My mental circus, inside and out.

Mujer de Mariposas

A story before she goes off on meditation.  In Monteverde, Emma walked down the road from Luis's to visit the Jardin de Mariposas.  She signed up for a guide, a calm, efficient Australian woman, sipping a cup of tea,  who led a small group of them around a table of scorpions, cockroaches, tarantulas, walking sticks, katydids, and very large caterpillars with horns.  Then they went out to the butterfly tents.   The first one was full of morphos, those bright blue butterflies, as big as a dessert plate, that you see all over the rainforest.  As Emma stood there, they began to land on her.  First one on her arm, then six or seven more, forming a kind of necklace on the bare skin above her breasts.  They had their sticky tongues unrolled, tasting her with great curiosity. The guide said she'd never seen anything like it.  Had Emma used any kind of scent that morning?  No, just hotel soap.  For whatever reason, those morphos had a thing for Emma, and she had a time unsticking them, placing them carefully on leaves before she left the tent. 

Posted by: EmmaPele at July 23, 2006 19:16 | link | comments (3)

There are rumors.  Those gone for the summer are protected from them.   It is said that a colleague, a leader in a field dominated by women, went home and announced to his much younger wife (also a colleague) that he was leaving her for a yet younger woman.   A fight ensued, leaving the wife wandering the neighborhood with a concussion.   She wound up at the house of the Native American scholar and confessed many plots and schemes in the couple's long bid for power.  Emma heard this story out on her four season porch, which is the place of the deepest happiness and calm she has ever felt in her life.  The women would be angry, she heard.  The women would punish the philanderer and wife beater by making sure he never worked in this town again.  They would finally see that their god had clay feet.

Emma feels rather grateful that she no longer believes in 1) gods or 2) revenge.  Given the frailties of human beings, tortured relationships exist in most households.  There's no use wishing even more suffering on those already suffering.  The universe takes care of that in its vast sea of cause and effect.   So why bother inflicting anger and revenge fantasies upon oneself?

Reading yet another article on happiness,  Emma is again astonished at how silly writers are on this topic.  For example: "Until extremely recently, happiness wasn’t even a value, much less an inalienable right."  As if happiness were a modern Western invention of the enlightenment.  Isn't that just incredibly silly? Philosophers have been talking about happiness for at least 3000 years and probably longer, and certainly people have been experiencing it!   So now, psychologists come up with the most obvious conclusions--be kind to others and you'll be happy--as if this were a new revelation rather than a truth that most people have known for eons.  The problem is that just telling people they ought to be kind does not make them kind, as we all know from our own failures.  

Happiness comes from understanding the nature of reality, but most people don't want to go there.  It means giving up a fantasy attachment to what is supposed to make you happy: sex, power, money.  It means accepting that everything is always changing, even states of happiness.  And from that ground, compassion arises for all beings caught in this crazy flux, even for people who in fits of passion and delusion beat up their wives.  

Any realistic view of passion shows just how awful and damaging and delusional it is.   There's something waaaaaaaaaaay better.

So there is another rumor that a certain state of meditation brings an ecstasy that is better than an orgasm.   Emma is off to a ten day meditation retreat to see if this is true.

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at July 22, 2006 21:56 | link | comments (3)

Emma's Back

Returning over the windy, bumpy roads, into the airport crowded mostly with other overheated gringos carrying decorative wood carvings, waiting endlessly for the  American Airlines flight, getting stuck in Miami overnight with a meal voucher worth only ten dollars--not even enough to buy the kid's hamburger on the hotel room menu, and talking to the other stranded travelers, a librarian who used her classification skills in birdwatching, a young guy just back from building a community center for the campesinos.. . then, another day of flying all the way west to Dallas and then back and up, but in a first class seat where you can actually *LIE DOWN* after drinking free liquor. ... . and so.  Home.  Home to the sun porch, and the backyard surrounded by trees and the sudden lilies and daisies. . . they weren't there when Emma left.  It is so quiet here.  Birds. The late summer insects.

Where are the small, brown barking dogs and the roosters crowing at 4am, the campesinos riding into town on Friday to cash their checks and hang out at the corner bars, the church ladies calling bingo in an outdoor tent just next to the park, the torrential storms called "tormentas" in Spanish hammering down on the tin roofs.

And especially Monteverde, and hanging around with Luis, who is holding forth on the decline of "la vida," the loss of frogs and birds in the rainforest, the loss of soul in the new money-grubbing ways of capitalism.   Sitting around on boards placed between bricks, drinking Pepsi and eating barbecued meat on tortillas from a wooden chair that is serving as a table. "Come back," he said.  "Learn Spanish here.  I will make you a good price."  In another life, Emma would have fallen  passionately in love with Luis with his thick black hair and serious manner.  Who else had ever parted the leaves of the hedge to reveal a juvenile sloth, living right there.  Perhaps it is another kind of love now, gentle and without grasping and extended to so many, the dark beautiful granddaughter enchanted with Barney, the Spanish teacher who thought it endlessly funny to watch accomplished people unable to speak more than a child's sentence in Spanish.

Well.  Deep subject, as her ex-husband used to say.

Posted by: EmmaPele at July 18, 2006 09:16 | link | comments (4)