When a person can swallow very little, but still needs medication, applesauce is one way to deliver it.

My stepfather passed away the morning after my birthday. Quietly. Peacefully. In my mother’s home, where we are staying. It took three days before hospice came and took the hospital bed. It was six days before we held the the funeral.

Today, I woke up thinking about yesterday’s solar eclipse, wondering if it will really change the world as much as astrologers said that it would. Today is the first average weekday since our little world shifted. Our perspective on just about everything has shifted. Including applesauce.

Under the Whale

40

July 2, 2010 TZT 8 Comments

Growing up, I remember the phone ringing at the butt crack of dawn on every one of my birthdays. Once, as a teenager, I grouched a little at my mother as she came in and nudged me out of sleep to answer it.

“You won’t have this forever,” she warned me, whispering. “You will miss it someday.”

Early this morning I woke up, squeezed my eyes shut and listened for the sound on that phone line – the sound of my grandparents, their voices chipper and full of the rural Ohio upbringing that makes every R sound like a sharp turn while the Gs in ings go awol and yous come out as yas. They always wanted to be the first to wish all of their children and grandchildren Happy Birthday. And mom was right. I miss that. I do.

Today my mom sang to me while Declan held my face and waited to tell me, intently, that on Ni Hao Kai-Lan, the children sometimes travel inside of floaty bubbles. My brother called and sister-in-law called sang while their son punctuated each line with an aggressive “CHA CHA CHA!” Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, I’ve already been flooded with messages and I’m starting this day feeling loved and hopeful.

Two things guaranteed that today would be a quiet celebration. First, the biggest fireworks in the city happen downtown, which would be like asking friends to sit in traffic gridlock if I wanted to, say, meet them for dinner.

And then there’s my stepdad, who has passed the point of speaking or eating or doing much in the way of responding to this realm. We’ve been bracing for the impact of his passing for a couple of years, more intensely in recent months, and round-the-clock for the past several days. I’m well past dreading the idea that he could pass away on my birthday. Instead, if I could take some of the good juju and love I’m receiving for this birthday, I’d pour it into the wish that he finds whatever love he needs within himself in order to let go peacefully.

I’ve decided to honeymoon with 40, and celebrate it with a crowd of people that I like soon because I want to and I actually think I deserve to. But today, this is how I want to do it. I want to be mindful and prayerful through the day and to pretend that things are brilliantly exploding in celebration of my future and my stepdad’s past through the evening. I want to meditate on passages and new beginnings and eat crab legs and be hopeful.

Earlier this week, Dec gave me the best possible birthday gift I could have asked for. He’s been reading individual words for a long time, but worried over trying to read a book by himself and often refused to try. I gently reminded him on Monday night that I still learn a lot of new words, and that lots of things that he thinks are easy, like astronomy, are things that many people would consider hard.

He slept on it, and the next morning, started reading some of the Bob Books at the breakfast table as though he’d been doing it all his life. And as silly as those short, confidence-building books are, it’s one of the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard.

My stepdad’s life has been filled with books and I know that he would be so proud of this. So Declan read “Fun in the Sun,” to his Grandfafa before bed that same day, and I talked out loud about how many books were in the house, how avid a reader his Grandfafa had been. My stepdad tried very hard to say something in response, so I know that he heard and received this gift as well.

So far, 40 is birth and death and new language and hope and memory and a pain in the pit of my stomach. It’s Buddhist mantras wrapped in silver around my thumb as I dive through this zero, sheathed by reminders of our impermanence. It’s a call to live well and let things happen, make things happen, to live by the serenity prayer and be more open, more loving.

This song came up on my iPod on my way to my son’s camp this morning, and it strummed every nerve in my body: Calling All Angels.

Listen, be well, have a beautiful weekend and if you’re into prayer, say one for my stepdad, ok?

Tiny Mantras

Gimme Shelter

Related Posts:

Under the Whale

Related Posts:

99 problems, but no yogurt ain’t one

Related Posts:

Invisible

Related Posts:

Pimp walking ain’t easy

Related Posts:

Kindergarten

Related Posts:

Endings, beginnings & my first Blogher

Related Posts:

Andyman

Related Posts:

Applesauce

Related Posts:

40

Related Posts:

Smooching infinity since 2005.