My mental circus, inside and out.

Skill

We often think of skills as things we do by hand or by thought: carpentry, writing, math, plumbing, being able to spell or to build a sturdy fence.  In our culture, people are divided into social classes by skill, and Emma recently heard a paper on slavery in which the scholar was redefining skill.  There was a real skill to picking cotton quickly, though it was defined as unskilled in that tragic system of warped views.  Skill adds up to a whole lot of ego for many people because of the hierarchy of skills.

 Living skillfully, for a Buddhist means cultivating a set of skills that few people recognize as skills, although those who successfully obtain these skills generally do better for themselves because they are so much nicer to be around.  This has been known as the art of living, but  few really understand that like any art, it requires a set of skills that are rarely taught and must be obtained through observation of one's own being,  just as one might observe the action of one's own body in learning to dance.  Some people seem to have a natural talent for joy and compassion--we all know warm and open people who seem to have been born that way.  But natural talent is not required, given the many stories of people who experienced some kind of sea change in midlife. All of the skills one learns through medtiation and daily mindfulness add up to a relaxed and joyful state of being.  This is not a state of belief but a daily practice to live harmoniously and creatively in one's environment, whatever it is.  Emma wishes that these skills--the good skills of cultivating joy, equanimity, and compassion in one's thoughts and actions--would be taught in schools.   These are really nondenominational skills, like getting good at math or spelling.  You can get good at joy.  You can  get good at equanimity.  And hey, you can start any time at developing these skill sets, and maybe since many of us are teachers we can find a way to introduce the idea.

Posted by: EmmaPele at January 31, 2007 20:00 | link | comments (2)

the gift

Lying in bed at 6:30 a.m. this morning, Emma hears the rasp of the snow shovel.  The Christian neighbor.  He is always out there very early after every new snow, making sure his sidewalk is clear for all the walkers.   Emma's own sidewalk has been neglected this past week because she has been so busy and then so exhausted from being so busy.  And yet the snow has come every day and a layer of ice has built up. 

Emma gets out of bed and looks out the window.  The sky is an orange color characteristic of snow.  Down below, she sees that her sidewalk has also been cleared.   She feels a mix of embarrassment and gratitude.  The embarrassment is from ego, the worry that the cleared path is a message to her that she is not doing her neighborly duties.  That is one way of reading this sign in the snow.  But another way is that her dear neighbor has been compassionate enough to take on this extra labor out of his good-heartedness.

And here Emma understands the lesson of the gift.  If one receives the gift with uneasiness, one robs the gift of its merit.  If one receives it with an open and accepting heart, both giver and receiver gain the benefit of the cleared path.

 

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at January 30, 2007 19:36 | link | comments (2)

random thoughts

Mmm quiet.   Emma's old poet friend John was telling her that his brother went off to live in an ashram for several years and he concluded that it takes about six months of meditation to get into the destressed state that many people in the world already experience, simply because their lives are much quieter, their rhythms of life more gentle, and they are removed from the restless activity of modern life.  But perhaps this is a pastoral, romanticized version of life on the farm.  Emma also had conversations with a very smart person who wanted to argue that happiness always comes from external conditions, not internal ones, so it is always a matter of improving one's external conditions.   Emma just does not believe this for a moment, since many people in dire circumstances manage to be joyful somehow with whatever labor they are doing.  Since this person also said that he was often very angry, especially at the injustice in the world, Emma thought that he should turn within to seek out the roots of his anger, and perhaps that was exactly what he was busy avoiding.  In Emma's field, there are many angry people who transpose their inner anger into views about the world, and they look for evidence to support and maintain their anger (and often and perhaps more importantly their egos) rather than opening their hearts with compassion.  In fact, Emma observed this many times over the weekend, a tightness and constraint in people, as they railed against the government and the system and the world.  Emma has been thinking a lot about her own work in this regard, and wondering what it will look like now that she has begun to fundamentally change.  She and John also had a conversation about this, in which he urged her to write about Buddhist activism.  However, Emma has no desire to write about Buddhism as a form of scholarship or as a set of views or even as a way of activism.  Emma is not even sure Buddhism can be a way of activism, and this is an old, classic question on which Buddhists disagree.  In any event, Emma has no wish to inject her own ego into Buddhist practice by corralling it into some kind of formal work, since this would, indeed, be defeating.   Emma writes about Buddhism anonymously here, on this blog, to avoid ego, and if anything, she sees it as creating a new freedom and form of expression within herself and some small, honest offering to anyone who might be interested.  Talking to some Marcuse folks, who espouse "liberation philosophy," Emma discovered that they were like-minded, and so perhaps she can get on the Marcuse train.  Emma has no wish to chase what is fashionable or what will get her ahead in her career, but it seems there is loving community possible even in a sphere as dire as academia, which is a petri dish for breeding anger, competition, and ego.

 

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at January 29, 2007 20:51 | link | comments (2)

the weekend

What an *amazing* weekend.   Emma spent two days with mostly cheerful, like-minded people from all over the world, and then at the end of it, after sheparding all the visiting Europeans around, including the small Serbian man who had recently been invited to the House of Lords and the tall Swiss she had to run to keep up with, she had a drink with some very old friends, including her ex-husband whom she hadn't seen in many years.  He looked the same, only grayer, and his third wife understandably looked a little tense across the table.  But their very old friend Phil occasionally broke into poetry from his impressive memory, and so the evening was full of Yeats and other shamans and catching up on old times. And so time moves for all of us, with all of its fleeting experience and emotion.

Posted by: EmmaPele at January 28, 2007 23:00 | link | comments

the conference

So Emma is successfully getting through her first attempt at organizing a conference.  She did have tons of help, and the theme of the conference ensures that mostly really cool people are attending--friendly idealists who are not too narrow in outlook.  But of all the interesting things going on and people milling about, Emma's favorite moment was a small gathering for Tillie Olsen, in which people who knew her or who had been inspired by her work, sat in a circle and talked about her influence and read bits of her writing.  It was very close and informal, and everyone felt connected to the creative spirit and to Olsen's magnanimous love of all people, grocers and bank tellers and wizened old labor organizers.   Emma has had long conversations today about the inspirations of Eric Fromme and Herbert Marcuse, the ethical dilemmas of the Russian terrorist group People's Will, millennial conspiracy theories, and a host of other interesting things and so she is now happily off to bed.

Posted by: EmmaPele at January 27, 2007 11:12 | link | comments