Category: essay

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Five Years Ago–Happy Revolutions


Facebook reminds me that I have a memory from five years ago, a picture of my then 12 year old daughter in braids and new-budding body and me, lean and less harried (the intervening five years ran roughshod over my face and spirit), walking a 4th of July 5k that is an annual staple of my town, that and the parade that follows. A rare photo in that my younger daughter awoke early to participate in this event with me. She has seen me run all of her life, even gone with me via stroller or bicycle. Running and soccer predominated over our home all of her life.

Except my daughter, a soccer player since a toddler following in her older sister’s footsteps, literally, has never enjoyed running. In fact, her particular style of soccer reveals a constant strategy to minimize sprints and chases. She outsmarts rather than outruns. So, this particular photo reveals the rare and typical: the two of us in an early morning race–walking. 

I remember this day vividly. She and I raced to the race, having awakened late. By the time we reached the starting line, the race had begun and we raced along in the throngs of sneakered early-morning celebrators. We ran our race before it began, a well-known mistake for one who had run dozens of prior races, short and long. Pacing. We had not paced ourselves, so the photo captures us walking at the three-quarters mark, me with serious intent and recovery written on my expression and she with discovery and rescue broadcast on hers. We were enjoying the moment of breath and notice, me ever deep inside myself and she with wonder of the street lined masses outside.

The friend who took the picture much to my surprise traveled in a group tour with me to the Costa Rican Carribbean rain forest jungle on a yoga retreat. We became waterfall hiking companions as well as yoga classmates on the trip and afterward at the health club we both attended. I did not know he had taken the picture until he posted it on my wall. That memory and all it blankets coupled with a coffee quiet morning foreshadows a lovely 4th. 

Happy, peaceful revolutions to you all.

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Coffee-Time-Meditation: Ten For Today (Slow Write, Fast Thoughts)


Coffee with a friend results in too much coffee for the day, making my bones jitter. My usual monkey mind races through the chatter jungles even faster and wilder than usual, turning and grabbing each vine-thought as it drops in sight–rapid fire.  This compared to yesterday’s thirty-minute meditation miracle contrasts like peace and chaos. Amazing how days vary so much, even while seeming the same while we experience them.

The yoga center free meditation session, which I have been meaning to attend for months, turned out deeply pleasant, a nice piggy back to the quality quiet and sitting in the monastery meditation room just two days before. Quiet makes all the difference. And not just any quiet. The infinite soundless quiet, soaked in all the meditations breathed before in unspoken time, en-layers the ease of slipping under the mind. My home has too much rackety noise and pending obligation to set me free.

Finding the depth of solitude to get underneath the mind’s skin needs place and moment. A quest to find just that place piques ticklish wonder. Maybe what we here call the dungeon aka the sound-proof music room/man cave beckons me.

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July 1st Ten Minutes of Life – Mad Dad

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July 1, 2016

I overhear my father speaking to my brother on the phone. He laughs as he reports that each time he sees a doctor, security is called. He thinks it’s funny. To me, it’s a reminder of the anger gene I inherited—which is not funny. Overcoming this trait—to anger easily and frequently—comprises my life work. And as I get older, my life’s work becomes more challenging.

My father’s doctors do not need security. My father’s doctors need to know that anger gets the best of him every so often, and he says foolish things, downright scary, violent words accompanied by mad gesticulations and facial expressions. Those who don’t know him well might fear. His last outburst was directed at the receptionist manning his doctor’s phones. She bore the brunt of his crazed-from-pain-and-impatience anger and threats spewed in demonic tones, I’m sure. I was not there.

But when the four police officers on my lawn caught my attention from inside the house, I found that they were cautious, though easily assuaged of their suspicions, that my father, who sat in front of them in a lawn chair in our front yard (detained), was relatively harmless. Neither of us owns a gun, after all.

My father had just ten minutes before told me that he lost patience and insinuated to the receptionist some veiled threat—this within days of the Orlando nightclub shooting. The doctor’s office receptionist and entire staff reacted seriously. When I heard it, I did not. I had heard these idle threats before and his relating them to me as if he had said them. Usually he admits that he felt like threatening out loud but did not. This time he admitted he said it, said something menacing.

No, I cannot say I was entirely surprised when I saw the cops in front of the house. Yes, he is a slouching, skinny 6 foot 3, 82 year old man, who looks older these days due to back pain, cancer surgery and infection recovery. And he rambles incoherently at times, particularly under duress, but he knows how to smooth things over too. The cops detected my exasperation and his beaten down pride, maybe even shame. Certainly embarrassment. So they let him go with a warning that next time…

A week later, his chuckling over the security guard called to his last doctor’s appointment reminds me of the cover up we end up having to do after we lose our cool—he and I both—to others and ourselves.

 

image: maddad/blogspot

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Today’s Ten Minutes–The Sanctuary

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June 30, 2016

 

Woke up with a pleasant, little hang-over, feeling calm and assured, recalling the spatial quietude both inner and outer of the Rama Krishna Vedanta Monastery in Rancho Santa Margarita. Snapshots of the musty, library thick with sound-absorbing books with titles like Yoga, the Vedanta, and You. I sat down on a faux leather sink-in couch and perused a few images on instructional pages before moving on to the meditation room. This dark sanctuary, replete with incensed-burning altar centered with a framed photo of one of the Rama Krishna disciples, I assume, compacted, thick, chewy air. I did not get close enough to examine the framed face heading the room. No, I stayed back in the sunken square dotted with cushy meditation pillows and blankets in deep wine and maroon velveteen or faux silk.

Pulling one aside, I sat on the pillow and lapsed into my habitual meditation pose, legs in half lotus, palms down and forefinger-thumb circled knees. I don’t know how long I breathed into the space which sucked out all noise save the air conditioner among three breathers. The desert outside did not exist in this room resonant with an abundance of meditations past: innumerable daily practicing monks and others since the 40s. Rich with endeavor and calm, I fell into the room’s focused peace.

The sweaty outdoor hike that followed contrasted deeply with steep climbs and declines along a narrow, mud-hardened, bramble-lined, winding path amid the chaparral—the shrine trail–leading to five meditative spaces symbolic of five religions or practices: Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism and Vedanta. The highest spot is the last, the Vedanta, which embraces both physically (highest climb) and spiritually all the others.

On the way out, the 18 year old son of a friend who accompanied me, purchased in the gift shop a jar of honey produced by the bees the monks keep on the property and allow to swarm the lily-laced fountain pool surrounding the shrine statue located between the mess hall and library. He had never tried honey before. And so the little jaunt ended as it began with the same, sweet, subdued astonishment.

 

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Ten Minutes More

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June 28, 2016

I breathed into this one a great deal yesterday: Tomorrow will be a day full of challenges small and large, the largest being the lack of time to think. A day full of so much activity (appointments, work, work and work) without any time to ponder the condition of the day–and me–for a small yet centered bit of time used to be every day. And that was just fine. I rather preferred not thinking and just doing. It warded off the demons I was keeping down inside me, in that deep, deep place no one—not even I—can locate. The busier I was, the less time I had to reflect about how my life was going or not going. It suited me just fine and then, of course, delayed the inevitable revolt of the repressed, those wild demonic fears and dissatisfactions named “where am I going and where have I been?”

But today’s busy-ness did not arrive with relish. In fact, the scheduled activities brought nothing more than the challenges of practicing what I know I must do but find difficult to do: appreciate everything more. Yet there’s no question in my mind (first mistaken location to start the day) that I do not appreciate taking my father to his doctor appointment down south 30 minutes in weekday traffic, abiding his ever stream of mad rant. “Why are we going to more doctors? They don’t know anything and just want to take my money and make me miserable. I’d like to give them some of their own medicine. Why do they allow trucks on the freeway? In New York, they only allow trucks on the expressway so the shmucks don’t slow down traffic. Look at that asshole driving so slow, holding up traffic.” This is the running monologue I expect and too often get before he asks me what we’re going to eat when we get out of the good-for-shit doctor’s office.

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Today’s Ten-Minute Write

I don’t know what I think until I write it down—Joan Didion

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In my web journeys today, I discovered a site called Life in 10 Minutes that collects and features ten-minute life writes. Much to my delight, this site celebrates what I do most days anyhow, write for ten minutes to a timer just to get a little heat to my brain and fingers, a warm-up if you will. After the free-write, I am ready to take on larger writing endeavors, like an essay or poem or whatever else that needs writing.

Though I have never thought of publishing these exercises in their entirety, taking only bits and pieces to flesh out into something grander, I might tinker with this idea of setting them out here as-is for a while to see what they bear.

I hope you enjoy today’s ten minutes of life.

June 27, 2016

Today feels like yesterday, except less fatigued and more awakened. My muscles after a half hour of yoga to start the day feel thick and rubbery like those industrial size rubber bands that bind a ream of paper’s worth of words—a manuscript, for example–together with firmness yet flexibility. My strut is glide-easy balanced between the push and pull of gravity.

And though the heat is slightly oppressive and my father is calling me on my cell phone once again from just inside the other side of the house, disrupting my writing—yet again, to ask me one of several questions he asks daily: “Are you hungry? What are we eating? Do you need anything from Sam’s? The answers to which are all 90 % of the time “No, I don’t know and no,” I sit in good-willed contentment and compassion. It is how he communicates, after all, how he crafts the world—plot, character and theme all food.

So today, with soft-hardness under the pads of my feet and surrounding the gooey gray matter inside my hard head, I have promised us both not to take it personally, not to react like night to day, inevitable and expected, even as nothing is ever guaranteed. I let the word “Dad” that flashes on my Samsung phone screen evoke a nanosecond of knee-jerk irritation before I exhale with the word ‘calm’ unformed but sunk-in performed. We will have this day of little perturbation, only small speed bumps that we will drive over slowly, braking down, deliberately pressing the gas pedal with a long whispered inhale and even longer exhale.

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Searching for the light switch in the dark

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“If a man going down into a river, swollen and swiftly flowing, is carried away by the current — how can he help others across?” – The Buddha

I am that man. Some days, at least. Absorbing the toxic words and actions around me in the news, on the roadways and in my own home, I swell with anger or fear so plumped that I could not pull myself out of the fast flowing river of popular roars and rants if there were a thousand outstretched helping hands lined up along the banks for miles.

 

And yet, I know the flip of the switch we all possess to alleviate the suffering that comes from the world being too much with us. Choosing not to allow the inflow of water or to let it pass through prevents the swollen suffering.

Detachment isn’t a synonym for tuning out, more so tuning in while refusing to participate. The only way to survive this volatile time on the planet and at home is as the scientist examining the world and my responses to it under a bell jar, watching with dispassionate interest the outcome and culmination of all the forces I choose not to be swept up by, like that river that I can fall in and under or navigate with the vessel that allows safe passage–for me and you.

There is a switch we can all turn on that allows us not to react to the chaos and frenzy around us but to observe it without attachment. I keep looking for that light switch in the dark.

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Preview of Upcoming Publication: Yoga and Gravity Unbound


Happy International Yoga Day. In honor, I have written a soon-to-be-published essay about yoga, meditation, gravity, growth, language, presence and play.

“Growing up” is the metaphor, like a slow-rocket burst through the air in defiance of gravity. So many metaphors about that first half of the arc that rainbows our lives bespeak struggle against warring forces like the pitfalls of acquiring experience called trial and error and raging hormonal bodily take-over that is puberty. Not only the breaking through, busting out and bursting metaphors of rising roots characterize maturing, but also minefield metaphors of making mistakes as we learn, falling in missteps (failing a driver’s license test, picking the wrong partner, losing a job) and picking oneself up from such falls. Struggle.

Learning our bodies and minds requires overcoming. Charlotte Joko Beck in Everyday Zen writes about the spiritual growth of achieving zen and states that “the process of becoming fully independent (or of experiencing that we already are that) is to be terror, over and over and over.” Our struggle lies in the fear of breaking free of our own mind chains–of falling.

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You Want To See The Face Of A True (as Opposed To A Wannabe) Rebel?

Bingham met Ali thirty-five years ago in Los Angeles, shortly after the fighter had turned professional and before he discarded his “slave name” (Cassius Marcellus Clay) and joined the Black Muslims. Bingham subsequently became his closest male friend and has photographed every aspect of Ali’s life: his rise and fall three times as the heavyweight champion; his three-year expulsion from boxing, beginning in 1967, for refusing to serve in the American military during the Vietnamese War (“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong”); his four marriages; his fatherhood of nine children (one adopted, two out of wedlock); his endless public appearances in all parts of the world–Germany, England, Egypt (sailing on the Nile with a son of Elijah Muhammad’s), Sweden, Libya, Pakistan (hugging refugees from Afghanistan), Japan, Indonesia, Ghana (wearing a dashiki and posing with President Kwame Nkrumah), Zaire (beating George Foreman, Manila (beating Joe Frazier)…and now, on the final night of his 1996 visit to Cuba, he is en route to a social encounter with an aging contender he has long admired–one who has survived at the top for nearly forty years despite the ill will of nine American presidents, the CIA, the Mafia, and various militant Cuban Americans.

“Ali in Havana” by Gay Talese (Best American Essays)

“Hating people because of their color is wrong. Andit doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.”

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Road Trip


Travel jumpstarts wonder. 

Leaving the usual haunts along the same paths to and from work, market or eateries, draws out the dormant words, smoldered sparks awaiting flint. 

Nothing but changing scenery piques alertness, imagery and observation so profoundly. 

I eat nature.  

Travel bits piece large land masses speeding roadside to tiny impressions, ideas and memory fragments, creating a large mosaic of tile-words. 

As I write, I fly over the Pacific on my way to Seattle to meet a connecting flight to Spokane, where she awaits.

More likely she waits for my call: “I’m here.” 

She and I will drive the distance Google reports as 19 and a 1/2 hours, but I know better. 

Last June, we drove her to Spokane for school. 

She left school–and Spokane–in December to come home and heal.

Last week, she finally returned to the life she began to make there before the unfortunate detour, the accident.

Her head.

She, who took me to a radical feminist art show last April, who sometimes wears a “cunt” pin, who sports Klimt’s The Kiss line drawing of two women tattooed above her ankle, and who smirkingly cranks up Taylor Swift’s “We are never getting back together” on the car radio, will be my car companion across three states homeward.

Road trip.

Just like last year, the rain astonishes us, its violent insistence.

And again, the greenness of green, the way rain pelts the tinny Honda framed windows reminds me of crackling gum chewers, and the nod to engineers knowing that windshield wipers need three or four speeds, these three I recall in a whirlwind road-swallowing marathon beside a semi-conscious travel mate.

She peered into satan’s screen for 23 of the 24 hours. 

But she never could figure out how to find the nearest vegan restaurant to the five freeway in downtown, perhaps too daft from sleeplessness or not acquainted with practical phone features as much as the camera, social media apps and texting.

I grow older in bounding leaps, too old for freezing, middle-of-the-night rest stops along two-lane, farm-house roadways without gas stations for 94 miles and cramped, compact car cabins designed for legless sleepers.

It could have been the blue moon.

I drove and drove, sidling mountain edges; through snowy pines and meadows, rain-soaked forests and cloud-burst flashes drenching miles of almond trees squared off in rows blurring into golden heather fields dotted with black Jerseys ruminating time and space in their masticant jowly bovine stares prescient with the soon-approaching L.A. traffic psychosis.

And home.

Only my biceps carry the road residuals: the mindless painful wheel gripping in the desperate fight against gravity’s theory. 
 

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