My mental circus, inside and out.

dead duck

This is really true.  Emma was out putzing around in the garden today planting pansies (which, she was interested to learn from Wikipedia, is a symbol of free thought, secularism, humanism, and freedom from religion.)  Suddenly, she heard a huge crash and turned to see a gaping hole in the window of her storm door.  She didn't even have time to think before a mallard duck flew out the hole from inside her house and began waddling around her garden.  Emma watched the duck, wondering what to do.  Strangely, he seemed to be no worse for wear.  Then another whirrrrrrrrr and a female duck came flying out from her house and the pair flew off.   Inside, Emma's hallway was full of glass shards and a bright pool of red blood, much more crimson than human blood.   Emma doubted that our poor female duck lived for much longer since she was the first through the glass and suffered the damage.

Emma's daughter said, "What does it mean, Mom?"  She was afraid it was some kind of omen.  "I think it means ducks are stupid," Emma said.  Neighbors came around to speculate about the ducks.  After all, this isn't exactly the wide open spaces but a close suburban community.  "Maybe it was an old flyby," they wondered.  "Maybe the door looked like water to them."  Emma's son said,  "I hope ducks don't mate for life."  They then felt sad.

Posted by: EmmaPele at April 30, 2007 06:18 | link | comments (3)

Anger

So, as you may already know, Emma has been on this Democratic Singles site, and on Friday she received the following tirade:

I am genuinely amazed, even startled, by the opening sentence in your profile. "Buddhist-atheist-rational intellectual..." Honestly, who are you trying to impress? lol lol This is a DATING site, for gods sake. Were you never taught to write simply...to write so that people can understand you? Your profile reads like something out of a "Monty Python" sketch. And, here's the kicker, you end by warning readers (who actually made it this far) "I can't take care of anyone with a history of mental illness.." lol lol In the field of mental health, it is those who do not realize their ill that are by far the sickest.

You may be a very nice person, and, it sounds as though you've led an interesting life...that I admire. However, and I mean this in the kindest way, you are delusional. You need to seek help from a mental health professional right away.

Well, Emma immediately forwarded this to customer service, saying that if this was an isolated incident, no big deal, but if this person was doing this to other women, perhaps something should be done about it.  She also suggested to this person that he examine why he felt such anger and the need to diminish and ridicule women who were complete strangers to him and with whom he had no quarrel.

Throughout this incident, it was hard for Emma to remain calm in the face of insult; however, she remembered her own lesson about anger.  One of the most beloved suttas recounts an incident in which a brahman came and abused the Buddha when he was giving a public discourse.  The Buddha asked him, "Friend, when you entertain guests, and they refuse to eat the food you offer, who gets it?"  The brahman answered,  "The food returns to me, and is mine."  The Buddha asked, "If you offer abuse to me, and I don't accept it, who gets it?"

"Even so, brahman, you are abusing us who do not abuse, you are angry with us who do not get angry, you are quarreling with us who do not quarrel. All this of yours we don't accept. You alone, brahman, get it back; all this, brahman, belongs to you.

"When, brahman, one abuses back when abused, repays anger in kind, and quarrels back when quarreled with, this is called, brahman, associating with each other and exchanging mutually. This association and mutual exchange we do not engage in. Therefore you alone, brahman, get it back; all this, brahman, belongs to you."

Emma has had to eat her own anger over the years because it was not accepted, and this is a most excellent lesson.

Posted by: EmmaPele at April 28, 2007 21:56 | link | comments (5)

we are all mothers

This link is for my fellow writing teachers to give you a laugh at the end of the semester.

Emma has been thinking about a Buddhist idea that we have all been each other's mothers.  In a Buddhist worldview, consciousness has no beginning, and therefore, in an infinite span of time, we have all had every sort of relationship with each other.  The Dalai Lama has a suggested meditation, to meditate very concretely on our own mother's care of us, when we were in the womb, and then to extend this to a thankfulness to all persons for their past care.  The meditator, in effect, becomes mother to the world, extending that kind of love to all.  For mothers, this works even better, in Emma's view, since we know what it is to carry a child.  Emma wonders what it is like for monks, or any man, to do this meditation, since it asserts that we have all been women, or at least urges us to put ourselves in the position of mothers and to feel what they feel.  Emma is lucky enough to have had a loving mother to think about, though perhaps for those who have had some kind of difficulties with their mothers, this meditation, with its broadening of scope, might help.

Posted by: EmmaPele at April 25, 2007 20:18 | link | comments (1)

bad poem

What are you doing reading a blog!? Go outside!

Emma always has a very bad poem in her head on any nice day.  It is a poem by Sara Teasdale:  "What is so rare as a day in June?/Then if ever come perfect days./Heaven tests earth if it be in tune/and over it softly her warm ear lays."  Now  Emma is sure you will agree that this is indeed a terrible poem, not worth any brain space,and yet for some reason long ago she memorized it and it has stuck there, among all the other detritus.  Like a white sugar buzz.

Emma was trying to be really equanimous about the weather, trying not to judge one day as bad, one as good.  This is one of those Buddhist quests, so you think of those hermits who sit in a thin cloth on the coldest mountain days, completely unperturbed.  In fact, she visited the grocery story one day last week and the clerk said, "Terrible weather isn't it?" Emma said, "I'm trying to treat all weather with equanimity so I don't suffer when it's cold."  The clerk looked at her.  "That's good I guess."  Emma feels she was thinking:  Crazy person. 

Crazy people often don't have a sense of the weather.  There was a guy in Emma's hometown who was known as the rocket man.  One of those people considered an annoyance in the city, but a charming asset in a small town,  the village idiot.  He, too, was a poet.  Emma remembers one of the verses he would mumble:  "Hop on a toenail wagon."  Very Zen. The rocket man was said to have manufactured his own LSD and driven himself crazy by taking it.  A doubtful,moralizing story, but anyway.  He wore a very heavy coat in all months of the year, even on the hottest summer days.

It is indeed the first very nice weekend we have had this year, here in MIchigan.  The trees are starting to leaf out now along our street.  It was a good day for a bike ride yesterday, out in the country, along the stubble fields. Out on the sun porch, Emma has been reading Julian Sand's Arthur & George, a pleasant novel, very British, everything expressed beneath the surface.  Maddening in real persons, pleasant in novels.

Posted by: EmmaPele at April 22, 2007 20:10 | link | comments (2)

the date

Emma had this date last night.  She has a hard time blogging about dates because she finds them very emotionally and intellectually confusing experiences.  For one thing, she is having a Buddhist dilemma. If one is to love all persons with equanimity, than what does it mean to attach to one person as a sexual relationship requires.  Furthermore, sexual attraction is based on making judgments about people, what features you find attractive, and this runs counter to equanimous acceptance of whatever it is that you might find distasteful or even ugly.  We can easily discern that ugliness and beauty are delusions (one of the Buddhist meditations is to contemplate our own distasteful features), but sexual attraction or repulsion doesn't respond to this kind of reason.  Emma has found that often times people she has not been immediately attracted to have grown attractive over time, just as people she was immediately attracted to have become repulsive over time.  The Dalai Lama suggests that because this is the case, you can see that attraction and repulsion are not fixed to any person and that this frees you to love all, even your enemies who undoubtedly were once your friends. 

So this date was sexually aggressive, touching Emma a lot, insisting on kissing her, but while Emma thought he was a very interesting, fine person she just didn't feel any kind of spark, and was even finding the experience distasteful and he had a funny smell and Emma wondered if she were inflating the importance of this smell in order to avoid intimacy.  After all, who, including Emma, doesn't have a funny, if  not downright bad odor at one time or other.  Who doesn't have bad smells contained within the shell of the body?  Now it could be that Emma is just closed off from such experiences these days, but it felt more as if she hadn't had any time to form any kind of bond with this person that would make him attractive, so this smell was as if an insistence and perhaps a sense of entitlement that was forcing itself into her space.  She began to find other reasons not to like him--all bogus.  And all of these reasons for not liking him hinged on the question of whether she found him sexually attractive or not, a question forced by the occasion of the date.  If she had just met him at an academic meeting she wouldn't have thought one way or the other, would even have found him quite delightful and would have enjoyed seeing him on other occasions.

Of course, Emma has often had the opposite experience of being attracted to people for nothing more than, for example, their hair or their voice, and finding them likeable based on no other evidence. 

And this seems to be the problem with sexual relationships.  Sexual attraction, which is judging all the time, is a very bad judge of character and yet it seems to be something over which we have little control. 

Emma's best relationships have been those that have grown over time, and yet many people insist that they have no time.

Posted by: EmmaPele at April 22, 2007 00:08 | link | comments (4)