My mental circus, inside and out.

frogs

This is a magical time in Michigan, when the frogs come up from the mud to begin mating.  Suddenly, the silence of winter gives way to a roar.  That means spring is close.  

Posted by: EmmaPele at March 28, 2006 11:21 | link | comments (3)

Self-ing

Emma has been listening to a very good series of audiodharma lectures on Self/Not Self with Gil Fronsdal.  It's not too productive, apparently, to get caught up in questions of self/not self except in the sense that what Buddhists call "self-ing" creates suffering, and that is the thing to be avoided.   Self is a verb, an activity, in Buddhism, rather than a stable entity.  All of our desires to see ourselves in the past and in the future, to know who we were and where we are going, do not create the conditions for realization.  To always be comparing ourselves to each other, even to see ourselves as equal, is the practice of self-ing.

Avoiding suffering, Emma finds, is not easy, since suffering is existence's default mode.  She has been creating an inventory of her own suffering to see if she can possibly avoid or transcend it.  Right now, it's work stress that is causing her the most suffering, the worry that she will not keep up with all she has to do, and thus she will let people down or do badly, give a bad class or a bad talk or miss an important deadline or forget a meeting.   She gets completely caught up in worries over this, to the extent that the worry itself begins to defeat her since it makes her forgetful.   She had a dream last night about writing clean copy without any unnecessary commas, and that seems a good metaphor for a better life, good flow without unncessary commas--that is, self-imposed stoppages and interruptions.  (But do notice all of them in that last sentence.)

On a higher level, Emma knows that everything she worries about is insignificant.  That in four weeks, a year, five years, she won't even remember this week or last, nor will her students, nor will her colleagues, even if she made some egregious error  of impoliteness such as not showing up at a meeting or bumbling through a talk.   Even the very worst things that have happened to her begin to disappear, and she can't even console herself with bitterness over what are now only imaginary persons.   Persons who have changed, who are no longer who they were (one would hope!), and are certainly just as forgetful.

So what is all this worry.  Then again, Emma has to get to a meeting!

 

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at March 24, 2006 18:54 | link | comments (2)

Mrs. Whatsits

Emma out for sushi with her friend M.  They have been friends for many years.  M is depressed, her book turned down by agents, a troubled daughter who isn't speaking to her, a husband who has strayed and whom she can't really trust.   Besides, it is  March, the most depressing month of the year, and who knows why Eliot thought April was the cruelest month.  He could not have known Michigan.  Or perhaps he thought of April because the first of spring is more of a delusion than the foulest winter. 

Emma's relationship with M has changed.  Most of their time together in the past was talking about the interminable "boy question," far into middle age until it had become downright unseemly.   But they have finally seen it all.  The last boys, troubled by women, caught in secret obsessions with the most oppressive and boring porn, the last sputtering attempts at some kind of mating. . . well, how tedious it had all become.  Emma has no further interest in the boy question.  She is also happy, which has robbed those long girly conversations of a lot of their intimate sharing of agonies.  And she is trying to avoid engaging in any malicious gossip.  For her generation, these are the kinds of conversations that made up female friendship, though Emma was recently reading about the cool friendship of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy who believed they stood above all that. 

Now, in their aging, it is time, Emma feels, for them to become wise and happy, as is fitting for grandmothers.  Expansively spiritual and magical and brilliant.  Mrs. Whatsits with the keys to the tesseract.

Posted by: EmmaPele at March 22, 2006 09:52 | link | comments (3)

flea market

Emma's brother, who is executing Maud's estate, decides to sell all the junk no one wants at the local flea market, held in the county fairgrounds.  Emma would have strongly preferred that everything be given to the poor, but her brother feels an obligation to squeeze the last cent out of Maud's mostly modest possessions.  So Emma drives down to take her shift, in honor of family.

A strange and enlightening experience.  The flea market is held in the Junior Fair Building, where every summer the local farm kids display their spiffed-up sheep and calves.   During the winter, the flea market is held once a month, and the building is packed with career junk sellers, who go all over the state from flea market to flea market dragging the detritus of civilization with them in some gigantic recycling project.   Mostly bored, they visit each other's tables to chat about this  lifestyle and see if they can buy something to resell at a higher mark-up, so the goods recycle even from table to table.   These are not wealthy people, and there are many, many grey heads in this group.

Emma talks to one woman, dressed in a navy blue sweat suit with her leather money belt cinched tightly to her waist, who is wondering how much longer she can continue the flea market life with its hard labor and declining profits.  She has the hard voice of the smoker, speaking as if marbles were grinding against each other in her throat, but she still has long, girlish hair, down to her waist.  Emma notices that many of the people in the hall have curiously dated hairstyles,  the men still wearing beards and moustaches and  mullets, as if they had stepped out of 1975.   As a group, they seem to have a friendly, but fatalistic air about them. Emma imagines that these flea market folks are probably not computer types and are now getting a hard run from E-bay.

The Maud table is set in a good location near the entrance.  Emma is joined by two high school kids from her sister-in-law's theater class. They are gaining brownie points with the teacher as well as selling handmade lollipops with odd flavors such as "cheesecake" and "banana split."  They probably could have run the thing quite as well on their own, but Emma assumed her brother was worried about the cash box.

To the left of them is the Sixty Year Old Virgin who is selling his collection of science fiction VHS videotapes and a veritable army of GI Joes in unopened boxes, plus one Elvis doll in military uniform.   To the right of them is a Chicano man listening to a Tracy Chapman tape on an ancient cassette player and selling black mammy figurines.   Emma hears him say to a potential buyer, "I was buying black before black was popular!"  (Emma imagines that there is an academic paper somewhere in this.) She also hears him say, "I don't have a wife, I have a boss."  Ahead of them is a grey-haired woman wearing a handpainted sweatshirt and selling embroidered pillow cases who tells Emma she is potttery mad.  She buys two vases of Maud's that look to Emma like vegetation on an alien planet, but she seems incredibly delighted to have found them, especially at $2.  She tells Emma these are lovely old vases from a local pottery, not really convincing Emma of their beauty, but Emma feels very happy to have made her so happy.  

One of Maud's possessions is this small modest-looking woven basket.  Emma already knows that this is a valuable basket, since her sister recognized it as a collectable worth $150.   One could never tell by looking at it, not least Emma's brother, who has put a price tag of $2 on it.  Actually, Emma's brother has repriced everything, since Emma's niece, nascent E-bay capitalist and daughter of the Christian fanatics, had put outrageous prices on everything, such as $20 for a plastic bag full of orphaned cup saucers.   So Emma is very amused at this new $2 price, remembering Ajahn's recent diatribe on how bits of carbon torn from the ground by exploited labor become the most precious commodities because of the paucity of human values.   Well, who knows, perhaps the basket is very well-made.

So another grey-haired woman in a handpainted sweatshirt comes up to Emma's helpers with the basket.  She is obviously trying to hide her delight and surprise behind a poker face.  She hands over the $2.  Then she can't resist saying, "This is a Lundenberg basket!  I can't believe you have sold it to me for $2!"  Emma just nods and smiles.  Then she tells the high school students they have just sold a $150 basket for $2, provoking one of them to say, "Dang, I would have bought it myself!"  Emma has a second of regret, caught up in the avarice of the moment, but steps back to laugh at herself.  The woman  then travels from booth to booth, for she is obviously a flea market veteran, telling everyone, "I just bought a Lundenberg basket for $2!"  "Will you sell it??" another asks.  "Oh no, I'm keeping this!" she replies.  And she says to her husband as they are heading toward the doors, "Make sure to protect me on the way to the car."

The Lundenberg basket was the diamond of the flea market, a microcosm of America.

To see a thing clearly is to be liberated from it.

 

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at March 19, 2006 20:37 | link | comments (4)

failure

So here is grace.  Tonight after an incredibly stressful day--watching the baby, preparing for class, rushing to class, teaching class, obsessing about chairing a big meeting tomorrow, writing a comprehensive exam, worrying about the keynote address in a couple of weeks, and on and on--Emma went to toastmasters club to give the fifth speech  toward her "Competent Toastmaster" certificate.   Her speech was entitled "Stop the Waste," and she had practiced it ten times in her car driving here and there, snatching any moment she could in her incomprehensibly frantic day.  But when she stood up before the group, all prepared with props, the speech flew right out her head half way through. 

She stood there dumfounded.  Her mouth was bone dry.   She couldn't remember where she was going or where she had been.

She stopped and apologized to the group.  Jim, the charming good-ole-boy lawyer with the incongruously feminine voice, handed her his water.  "I haven't touched it," he said.   She took a drink, and in the surreal daze she was in, attempted to hand it back to him.  "No, no, you can keep it," he said.  There were murmers around the group:  "Just take a minute, Emma."

She resumed her speech, or at least what she remembered  of it, ending too quickly, still in this weird mental space where there seemed to be huge holes in her thinking.

The speeches are always evaluated.  Obviously, Emma had not performed well, and she was briefly embarrassed, but she knew she was being evaluated by Mike, a gentle retiree and excellent comedian.   Emma has formed a huge fondness for Mike because of his kindness and essentially good nature.  

Mike found everything that was good about her debacle of a speech, things she could not see herself because she was blinded by her moment of failure.  Not only did he teach Emma about what to do in such a moment, but he shepharded everyone in the group who had ever been afraid of a similar failure.  Mike's last speech was entitled, "Anything worth doing is worth doing. . . . badly." 

He told Emma afterwards that Winston Churchill always spoke from notes, and the one time that he spoke without notes, he forgot what he was saying and was jeered by the assembly.

The culture of this odd little group is based in kindness, compassion, and a healthy dose of good-natured ribbing.  The speeches are very revealing, not only in content but delivery, and by a person's  fifth or sixth speech, the group has begun to know that person pretty well.   The other week, one of the long-time members, who had woken only three days before to find his wife dead beside him, came to the meeting to practice her eulogy.  Though his speech was only supposed to take seven minutes, he couldn't stop, and so the group let him talk for fifty minutes as he grieved and searched for some kind of meaning.

What a beautiful space where Emma can lay down her heavy responsibilities and professional identity to be a regular person, without any pretensions.  A space where people fail, where people are completely human, and are still just as loved.

 

 

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at March 17, 2006 08:21 | link | comments (2)