the habit of being

I had to reschedule my acupuncture appointment because the acupuncturist had some sort of emergency and disappeared only an hour before I got there. The receptionist, Sua, did not expect this to happen at all. She thinks my name is Kate. She used to think I was a ballet dancer, too, but this is not entirely her fault, because one time I was in there late at night and I told her I had come from a dance performance. I didn’t mean I’d been in the performance, but she thought I did, and by the time she was asking me how long I’d been dancing, and I realized what she thought I had meant, it was like one in the morning and I was embarrassed and I just said I had danced when I was young, which isn’t entirely a lie but pretty much is, because I only took ballet for a few months. I sometimes get annoyed with people who think it’s fine to deliberately mislead others as long as they don’t tell any outright lie. This is especially annoying when I’m in love with the person who does it. A few months or half a year later Sua asked me what I did for work and I told her what I actually do, and she said that to her eyes I looked like a ballet dancer. I said I was too fat and not graceful enough to be a ballet dancer. I don’t know if she remembered that time I was in there late at night after the dance performance or not. Maybe she thinks I lied to her. Maybe that’s why she didn’t call me when the acupuncturist left on his emergency. Maybe that’s why she calls me Kate. I doubt it, though. She’s really nice. She asks me if I want tea and brings me the tea and straightens my towel and sometimes she comes and talks to me while I’m in the soaking tub and it isn’t even a big deal that I’m naked and she’s not. Sua asked me if I’d even had acupuncture before and I told her I hadn’t but that I wasn’t scared. She said it doesn’t hurt and I said I didn’t think it did. Even if I thought it did hurt, I still wouldn’t be scared, but I didn’t tell Sua that. I used to hate the cold soaking tub. It is really cold. One time, maybe a year ago or even more than a year, I went there with my boyfriend and we were in the tubs together, so he can tell you how much I didn’t like the cold tub and pretty much stayed in the hot tub the whole time, even though they always tell you not to do that. He wasn’t really my boyfriend. This was already after we had stopped having sex, but even when we were having sex he wasn’t my boyfriend. Not really. He used to tell me how he didn’t really feel anything and I would cry. I think I had been crying before we went to the tubs, but then I was feeling better. I still didn’t like the cold tub though. That’s how I was. After we had shiatsu, the old man came and talked to us about how we needed to do these exercises together to help each other, and my boyfriend, who wasn’t really, said that the old man must have thought we were married, and now we couldn’t go there with anyone else or everyone would be disappointed. I never go there with anyone else. I always go alone. Now, I like the cold tub better than the hot tub. I like how if you stay still enough you don’t feel the cold anymore. I like floating on my stomach and looking at my hands under the water and feeling so quiet, counting the seconds in my head. I like getting in the hot tub after I’ve been in the cold tub and how my skin tingles all over and my counting seems to go in slow motion. Then I can’t wait until my hot minutes are up so I can get back in the cold and do it again. Now it’s the hot tub I have to struggle with patience in. It seems like there’s nothing in particular to feel or not feel in the hot tub, so it’s not as interesting to be in it. That’s just one more example of how everything is completely different now. But I know if I keep bathing, there will be no difference between the hot and the cold tubs at all. Neither of them will seem better. I can already feel this beginning to happen, right now.

In my last entry, when I said “lots of people think…” or “some people think…”, what I really meant was “I used to think…”

People have asked what happened to me ever since it happened, and I’m still not sure what to say. It’s been over two months now, but I didn’t know what to say a week afterwards either. One reason it is difficult to say is because there was not just one definitive event. There was no fig tree, no visitation… not exactly. There was a dramatic shift, which happened over a relatively short period of time, beginning in March. There was a sequence of events, coincidences, dreams. A friend of mine, Mitsu, who was involved in all this in various ways, and to whom I talked about it throughout that early period, likes to tell my “story.” I asked him to tell it to me, and it’s not a bad one.

There was the hearing of a certain Zen parable, a trip to Portland, a poem my friend Leigh wrote about me, a strange class I was taking fall semester which lead to my reading certain books (including St. Augustine’s Confessions, which made a big impact on me), and a heartbreak. All of these things happened around the same time, and afterwards everything had changed. It is not entirely wrong to say that those things are what happened to me, but that isn’t really right either. There are other things that happened in that small time window in March, many, many, things, all of which are amazingly connected, and in fact project all the way back through my life. If it is the specific sequence of events that defines this, that sequence can’t be isolated from the rest of my history. I don’t think it is the specific sequence of events that defines it at all.

It is very tempting the talk about it in terms of “before” and “after,” but that is misleading for many reasons. There is no after, because it is still happening. Amazingly, it keeps happening. But when I think about my experiences with this in the so-called before (which is not a real before because I was always in this and did sometimes realize it), one thing that sticks out to me is that, unlike this experience now, those had definite ends, in my mind.

When I was a child, the thought often crossed my mind, while I was doing some ordinary thing like walking back from the grocery store to the car with my mother, that it was possible that my whole life was just made up, that I might just be a character in someone else’s dream. Suddenly everything felt very different, but I would actually reason with myself that, well, even if something like that were the case, I’d just have to go along with it and do my normal life, that I couldn’t stand around thinking about how it might not be real because then I wouldn’t be able to do anything. So the episode would come to an end. Later, I would have brief flashes of this different way of being, in a more physical (rather than intellectual) way, after I’d been through some challenging emotional experience and had let go of something.. usually this would happen when I stopped trying to get whatever it was I thought I wanted from some other person. But it was a very brief thing, a feeling of freedom, usually following a huge explosion of some sort. I’d also feel something like this sometimes when I was practicing yoga regularly, about 3 years ago. My whole way of relating to the world would be shifted somewhat after a really powerful class. There were many ways in which I experienced this, “before,” but they were relatively transient glimpses, and I could not articulate them. I was even less able to articulate them than I’m able to articulate what happened to me in March. One way of saying it is that there’s a way to be both in my life and aware that my life is just a dream at the same time.

Recently I was trying to tell someone, another friend, who is skeptical, about this, and he kept saying that while he was all for people having realizations, what he had a hard time with was the way I seemed to talk about the experience I had had as having some sort of special status, some uniqueness among other possible realizations. And of course, being an atheist, he was turned off by the mystical way I’ve started talking about it. I’ve gotten similar reactions from other people, and it is difficult to know how to respond. On the one hand, it is true that it isn’t really that special of a thing that happened to me. Everyone has access to this realization, it isn’t really a secret. As I’ve quickly learned, there are volumes and volumes written about it. It’s also true that this isn’t the final ultimate thing, there’s always more and more to see. But it’s also the case that this isn’t just any little realization. I’ve had other realizations, and they did not have this character. This change, which I’ve yet to really describe, was intellectual, physical, emotional, all at once. It is hard to describe or explain, but it was, and is, not at all abstract. It’s a clear, concrete, experience, that informs everything, literally everything, in my life. It’s not a purely intellectual thought. It is something I feel, physically and emotionally. It is something I participate in. I’ll try to write something about what the experience of it is like soon. The understanding is tightly linked to the experience. I had barely any concept of it a few months ago!

I’ve been reading books about Zen and yoga and philosophy and religion and various things off and on for many years, and I can say with certainty that I did not really understand them at all until now. And it wasn’t that I didn’t feel like there was anything to understand in these books. I most certainly did think there was, and I wanted very much to understand it, and I thought that if I understood it I might be happier. From my own experience, I know that it is possible to go quickly from not understanding this to understanding it to some degree. And I know that the way to make that transition is not by trying to understand it, because I did that for a long time and it didn’t work. I also know what it feels like to be someone who is reading about these things, or listening to someone else talk about them, without having experienced them. The idea that I could experience something like this now is not any more amazing than the idea that I could have NOT experienced it then. I should also say that there’s not any meaningful separation between now and then inherent in THIS, but that’s part of where the trickiness of trying to talk about things comes up… there are so many assumptions in the world that don’t hold from this perspective, and those assumptions are built into our language. But anyway, I think this is where the sort of categorical thing, for me, comes in… because for me there really was a long period of just not getting it, not grasping the full picture. And even though I cannot claim any sort of “complete understanding” now, it is clear to me that I can see vastly more now than I could see only a few months ago.

My friend the skeptic was saying that there are many realizations, little shifts, that can happen; that’s it’s not just one big understanding that a person either has or doesn’t have. And I don’t deny that that is possible, that one could come to this or something else like this in many steps. I’ve heard stories like that. And what happened to me has a little of that character, when I look back on it, trying to find precursors as I mentioned above, but there is also a distinct quality of a door opening, an eye opening, as I wrote the other day and many others have written.

In my own amazement and almost disbelief that such a thing could really happen, even faced with my own experience as evidence, I read a lot of books about it. In fact, I haven’t read anything that isn’t about mysticism or conversion or enlightenment since March. It is partly because I was able to find so many accounts of experiences like my own that I feel comfortable talking about this using terms like “God” or “enlightenment.” I don’t think this has to be framed using those particular terms, but I do think that what it is the Catholics are talking about when they talk about conversion and grace is the same thing the Buddhists are talking about when they talk about satori is the same thing basically all religions are based on is the same thing I am trying to talk about here.

When I am sitting in the car at night and it is raining and you are driving us to see someone and the drops are streaking down the windows and we are not talking to one another because talking would be too loud, I think that all the rain must come from women who have lost their babies, and if there were no more tears, if there were no more sadness, the grasses would become brown and the ground would become sandy and all the trees would go thirsty and the world would stop going. But that is not really what I think, I know it isn’t, because that sounds like a story and actually it isn’t like that until I try to tell it. It is a wordless hum and a hollow sphere of cloth in my head. From the center of the sphere, I am grabbing at the cloth and pulling it toward me from many angles all at once. I look out at the raindrops. I look through the raindrops. I look at the raindrops. I follow the raindrops as they leave the edge of the window. I look through the raindrops. I look at the raindrops and through them at the same time. I become the raindrops and the window and the blurry wet red tail-lights going and the blurry wet white head-lights coming and the highway and the sadness and the shadows of trees that I cannot see because it is too dark out but I know they are there. It doesn’t matter where we’re going or who it is we’re going to see, because I can already see them, I can see everyone, and I can hear you even though we’re not talking, and I can hear my thoughts even though they are wordless and I can hear the silence and the hum and the engine and the crying of women who have lost their babies. I see now that I am not the only such woman. I leave the raindrops with my eyes but I do not leave them and I look at your thigh. You’re wearing new jeans and they have lighter stripes on them to make them look older than they are. I put my hand on the denim and I can feel the heat of your skin underneath and I look at my hand on your thigh and I cannot believe how beautiful my hand is, how it seems to glow more brightly even than the little blue lights on the dash or the red tail-lights going or the white head-lights coming, and you know not to talk to me because that is how well you know me.