“It is one of the best traits of people that they love where they pity. And this is more true of women than of men. So they get themselves drawn into situations that are harmful to them. I have seen this happen many, many times. I have always had trouble finding a way to caution against it. Since it is, in a way, Christlike.”

“[T]hat was the first time in my life I ever felt that what I thought I was amounted to the clothes on my back and the books on my shelves and the calendar I kept full of obligations waiting and obligations fulfilled. As I have said, it was a foretaste of death, at least of dying. And why should that seem strange? ‘Passion’ is the word we use, after all.”

– Gilead

“Finally, let it be said that to surrender oneself to the will of others (as often happens with lovers and mystics) and so to find oneself at last rid of selfish pleasures, interests, and personal complexes, is in no wise a joyless act, nor one lacking in grandeur.” — Jean Paulhan, “Happiness in Slavery” (intro to Pauline Réage’s Story of O).

“There the conviction was suddenly borne in me that Christianity is preminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.” — Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest

“Since Christ demonstrated his love by doing such amazing things and suffering so radically for us, how can your mere words be enough to please the Beloved? Do you know what it means to be truly spiritual? It means to become a slave to God. We are branded with the sign of the cross. It is the token we have given him our freedom. Now he can offer us as servants to the whole world, as he offers himself. This does us no harm. In fact, he is granting us a great boon.

Until we surrender to this divine slavery, we cannot expect to make much progress.” — St. Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle

“[E]very time I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.” — Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest

“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body. ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.” — Ephesians 5: 21-33

“[He says of me,] ’she sees the value both in sadness and in happiness, and revels in intensity and loss of control.’

I realize … that the way I view control is very central. I gain all my power, all my pleasure, from my ability to give myself over to things. [It is] a measure of trust … it is somehow so very simple … I feel that by giving up control I am gaining something so much more valuable … Simply said, I am a receiver, yet in receiving whatever … is thrown at me, I seem to add as much to the meaning of the gift as the giver. In a way, I am giving a gift as well… ” — me, age 18.

The teacher said follow your breath but I couldn’t. I was barely breathing. I didn’t need to breathe because I didn’t have any skin and all the air was already inside. There was nothing between me and the air. It was inside of me and outside of me and in the other people sitting, all at the same time. I didn’t need to do anything about that.

I sat there and tried not to think of how I could not feel my hands or my arms or my legs or anything at all except the air. Then I started to get dizzy.”

I wrote this five years ago. Sitting is still basically the same for me, but I think, at the time, this was a rare experience, and more disorienting (the last bit), and thus merited recording. It’s so strange, how everything always was.

Happenings in my so-called everyday life of late:
- After a couple weeks of visiting family in Kentucky and Georgia, I moved to Portland on June 18th.
- I stayed at a friend’s place in Sellwood-Moreland (a lovely neighborhood full of antique stores, neighbors with rabbits and chickens, and other magic in further-SE Portland) until July 1.
- I moved into the house I’m currently inhabiting, with three other women and five dogs, in North Portland, about a block away from Peninsula Park, which boasts the oldest rose garden in the Rose City, dating back to 1913.

In two months post-NYC, I have:
- nearly stopped calling the house “my apartment”
- recreated several of my mother’s Southern dishes, including pimento cheese, which no one here has heard of, in the ample kitchen
- planted my own herbs in pots
- gotten used to having at least one dog in my presence at all times
- gone back to New York once, which felt like entering the Gates of Mordor

Things to love about Portland include:
- the Saturday Market
- the many food carts with really tasty fare under $5
- the short city blocks downtown that make it feel like the Village with fewer people
- the way the light falls
- the fact that everyone recycles and most everyone cycles (I rode a bike for the first time since I was 12 recently)
- the gigantic KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD mural on the wall of a building near Voodoo Doughnut
- Powell’s Books
- the smaller alternative bookstores, Reading Frenzy and Counter Media, right down the block, where you can find everything from ‘zines to Guido Crepax’s comics
- the couple I saw riding a motorcycle downtown with their white fluffy dog onboard, wearing goggles
- the fantastic new cuisine, such as that found at 50 Plates, which would cost 3x more in NYC

Things that are hard to find even in Paradise:
- a job
- health insurance

Portland has practically no flaws other than its economy. I can personally attest to the fact that, though the recession is making it difficult to find work anywhere these days, finding work in Portland is nearly impossible. It looks like I may finally achieve my life-long dream of becoming a starving artist!

I am paying more for COBRA than I am for rent. Considering that my monthly income is pretty much non-existant, this is impossible to sustain. BlueCross of Oregon rejected me for “pre-existing conditions” despite the fact that I am 26 years old, completely healthy, take no medications and see no doctors except for routine exams. The Oregon Health Plan rejected me because I’m eligible for COBRA. I’m still applying with other providers, but, the likelihood that I’m going to wind up uninsured unless I find another full-time job with benefits seems fairly high. This is ridiculous; health care in this country right now is disgraceful.

Some books I have recently procured (mostly for free or dirt cheap, I swear):
- Inner Experience by Georges Bataille
- Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction
- Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
- Our Bodies, Ourselves
- Hateship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (stories) by Alice Munro
- The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos
- The Raft is Not the Shore by Thich Nhat Hanh
- Simone Weil: An Anthology
- Wallpaper* City Guide: Vienna

Speaking of cities:
- Ellen, my best girl-crush from Statesboro High, whom I tried to my darnedest to seduce (and apparently succeeded, considering we’re still friends) via long rambling letters exchanged in AP American History, and who, in her utter coolness, went off to college in Dublin, and then married an Irishman, and then moved to Cambridge (England, not Massachusetts) while he got his Ph.D. in mathematics, just moved again to Hannover, Germany. I am going to visit her and her husband there in September. We are going to try to make an excursion to Vienna, which has been my favorite city (from afar) ever since Jennifer famously said that if I were a city, I’d be Vienna, over ten years ago.
- After much deliberation, I have finally come to the conclusion that, of all the places I’ve been, the place that most closely resembles Portland is Amsterdam, by a mile. Nowhere in the States really compares.
- I am going to be in New York next week.

The other night, I was talking to an online friend about Deadliest Catch, which is a reality show about Alaskan crab fishermen on the Discovery Channel. I was addicted to this show last winter and no one understood. She said she had the same reaction from her friends, but it usually helped them understand why she watched it when she explained that it is called Deadliest Catch because people actually die.

Then I started telling her about whaling, which was even deadlier. Did you know that the harpoon is just for attaching the gigantic whale to a tiny boat so the whale can drag it around the open seas until it gets tired or kills everyone onboard? Did you know that they took young boys onboard whaling ships for the purpose of crawling into the dead whale’s head to retrieve the sperm oil? Did you know about the beautiful things these men made out of whale teeth and whale bones to bring back to their wives after five years away?

I have been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre, and although I do not really understand their relationship, I can appreciate how she sometimes signs them “I love you — with a hint of tragedy.”

Last weekend, a small plane carrying two adults and a child collided with a helicopter carrying 6 tourists and crashed into the Hudson River, killing everyone on both aircraft. Last month, I flew from New Jersey to Nantucket and back, with my boyfriend and his flight instructor, in a tiny Cessna 172. We flew over the Hudson, alongside Manhattan, and it was one of the most amazing, breathtaking sights I have ever seen. Travel by small plane is 8 times more dangerous than driving, and 150 times more dangerous than travel by commercial jet. I know people who have friends who have died this way; I know of people who have been severely burned. I went anyway, and I loved it.

I have often wondered about the true value of what I call “peak experiences.” There are certain experiences I have had that have dramatically changed the way I understand everything else in my life. These experiences have altered the way I see. I am not just talking about adventurous outings like flying, and travel in general, which have changed my perception of the world and made me feel incredibly free, but also about more subtle things, emotional and spiritual experiences. Clinging to such experiences is very risky, and is often the first step in the process of getting stuck. For instance, sometimes I worry that the heights to which I sometimes travel, speaking metaphorically, put a damper on the everyday, though I know that truly there is no separation between the sublime and the ordinary.

Another way of putting it would be to say that there is no ordinary world. Even being stuck, even so-called samsara, even sin itself, is included in divine reality. Why do we choose to believe an illusion?

But, still, would it be better to forsake the highs if that somehow dampened the pain of the lows? I have been pondering this question for what seems like my entire life, and I still find myself returning to it, even though it is probably ultimately the wrong question to ask. I have more or less concluded that, no, it would not be better, and furthermore, pain should not necessarily be avoided.

I am not sure how this intersects with questions of danger and risk-taking, which are somewhat different. But I’ll end there, because Royal, the dog, just jumped out the window, so I need to go let him in the back door.

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does is hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Also, Meryl Streep reads the Velveteen Rabbit.

One of the issues I’ve been looking into is related to my moods, or modes of being.

I am strongly affected by light levels and the weather, and have a “sad” mood/mode that roughly corresponds to fall/winter, and a “happy” mood/mode that roughly corresponds to spring/summer. I tend to this interpret this by saying that in the summer, I’m “normal,” and in the winter I’m depressed and anxious.

The symptoms of depression and anxiety are well-known, and for those of you who have never had to deal with a serious bout of depression, I can assure you that it is worse than most things you can imagine. I went through a particularly rough patch this past winter, and literally felt so paralyzed by my negative emotions and thought patterns that I thought I couldn’t accomplish anything (this accomplishment-focus is in itself another mistake/habit). I am normally an “overachiever,” so this feeling unable to achieve is really torturous for me and makes me feel all-the-more useless and worthless when I’m in this state.

One of the most obvious symptoms of anxiety, as it manifests itself for me, is this little “voice” (for lack of a better term, “storyline” might be more appropriate) in my head giving me a running narration of what a huge disaster my life is. Practically all I see are disasters of the past, disasters of the present, and especially disasters to come. The “voice” also tends to tell me everything I’m doing wrong, what a failure I am as a human being, etc. Obviously, this voice is a total pain, a complete distortion of reality, and a hindrance to my living my life in a way that serves myself and others. And, because it is also making me miserable, my desire to silence it is very great! So I tend to be pretty good about my meditation practice in the winter, because practice is very helpful for uncovering storylines like this and seeing them for what they really are, which is necessary to letting go of them.

I went on my first retreat with Steven last November, when I was right in the midst of this. I would have to sit there for hours at a time with nothing to deal with but this voice, which was very hard, and I spent a lot of time crying about how I felt like I had lost my entire connection with the Original Nature (aka God, THIS, Tao, etc) and was totally doomed (which is impossible), but that retreat definitely helped get me through the next few months. And I also had a few other insights that stuck with me, in particular the realization that trying to be still while meditating was a mistake/problem.

And somehow, spring finally showed up again, and a lot of “good” things happened in my life, and the anxious voice went away.

Enter the “happy” phase. Obviously, being happy is pretty great. It’s hard to see that there could be any problem whatsoever with being happy. We tend to think the happier we are, the better, end of story. And I’m definitely not knocking happiness. Thanks to combination of factors, including Portland and a new romantic relationship, I’ve been happier in recent months than I’ve been in several years.

But then my friends started pointing out mistakes I was making. Big mistakes, cases where I was greatly overestimating my own understanding of particular situations, and also cases where I was acting insensitive and self-involved in ways I never usually do, not even in the depths of depression (granted, I’m self-involved in different ways then). All of these things stem from over-confidence, which is not a problem I ever experience in my “sad” mode, so it really took me some time (and some persistent warnings) to realize what I was doing to any extent.

It’s a lot harder to see the need for regular practice when I’m happy. I mean, gosh, when I’m all chipper and excited, I tend to want to be out doing things and talking to people, not sitting on a cushion alone in my room. I’m also less likely to be able to separate what I want from what I need.

But it was very clear, from the very first practice session of this retreat, that the little voice doesn’t usually just shut up when I’m happy at all. It just tells me things I want to hear, instead of things I don’t want to hear. This is a lot less bothersome in everyday life than the anxiety version, which tells me what a wreck I’ve made of everything, but, in a meditation context, listening to your ego telling itself how fantastic it is is really horrifying.

The personal greatness story is no less annoying than the personal failure story. And it’s also quite obviously a distortion of reality, no less a distortion than the idea that I’m a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad person. Both that and the idea that I am somehow very, very “special” and “gifted” are based on many, many false assumptions, the most obvious of them being that I am who I think I am.

This story does not help me. Not at all. It leads to many mistakes. But beating myself up for experiencing the voice doesn’t silence it either, it just digs me deeper into the self-consciousness rut. There is no way of exerting effort to try to make it stop that does the trick. So what now?

A few brief notes from Steven’s talks:

Acceptance. Stop trying. Don’t improve. Participate in reality, which is unexceptioned. Have your life. Understanding is not your problem. Stop.

Thanks.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Today I took my fourth yoga class in under a week, and my own body already remembers what it feels like to have a regular asana practice. I sometimes think the “yogini me” was a former self, but if I go to a few classes in a row, I can feel that those months in 2003 and 2004 when I was working at Tranquil Space and taking free yoga classes nearly every day will be with me forever. It’s funny how little I knew my body in some ways then; I had never seen the x-ray of my spine with its 22 degree curve, but I could balance on my forearms in the middle of the room.

I’m living in a beautiful house with three women and five dogs and a gigantic rose garden two blocks away. This week, I planted herbs in pots, and I’ve been cooking at home for the first time since I lived with a boyfriend when I was 19. It’s amazing. I get up at 7:30 or 8 a.m., even though I don’t have anywhere to be, and I make my own coffee and cheese grits.

I ate out 3 meals a day in New York, for years. It wasn’t just because I was lazy and the groceries were so expensive, both of which were true; it was also because I didn’t have time. I was so busy I didn’t have time to cook a meal (or take a yoga class, for that matter). I complained about how busy I was as much as the next New Yorker, but I didn’t really realize how busy I was until I left. I was so used to running everywhere, it was like I forgot how to walk, or that walking was even an option. I remember how hard it was to adapt, when I visited Vilcabamba (a small village in Ecuador) the winter before last, and when I was on retreat at Blue Cliff, where one of the primary practices is slow, mindful walking meditation. But then I’d go back to New York, and my old habits came back very quickly, and were made necessary by the life I led there, which included a full-time job, and part-time school all year round, and a hefty schedule of social and church-related commitments.

I had an amazing life in New York, and I am so grateful that I had a job that made it possible for me to live in Greenwich Village, and to experience all the cultural richness of the City, and to graduate from NYU (however belatedly) without student debt, and that was intellectually challenging and interesting and (hopefully) allowed me to contribute something to the world’s understanding of an important topic (how we see).

But, I thought I’d miss it. I thought after a month away from the City I’d start getting antsy and feeling out of touch with the “real world.” I do miss my friends, very much, but I don’t miss my job, and I don’t miss New York. I don’t think it was the “real world” afterall. It’s a good place to spend one’s early twenties, for sure, and I highly recommend living there for a little while, but, up until the second I left I was still telling people I’d probably be back, that I’d get out here on the West Coast and the Village itself would somehow reel me back in. That seems so silly to me now.

If anything, being here in Portland has taught me how very important it is to pay attention to one’s environment. It has far, far more impact on our health and how we feel on a day to day basis than we give it credit for. Places can actually harm us! And places can heal us, and that’s part of why I want some of my New York friends to visit me here so badly. The notion that we are separate from our surroundings is just as false as the notion that we are separate from each other.

Architecture suddenly makes a lot more sense to me as a discipline, and one worthy of utmost respect.

(This is what it means to say that a prerequisite for enlightenment is enlightenment. There’s no learning anything new, no adding anything that wasn’t already there.)

Sometimes I find things I wrote when I was very young, and am amazed at what I “understood” then. I had no idea I knew this then, I’ll think to myself, that I even *thought* about this issue then. But the truth is, I didn’t even have the same mind to read my own writing when I wrote it, however many years ago. Even the meaning of my own words is constantly changing. I don’t know what I know. I don’t know what I knew then, and I don’t know what I know now. I’m not really the one doing the knowing.

I’ve never really been afraid of dying. Maybe this is because I’m young, but it’s not because I’m fearless. There are some things I’m terrified of, particularly hurting other people. I never learned how to drive when I was teenager, not because I was afraid of getting in a wreck and dying, but because I was afraid of getting in a wreck and killing someone. I still haven’t learned, and I don’t want to. Everyone is always telling me how much fun driving is, how I would feel so free and independent. But my independence isn’t worth that much to me.

But then, this morning, I was thinking, death in every second. What if I really kept that in mind, all the time? It is true; I could die. Any second. Any breath could be the last one. I have no idea what could happen. But living in the light of this is not being afraid, it’s being awake. Death in every breath is what makes life precious and beautiful. Without death, life would have no meaning. It’s so obvious, but this is a practical thing, a practice. If I could regularly practice thinking of each breath as the last one, I’m certain I wouldn’t waste as much time.

It is true that time is an illusion, but it’s still possible to waste time, I think, and it’s a real tragedy. A paradox.

There are things that matter. Where you take that last breath matters. Who you take it with matters. I know what it is to breathe into someone else, and it is significant. We can breathe into others, we can breathe for others. Others can breathe into and for us.

I moved from NYC to Portland, Oregon, recently. Portland is a place that can’t really be explained unless its been experienced. It’s a cool city, yes, and cool people live here, but there’s more than that. There is a web the connects everything, Indra’s net, the Spirit, some sort of gossamer shimmering something. It’s always there, and sometimes we can see it. We’ll often notice some strange coincidence that makes it visible, even if only briefly. There is something about Portland that makes the web easier to see. Just walking down the street, browsing in an antique store, talking to strangers at a cafe or on the bus, you can see the connections. And everyone who has lived here for some time knows it, even though they might not know they know it. You might ask someone here what he loves about Portland, and he might say any number of things. One of the people I asked recently said, There’s a lot of grace in Portland.

I smiled at him. It’s really true. I want to stay here as long as I can, I keep telling all my friends. But it’s enough that I’m here now, possibly taking my last breath, in Portland, right now.