the habit of being

On the night of the Fourth, I sat in the grass on the National Mall, near the Washington Monument and a white trash family with red, white, and blue tie-dye on their daughters. The fireworks were larger than life, and I tried to imagine us all, so many people, as being something other than who we were, watching bombs and air-raids with the same awe. I screamed and cheered as the finale approached. Ash fell from the sky and gave me strange orange-ish dots on my skin through two showers. My mother asked me if it gave me a patriotic feeling, seeing the fireworks up close with all those people, and in a way it did. I’d never seen so many port-a-potties all lined up in my life, and the line to get through the security check point was about a half hour long. Afterwards, we, the not-so-humbled masses, swarmed out of the Mall, covering the sidewalks and the streets.

. . .

I adjusted him in his newbie downward-facing dog (”Down dawg!” he’d say, which annoyed me, but only because I was trying so hard to be annoyed), but that was about as close as I could get without feeling guilt-laced suffocation closing in. Every nice thing he did and said made it harder. I should have known better, but it’s alright. “You just have to believe you’ll be okay and you’ll be okay,” I said. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” he said, and he might have even believed it.

There is never a good enough reason to hurt someone. In an ideal world, we simply wouldn’t be capable of it, but in this one it does more good to protect yourself from being hurt by others than to strive never to hurt anyone else. One is possible and the other isn’t. All the same, I’m so sorry.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

The mantra of the AA children remains applicable. I told Marlon, who passed the chips with me in he Young Peoples’ Group (the young people in question being our parents), in a nostalgic instant message not so long ago, “the Serenity Prayer was to us what the Lord’s Prayer was to normal people!”

I recited it in bed last night, the first time I’d heard it spoken out loud in years. It was on a wall somewhere in every house I ever lived in as a child.

. . .

My father called me, after three months in jail, the day after he arrived in a Christian reformatory program designed for teenagers in Michigan. They cut his hair real short and won’t let him smoke cigarettes. A fortysomething who looks sixty, he’s carrying around hard candy in his pocket. He asked me if I still worked in the bookstore (I quit in January) and was shocked when I told him James and I broke up (he was maybe the only one I actually sold the story about how we were really happy to).

My mother called me, after I told her about the 35 year old I’ve been “seeing,” but she promised she wouldn’t get mad. It’s not age but the feeling you get that matters, she said. You’re an emotional girl, she said. In my experience, she said, chemistry leads to fire leads to explosions leads to serious injury. And we talked about the stomach ache, panic, and desperation we associate(d) with True Love, and I told her that I want to have a baby someday, and she said that would make her happy, and she would rock it so I could get some sleep, like her mother did for me. (Just not yet.)

. . .

Some Things I Underlined:

If an artist becomes too idealistic, he will commit suicide, because between his ideal and actual ability there is a great gap. Because there is no bridge long enough to go across the gap, he will begin to despair.

If your practice makes you worse, it is ridiculous.

We should not attach to some fancy ideas or to some beautiful things.

You should not mistake medicine for food.

Today I read a beautiful sestina written by a girl still two years younger than I am:

Seeing nothing but your dance
winding up into me, sweaty and flushed, tight
I forgot there were other successes I wanted

It opens this way. I forgot there were other successes I wanted, she said. A perfect line. What lover does not forget? Jennifer put a star next to it and taped it to our television; in hopes that (even more than inspiring us not to forget) it would inspire us to write. We too might be able to say something true, if we try hard enough! I didn’t realize it was a sestina until the second time I read it; it was that good. A college freshman wrote that!

A man wrote a sestina for me, a few days ago:there is something in me at your touch which sinters,. Surprisingly not the first sestina ever written about me, it is the first completed one, significant. I didn’t even know all the words. To sinter means to form a coherent mass by heating without melting. There are so many beautiful things left to learn.

It’s been a week of yoga classes, and my body is opening again and becoming more fluid, the flow is slowing, becoming more deliberate. I could pierce a heart with my virabhadrasana II! More and more I find myself wanting to share this feeling with others. In the end, no one imagined I would wind up doing something non-academic. I haven’t been in school for a year and a half, but I look forward to the upcoming yoga teacher certification program with nearly the giddiness of a trip to the university bookstore for notebooks and binders and clicky pencils. The idea that there is any power or beauty in the parts of my body I do not use to hold a pen or type this sentence into my keyboard still thrills and excites me, every time someone gasps at my dove pose, every time someone moans from the pleasure of coupling with me.

If sex and yoga do not mix, one can only marvel at my hours of late spent half drenched in a sweaty physical passion which leaves me literally trembling and afraid of what my body is capable of and half cool and relaxed, pondering trance and meditation, undergoing the beginning stages of hypnosis, which leaves me quite in awe of what my mind may be capable of. All of this with one partner, such an unlikely thing, and strange, yet the goal here would seem to be passion and compassion without any harmful emotional attachment. I find I am not the only person who’s been called a bodhisattva, not the only person who so highly appreciates stillness, and all this is so exciting, a breaking open of things kept inside for so long.

I could not even describe the amazement that flashed over me, when, lying there, it suddenly dawned on me (even after hearing about the hours of sitting meditation, the Zen retreats), and I goofily exclaimed you’re good at being still! and he replied I’m a Buddhist yogi! as if it should have been the most obvious thing in the world. It should have been. I’ve been having my stillness wiggled on and shaken and twitched at for so long (by myself, primarily, but certainly by others as well); I suppose I’ve grown to expect it.

Meeting and getting to know a white person born and raised in America and willing to proclaim to the world that he is Buddhist makes me really realize just how long I’ve wanted to do the same, but feared the snickers. Instead, I’m “interested in Eastern philosophy,” and beyond that even have certain boundaries for my interest.. as if even to study it too much would be somehow presumptuous of me. To think that someone as flawed as I am could ever even entertain the idea of enlightenment - it’s just too ridiculous! Even the masses of so-called Christians I’ve known, whose lives seemed to veer so very far from the teachings of Christ, seemed to have some claim on the title, inherited from their parents somehow. It seems like to overcome the cultural barrier I couldn’t just be a Buddhist, I’d have to be a really good Buddhist. A warped, yet understandable, view. It just shocks me how long it’s been since I’ve even really thought about this, in these terms.

At NYU, after I decided maybe I wasn’t going to be able to cure cancer afterall (because it was cutting so much into my writing time), I switched my intended major from cell biology to a double in art history and religious studies. It was a happy plan, the idealized outcome of which saw me with Charlotte’s art gallery job in Sex and the City and a lot less embarrassed/confused discussing and actively taking part in my own spirituality. I may never get another chance to live in Manhattan, much less land any posh to-die-for art job, but there really are much better places than college to “find your path” in some ways, and the more I think about it, the more content I am to be exactly where I am now.