Boat Across the River
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Moments in Time
It’s funny to me that it’s so difficult for a baby to learn how to crawl…to crawl! Everything we do takes so much effort. I watch my son rolling around the carpet — the boundaries of this little area rug are the literal boundaries of his range of motion. I always think to myself, “My parents watched me like this. My grandparents watched my parents like this.” My grandparents were little babies for the exact same amount of time as my son will be a baby. I think it’s…something like arrogant to act like the present is the only time that exists. I think all moments in time are equal in importance and existence. Except maybe the ones that we regret, wish we could take back, and for which we have asked someone for forgiveness.
Right now, I’m thinking of lives as bars on a graph, that are all layered over on top of each other, one over the other. I can’t really explain my thought…but not as bars that are end to end, but as bars (of time) layered on top of each other. So that the graph does not extend forward, but outward, in a three dimensional way. Now I’m thinking of time as a billion billion still photographs lying all over a table. I think that lives are less like video tapes than they are like still frames of every moment, captured forever.
6 pm
I take back my previous post.
I want to be able to get out of my driveway!
I want something in my head besides constant loud beeping!
Strange Comfort
Is it weird that the constant construction noise in our neighborhood, as the city puts in sewers, has started to become soothing?
Strange that I smile in my sleep and turn over at 6 am as the man driving the backhoe in my yard begins his day’s labor?
Odd that I have considered making cookies and coffee for my old friends slopping away out in the street?
“Travelin’ Thru”
I’ve been reading a lot lately — not writing a whole lot. The following excerpt from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays: First Series struck a chord with me, especially in light of my previous post about wanting to travel more. The essay in particular from which these lines come — Self Reliance — is apparently listed on President Obama’s Facebook page as one of his favorite reads. So there you go. I have also been enjoying that essay a lot and have only found a couple things with which I disagree. One is that Emerson mentions his belief that he has no responsibility to the beggar on the street or to the vast number of charities trying to collect money from him. I think if someone asks me for money on the street, I should give him a dollar at least. And I think we should pick a few charities to give to regularly as well. Maybe Emerson meant that you can’t give to every charity that comes calling, because that’s true. I’d have nothing left with which to support myself, and would become a charity case myself. I also disagree that travelling has nothing to teach us. I do agree though with many of his words here, especially that our society fosters restlessness, and that our minds are always travelling even when our bodies are not.
I also love the lines that “the soul is no traveller” and that when the wise man is abroad he “is at home still.” I was meditating the other day and had been thinking about the Buddhist concept of no self. When I closed my eyes and tried to clear my mind, what popped into my head was the image of “me” in a sticky web of sorts; the material that glued my “self” in place was my relationships with other beings. The way our experiences and stories all fit together was what held the me in place and made me, me. When those relationships are gone, maybe the me I thought I was will disappear…but I also don’t think those relationships do ever disappear. So that on some level, the me of this lifetime will always exist once I find the love that existed in this story I am currently living. If I can find those loving relationships, I will find the self from this experience in particular. Then what popped into my head — and this was before I read the words by Emerson — was that no matter where I travelled, I would always be in the same place. My self would always reside in the same place, the same spot on the bookshelf, no matter where in the universe my body happened to be. I am here, no matter where I am.
Well, enough about that. Here’s Emerson:
It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling…retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign soil, he is at home still…
He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things…
Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Rome I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk…and at last wake up in [Italy] and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical that I fled from…
But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay home.
Can We Wipe Off Love?
When I tell my daughter that I love her, she likes to say, “I’m wiping off all that love!” And she wipes her face off with her hands — she gets a big kick out of it. I tell her in return, “You can’t wipe off that love; that’s stuck to you forever!”
That’s how I imagine so many adults acting with their behavior and choices. The violence that we inflict on each other, the animals, and the earth makes me think that people often do not accept that any kind of divine or universal love should be wasted upon them. Most likely, they did not feel a lot of parental love as children, thus they can’t imagine love on an even greater and unconditional level. They must not feel loved because they certainly don’t act lovingly — or like they know what love is.
I imagine them trying to wipe all the love off their faces with each hurtful act they commit. And I hope that someday, they are in a position to see things more clearly — such as, after their deaths — and that they recognize the pain they have caused, even feel all the pain they have caused. Maybe we’ll all feel all the pain (and love) that we have been responsible for. But I hope that people do not feel the pain that they have caused for eternity. I hope that Divine Love is stuck to all of us forever, and that eventually we’re all grown up enough to feel, accept, and reflect that love back to others.
Seeing the Truth
It would probably be impossible to have had a life more stable than the one I have thus far lived. I have lived in the same city since birth except for a year and a half “abroad”. I have never experienced a move as my parents, who have been happily married for forty years, bought the house they currently live in when I was an infant. My grandparents have lived in their house since before I was born, and they were married for sixty four years. I attended the same high school as my mom. My dad grew up down the street from where I am now and lived there from the time he was born until he got married. That’s the house in which his father died, and where his mother lived for over fifty years — until she moved into a nursing home. He has never lived anywhere but here either. There is no divorce in my family. I feel like, in the midst of a big city, I have had a stereotypically small town experience. And that I have been lucky to have had every important privilege.
Sometimes I feel so attached to this place and this life that I don’t even see it anymore. It’s like looking at my own face in the mirror. I’ve been looking at the same things for so long that they’ve almost become invisible to me. Driving to a restaurant downtown, I suddenly saw the city, the hazy sunset over the fluffy trees, the little houses snuggled close together. I saw the city as if for the first time and managed to grab hold of that image. In Buddhism, there is talk of trying to maintain a Beginner’s Mind — to keep that freshness, that quality of really seeing something for what it is. I have that when I am traveling; I see every little detail of a new place as if it’s charmed. I notice everything from apartment balconies, to little pink flowers streetside, to Spanish moss in the trees, to the little boy holding his father’s hand. I want to try to reclaim that freshness of Beginner’s Mind when I look at my own city, so that I am actually seeing where I am — so that I actually perceive the life I am living.
(And for those us who are longtime adherents to a specific faith tradition, it’s important to also see things as they really are — to not be so attached to our beliefs that we can’t see the truth anymore).
More or Less (of Ourselves)…or Neither
I keep remembering a dream I had a few months ago where my grandmother came to me and was telling me about the afterlife. She looked the same, but different. Where the details of most dreams fade quickly, I can still remember just how she looked in this one. The main thing that was different was her smile. It was no longer pained or fragile — it was huge and confident.
In life, my grandma was not perfect (just like none of us are!) Grandma could be hurtful. A strong memory that I have of her from my youth was when my mother and I were visiting her in her and my grandfather’s home. Two of our state universities have always had a strong rivalry. My grandma and grandpa went to one, and my dad the other. My dad’s team had won the game, it came up in conversation, and I said something like, “Yay!” I went to kiss my grandma goodbye and she dodged my kiss and kind of ducked away from me. I remember feeling stunned. Like, “What did I do?” I also remember my mom’s reaction — pure fury. She told me to wait out at the car and only recently have I come to know what she said to Grandma. This was by far the most hurtful experience I had with her and I’m sure she regretted it. But she never apologized and I wish she had. Forgiving someone is much easier if they apologize. I know she loved me, but sometimes our relationship was confusing to me.
I recently read a book called Here if You Need Me by Kate Braestrup. I really enjoyed it, but there was one section that bothered me, and continued to over time, like a seed stuck in my teeth. The author was presenting her thoughts on the afterlife and one option she mentioned was that we might become perfect versions of ourselves. She then dismissed that possibility, stating that then we would no longer even be ourselves. She concluded that she thinks we “just die”. I guess she meant that…well I don’t know what she meant. Maybe it was her way of saying she doesn’t really know what she believes, which makes the most sense to me anyway.
A few weeks later, I had the dream where my grandma came to me and was explaining all about the afterlife. I remember bits and pieces, but mostly I remember the feeling that I should not worry. I remember her fabulous peaceful smile and that she seemed herself, but not herself. Or maybe she seemed more of herself, not less. Maybe on Earth we are actually less of ourselves. And then I vividly remember her saying, “Here, we are perfect versions of ourselves.”
The whole thing could be my wishful thinking, all my own creation, the phrase Grandma used supplied merely from Braestrup’s book and my mind. I’m one who believes that those who have passed on can visit us in our dreams. And maybe Grandma came in a form that I would recognize and used words that I’d connect with. I don’t know, but I believe it’s possible; such are all matters of belief.
I am fascinated by (and love) the fact that I keep having these conversations with her now, when in life our relationship was not perfect. Maybe it’s her way of saying that things are fine between us. In one dream, she came to me to mediate an argument that my mom and I were having in “real” life. Mom and I hadn’t argued like that in years. In the dream, Grandma was now the peacemaker, level-headed, even-keel, and very happy.
Fear
My father-in-law pastors a small congregation in a very small rural town about an hour away. We only get out to hear him once a year, at Easter. He delivered a chaotic and hilarious children’s message involving live chicks, in which my city-girl daughter stared wide-eyed over his shoulder at the little one in his hands and her cousin shouted, “He just looked at me!” After the children had finished running circles around the box of chicks, they filed out, and A. delivered a wonderful sermon.
He read the resurrection story from Matthew, and focused in on Jesus’ words to “Be not afraid.” Jesus was telling his friends not to be completely terrified that he had just come back to life from the dead. A. suggested that we extend that message out just a bit to say, “Do not be afraid, now.” In other words, now that Jesus has demonstrated that death is not what we might think…that it is not the end…we need not be afraid of what life can do to us. We need not spend all our time worrying about bad things — and especially not the little things.
He pointed out one phobia in which the person fears flowers. There are all forms of skewed perspectives to which we are deeply attached for whatever reasons, and A. said he didn’t expect us to walk out of church suddenly impervious to any of the things that trouble us. He said that he thought one message of Easter is that we don’t need to do that. I don’t claim to understand Jesus, his life, or his message. But I do believe in an afterlife, for my own reasons separate from being told to by the Bible, and I do believe in miracles. I think all this could have happened, and I love the idea that it did. Not that someone suffered intense pain, but that someone could prove an afterlife to the people around him and that he could love them so much that he would suffer intensely in order to prove it.
I liked one of my father-in-law’s sentences in particular, though I don’t know if he was quoting someone or not: ”I didn’t bring you to Disneyland to be afraid of Mickey Mouse!” Though I do not especially love Disney movies or Disneyland, I like the metaphor. There are so many beautiful things about this life; I shouldn’t waste too much time with “dark imaginings” or “sweating the small stuff”.
