Grace in Small Things 169, 170

We are back from two days away. For my birthday, Sylvain took us to Stratford where we saw The Merry Wives of Windsor. Not counting Windsor Fringe Festivals, it was Sylvain’s first live theatre experience.

Savour, savour, savour.

What was wonderful?

• Driving for hours through rolling farmland
• and past quaint town squares
• getting dressed up…and a fiance who tells me at least once an hour how much he likes the new dress
• the bread at Pazzo
• taking off my sandals to walk along the Avon while families of swans nestle together on the grass close enough to nip at my dress
• seeing Amaranth up close for the first time (in the Festival Theatre flower gardens)
• noting that traveling together gets easier and less stressful every time we do it
• seeing a movie at the Princess, just for old times’ sake–one with astounding cinematography
• the way her blazer sets off my friend K’s sapphire blue eyes

Grace in Small Things 168

• “I like your energy,” she explains. “I feel calm when I’m around you.”
• While going between the basement and seventh floor in the elevator together, a neighbour and I discover we are both film aficionadas. She suggests we go some evening, if my beau wouldn’t mind.
• There will be no lesson planning on three of the four days of this long weekend (Civic Day is Monday).
• My honey has tickets to The Merry Wives of Windsor for my recent birthday. My suitcase is almost packed.
• …including the a new dress for the occasion.

Grace in Small Things 167

Tonight I am grateful:
Because Pa got to see his siblings from northern Quebec this weekend;
And because I am ready for tomorrow, even if I spent ten hours of my weekend getting there;
And for the eerie quiet of a neighbourhood without power;
And for a summer storm;
And for my womb-like bedroom, barely lit by the fading glow of dusk.

Grace in Small Things 166

• the soft pastel tee shirt i found in a thrift store while visiting little rock
• a successful visit to a used bookstore; the proprietor said, “these books are interesting” and didn’t send any of them back home with me
• a dream that followed me all day
• sweat
• ice water

tee shirt

Grace in Small Things 165

The BlackBerry was mysteriously quiet this morning; Sylvain had forgotten that I have Fridays off in the summer. Ha!

Pretty soon my inbox filled up with happy birthday wishes via Facebook. I don’t check in there very often, but I thanked everyone for the greetings. How nice!

I also got a snail mail birthday card (THANK YOU, V!)

I spent most of the day doing one of the things I love most: lesson planning. I worked many hours on three days’ worth of lessons for my upcoming stint in the literacy class. It will be my first time to sub in that level, which is a very prep-intensive class. I could re-cycle materials that have already been developed by the other teachers, but I don’t want to. I want to do something more Kelly with them. So by 9:00 this morning I was across town in their local supermarket taking pictures for a virtual tour. It will be like a field trip without the heat or cost of a bus. (It was 102 F here, with humidex much higher than that!)

I’m not sure yet what all the lesson will entail, but I know I will incorporate lots of realia in the form of shopping flyers, real re-usable shopping bags and all the food boxes and packages that I’ve been saving for over a year but have yet to use in a lesson. My friend Juan will be the check-out guy because he is very good with numbers and can total up purchases and make change with ease. We practiced the other day just to make sure he could use a calculator. He’d never used one before, but caught on very quickly. He’s looking forward to being teacher’s helper.

I think we are going to have some fun. At least the tactile learners should be happy.

After hours and hours of lesson prep, I changed into a pretty dress for birthday dinner at Mazaar followed by the Windsor International Fringe Festival. We saw Revelations and then took a nice stroll by the river.

I got my 48 spankings and one pinch.

Grace in Small Things 164

I am grateful in this moment to have a beating heart, a working air conditioner, a full belly, a comfortable bed, a knock on my door

Not the Whole Story

As we both know, the chatterings of monkey mind do not comprise the whole story.

The rest of the puzzle, however, can’t be put into words.  I’ll let Scott try. He does a pretty good job considering that what he is trying to describe is ineffable.

I have been working with my mind for decades now in one form or another. For the past four years, my practice has been focused on Tibetan Buddhist teachings, breathing and mindfulness. Detachment. Being here now. Observing the mind. Freeing myself from the suffering that comes with identifying with and taking seriously the content of that endless stream of thought.

The practice of taming one’s mind pays off after a while, and I felt I was doing pretty well. There are many moments through the day when I am able to observe the thoughts. I am able to smile at them.

I am sometimes able just to be, just to surf on the foam of naked reality. Sit with the uncomfortable knowledge that there’s nothing to hang on to. To look around me and laugh.  To laugh with joy at the unbelievable miracle of being. Laugh at the silliness of my human propensity to want safety. Laugh at small mind’s indefatigable attempts at creating something for me to hang onto.

When I remember that everything I hang onto is illusion, I vacillate between pangs of terror and lungfuls of bliss.

Yes, I thought I was doing pretty well and felt confident that this visit with my mother would be different. Better.

What I realized about halfway into the first full day of my visit is that much of my success at being calm and letting things go stems from the fact that I have constructed for myself a life relatively free of antagonists. Jack Kornfield is quick to point out that many of us can get our minds to behave well on a retreat; the real test comes opon re-entry to the real world with its grouchy spouses, whining children, nosy in-laws, traffic jams and micromanaging bosses.

For my visit with my mother, I had to remind myself again and again (about every five minutes, in fact) of the various teachings that have got me this far. I reminded myself of things like what Olivia and Suki and others have said in response to earlier posts on the topic of giving unsolicited advice.

I reminded myself that my mind was making judgments, but there was no absolute reality behind those judgments whatsoever.

I reminded myself that just being on earth in this moment, alive for now and able to reach out and touch my mother’s hand was a miracle to stop and breathe in and savour.

When a remark started to rise to my lips and I knew its origin was a judgment, I reminded myself that I did not fly 1000 miles to make my loved one feel bad, to hurt her feelings, to tell her how to keep house, to admonish, to nag, to be my old obnoxious self.

I reminded myself that I flew those 1000 miles just to be with her. To bask in her presence and let her drink up mine. To hold her hand while crossing the street. To sit next to her for hours in the back room whose bay of windows looks out onto the deep backyard and birdbath while stringing colourful glass beads on wire. Look, Mom, what do you think of this one? Are you about ready for some supper?

At first I was doing nothing more impressive than biting my tongue. The judgmental thoughts were there; I simply wasn’t giving them voice. After a day or two of observing these thoughts without acting on them, however, they began to rise with less seductive pull and less frequency.

A new energy danced between us, and it gave rise to something that had never happened for us before.

The Running Commentary

Before you can train monkey mind, you have to be conscious of its antics. I started the day with a goal of being aware of every time I made a judgment that something needed to be other than what it was.

I enjoyed a leisurely mug of chai on the balcony in the fresh morning air. My attention was captured by the scene of a caretaker in the courtyard below mowing a very awkward, puzzle-piece-shaped plot of land which included a circular area that had to be mown around.

Do you know what thought pulled me away from my magazine?

“He is not doing that in the most efficient manner.”

Seriously. I was captivated by the way he was backtracking over areas he had already mowed in order to get to areas he had not mowed.  I had a strong desire to get out a pencil and piece of scrap paper to experiment with mowing patterns in order to find the most efficient path for the lawnmower to follow.

If that is what I deal with on a day off with no appointments or other sources of stress, you can imagine what the chatter in my noggin is like on a hectic day. Much of the time, especially when I let myself get anxious or stressed, it goes something like this:

the toilet paper roll is loaded the wrong why did she spend all that money on a good chef’s knife if she isn’t going to take proper care of it driving around on a low tire wastes gas has your doctor looked at that if you can’t afford the vet you can’t afford the pet i’m pretty sure people with bi-polar disorder are not supposed to drink hey bozo turn signals are not optional it’s a lot easier to parallel park if you back in you know if you pick at that it will never heal i don’t think people with high blood pressure are supposed to pour salt on their food it’s too hot a day to be leaving a dog locked in a car even if the windows are cracked if someone doesn’t prune that tree they’ll be sorry the next time it storms swimming on a red flag day oh gross if M would keep his access card on the lanyard and around his neck he wouldn’t keep losing it you call that washing your hands you’re in food service for heaven’s sake she’d be a lot prettier without all that make-up

And so forth.

It’s been fun becoming aware of how often I make these inner mental judgments. Sylvain and I talk about them and laugh.

That’s a start.

 

What My Poor Mother Has to Put Up With

I have this creature who lives inside of me. Sometimes even I can’t understand how she arose or from where.  She’s about one part Neat Freak and two parts Miss Fix-It.

When I look back on the kind of teenager and young adult I was, it’s hard to believe my psyche gave birth to her.  I used to go barefoot everywhere, the hides of my feet so tough that I could walk over broken glass, my soles stained black. My bed was perpetually piled high with books, magazines, dirty and clean clothes. Under the bed you might have found a hamburger wrapper or shriveled old banana peel.

I don’t even remember when I started being and feeling more like Martha Stewart and less like Pigpen.

Somewhere along the way I became obsessed with better ways of doing everything. By the time I was thirty, I was seriously considering a career in ergonomics consulting.  I honestly believed that there was a right way and a wrong way to do almost anything, and that everyone deserved the benefit of my insights on…well…everything.

“If you always put your keys in the same spot when you come through the door at the end of the day, you’ll never have to waste time searching for them the next morning.”

That’s the sort of advice my inner Miss Fix-It will dispense, unbidden.  She can be obnoxious.

I recently finished reading the non-fiction best-seller Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.  The book teaches a set of steps for changing anything from your own exercise habits to your employer’s wastefulness. One of the steps in the formula is called “Shape the Path.”

Shape the Path is something I have been employing consciously for a very long time, though I never called it that.  Perhaps I discovered the technique intuitively.

You know those annoying people who are always running late for everything and much of the time don’t even get the day right…showing up a day or two too early or too late for what they had agreed to do for or with you?  A very long time ago, I was one of those.  Then I started employing strategies to cope with my space cadet tendencies.

I learned to use a calendar.  I wrote things on my hand. I learned how to shape my environment so as to make forgetting things impossible. For example, I have a place for everything. In the morning, as soon as I have packed my lunch, I set the lunch bag in front of the door so that I have to trip over it to get out.  If my life becomes too hectic for a period and I start being forgetful, I will tape a check-list on the inside of the door:  Do you have your lunch? The BlackBerry? Classroom keys?

For everything I have ever wanted to changed about myself, I have usually been able to find a way to tweak the environment to make that change much easier on myself.  For example, I have a bad habit of getting out of bed when the alarm goes off, but crawling back between the sheets for (just — ha!) five more minutes of blissful slumber.  So one day it occurred to me to MAKE THE BED as soon as I get up to pee.  With the bed all neatly made, I am much less tempted to crawl back in. I shaped the path, and it works.

One reason I think it is so hard for me not to try to convert others to my religion of finding the optimal method for any desired outcome is that when you are the solutions guru in a work setting, you are so very rewarded for it.  In every workplace, I’ve become a “go to” person for solutions.  This has been a huge boost to my self-esteem and has contributed to rave performance reviews and raises.

Outside of a work setting, however, my need to be needed and my compulsion to try to fix people and find solutions for every so-called problem under the sun isn’t cause for a raise or promotion. (Did I mention that I don’t have too many friends?)

Sylvain and my ACIM group have pointed out to me, as I’ve explored Miss Fix-It in the light of my mindfulness and Buddhist detachment practices, that in order for me to feel an impulse to offer advice or try to help fix something, it naturally follows that I have already JUDGED the situation (or person) as needing to be other than what it is.

Indeed.

And I knew that. Of course I knew that. But the urge to try to fix can be quite addictive.  So, like with any addiction that isn’t a lot of fun for those around me, I tended to relax and let it hang out more with my partner and close family. I THOUGHT I was doing a good job of not letting that part of me hang out with friends and acquaintances until C spoke up at our ACIM meeting the other day.  It was a wake up call for me, just in time for my upcoming visit with my mother–whose wabi sabi way of life pushes all my buttons.

Grace in Small Things 160

At 7:03 p.m. we are seated beneath a canopy of maple leaves in Reaume Park, surrounded by the tiers of flower beds of Coventry Gardens spilling over low flagstone retaining walls.

We have missed the Strauss brothers’ Pizzicato-Polka but are in time for Gershwin’s Suite. A car alarm wants to participate, it seems. Nor does a passing freighter on the Detroit River want to be left out; it joins in on The Marriage of Figaro.  The gulls wait for Swan Lake, which the musicians tell us was embellished by the honking of geese during the quintet’s prior outdoor engagement.

Ah, summer!

Ever Vigilant

The week before I was to leave for Little Rock, my eyes were opened to a part of my psyche that had heretofore been hidden from me. It’s amazing to me how long we are sometimes capable of remaining in denial about our own behaviour. This something had been pointed out to me many times by my partner and family members, but somehow that hadn’t broken the seal of denial.

It was when a member of my weekly ACIM group brought it to my attention that I finally heard.

“I knew you would say that,” he said to me after my comment.

Ouch. Am I that predictable? I had thought.

“Don’t fix me,” had been his next words, said with enough humour to soften but not so much as to negate the seriousness of his intention.

Perhaps I am wrong in thinking that this was the first time anyone had pierced my thick shell of denial. It’s possible that others outside my family have managed to get through to me in the past, but after a brief and painful period of self-awareness, I had retreated back into the shadows of denial and covered over the event with a layer of convenient amnesia.

In any case, my friend’s words hurt. And so I sat with that hurt and investigated it in the days leading up to my flight to Arkansas. If my mother and I were to enjoy each other’s company instead of driving each other crazy all week, I would have to be very vigilant.  My friend had had the courage to shine a light on an unhelpful and unhealthy behaviour in me, and I had to keep that personality trait from slipping back into the shadows of my psyche.

As my shaman used to say, quoting Sun Tzu via Jung: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Grace in Small Things 159

• I am sitting at the marina with my love watching the western sky after the orange ball has sunk beneath the horizon. The air feels moist and cool.
• As I walk toward the entrance to the grocery store, I pass a display of African Violets on the verge of heat stroke. It seems to me that one of them is begging to be taken home. So I do.
• Across the street from where I work is an enormous mulberry tree. I stop under the arching branches to stain my fingertips and lips purple with the dark and shining berries.
• Having risen earlier than I needed to for a 9:00 workshop, I step out onto the balcony to sip my chai and finish another chapter from the novel I’m reading.
• I spend an hour Skyping with a friend. After we hang up, I walk into another room and find a book she gave me open on the desk. I touch it and reflect on the oddity of it…feeling so close to someone I’ve never met face to face.

To Break the Seal or Not

In March I had a dream which I reported to my mother in an email:

Mom,

I had a dream about us last night. We were wandering together through some shops, boutiques and architectural ruins. You opened a beautiful bottle of something that was up on a wall of a room, like a gorgeously appointed old Bed & Breakfast room. I noticed that the bottle had a seal and that one was not meant to break the seal unless one was prepared to pay for the whole bottle. It was some sort of really amazing French liqueur. Rather than crying over spilt milk (having to pay some enormous sum for this bottle), I decided that we would just pay whatever it cost and be glad it was ours.

What I remember best about this dream was the beauty of everything around us. It was a soft beauty with muted colours, like white-on-white.

And my mother had written this in reply:
Well, I will share the few things that have come to my mind, so far, about the dream. It seemed to me to be about our trip through life and it’s experiences together..and our relationship through it all.. and the potential for our relationship in the future.. The shops and boutiques represent some everyday stuff and some especially fun stuff, the architectural ruins represent the original home that crumbled and left “remains”. There is a lot of detail about the environment of the room where the sealed bottle was. Most of it has no particular significance to me. The thing that jumps out for me is the fact that the bottle contained something rare and wonderful that would come at a high price and that one could not taste it unless they were willing to buy the whole thing. It reminds me of something like going into deep therapy or analysis where you have to be willing to open up everything to really reap the benefits. Since this dream seems to be about you and me, I see the sealed bottle as our relationship over the years as well as now . Perhaps it suggests we should leave it sealed unless we are prepared to drink the whole bottle and pay the high price which would be the pain that goes with opening old wounds, etc. The benefit we would get for our pain and suffering would be a strengthening and enriching of our relationship and the promise of even greater joys in shared experiences in the future. (like sharing the joy of appreciating the beauty of everything around us , like white-on-white) What do you think? Your turn. Mom

I thought my mother’s interpretation of my dream was insightful and also telling of her own feelings toward our relationship. I had for a long time felt sad that our relationship had to remain on a relatively superficial level. We never seemed to be able to maneuver skillfully through areas of hurt feelings, misunderstandings or disappointments.  Both of us, for the longest time, were very thin-skinned. We each had to walk on eggshells around the other or risk big blow-ups that never seemed to produce anything of value and only served to injure one or both of us.

For years I have longed to be able to broach sensitive territory with my mother in an adult way, remaining respectful and calm. Or could we perhaps learn to do so with a sense of humour, I wondered. I yearned for this because I sensed there was a depth of closeness we were missing out on and might never get to enjoy before it was too late.

As this trip drew nearer, I spent some time wondering if we might attempt what we had never been able to accomplish before.

Before There Were Moleskines,…

“I might be able to go a week without blogging, but I don’t think I can go without keeping a journal at all,” I told my mom on Saturday morning. “Do you have a blank book I can have?”

“Oh, I think I have one that was your father’s. I took it on a retreat not long ago,” she said.

“That silent retreat you went on, the one where your friend ML wouldn’t shut up the whole time?”

“That one. Let’s see…” she said as she dug through the drawers of the antique buffet in the living room.  ”Here we go!” She handed me the slim ledger book bound in black leather. It looked very much like a lined Moleskine except for the red page edges and red double lines running down each right margin where the figures were to be written in a column.

“This has to be over forty years old,” I said as I turned it over slowly in my hands. I smiled and told her with my eyes how much it meant to me to have this notebook passed to me from my father through her.

I disappeared into the bedroom to make my first journal entry. But before I could do that, I was compelled to read what my mother had written during her retreat on contemplative living:

No plans, no goals.

“If you think you know why you’re here, you don’t know why you’re here.”

Why this hunger?

Grace drew us here. It’s a riddle.

Surrender to the self transforming process.

3-fold vision (philosophy) of contemplative life. not a doctrine. how reality grants itself to us. personal sense of direction. the way is obscure (not to the Deep Self)

1. the divinity of what just is – awareness that present moment, just the way it is, is the perfect manifestation of the mystery we seek
2. you can have these moments when you are very young and you spend the rest of your life trying to grow into it.
3. we are impelled to set out on a path of self-transformation. we want to end our discontent and be true to the exp. of our childhood

More to come…

Like Crossing the River Styx

At the Detroit Metro Wayne County Airport, there is a long pedestrian tunnel connecting two terminals. Inside this tunnel is a multi-media installation that is described in the following way on Wikipedia:

The “B” and “C” concourses are connected to the main terminal building and the “A” concourse by a pedestrian walkway under the tarmac. This walkway, known as the Light Tunnel, features an elaborate multi-colored light show behind sculpted glass panels extending the entire length of the walkway, as well several moving walkways. The light patterns are synchronized with an original musical score composed by Victor Alexeeff, which runs for nearly a half hour before repeating. This installation, one of the first large scale uses of color changing LED lighting in the United States, was produced by Mills James Productions with glasswork by Foxfire Glass Works of Pontiac, Michigan. The display won multiple lighting design awards including the prestigious Guth Award of Merit. For passengers who are prone to medical conditions such as seizures, there are buttons at each end of the tunnel that will suspend the light show for five minutes so they can pass through with no adverse affects.

As I stood on one moving walkway going toward the terminal where I would find my departure gate, I gazed across the tunnel at passengers coming the opposite direction on the other side of the tunnel. They didn’t look quite earthbound, these backlit figures that were moving against the backdrop of the shifting light show. Lime green faded to purple, which brightened again to electric eel blue, which gave way to spring-dawn yellow.  I watched the figures: some tall, some short. There were males and females, adults and children passing one another, following, getting ahead, dropping behind. All voices were swallowed by the mysterious electronic music.  The figures with their eerie auras of light were too far away from from the opposite stream for any communication between or among them, and were moving too quickly for exchanges with those going the same direction nearby.

It felt to me like watching souls on their way to the next life. We could passively observe others in the distance on the same journey, but could not communicate. Surreal.

You can see videos of what it’s like to be inside the tunnel if you visit YouTube and look for “Detroit airport tunnel.”