quieter

Last week the sweetheart and I went to New York. I had a meeting, and for whatever reason we thought it would be fun to drive there for the day.

We took a box of cupcakes with us. We walked around a park and stopped at the Smithsonian on the way home. It was pretty fun. Just very long.

I made a photolog on my phone of our drive through the Holland Tunnel. I feel like people usually create photologs of things that take more than 10 minutes, so it was a form of savoring a moment that might not be considered savory.

He’s not really a city person. Honestly, I’m not sure that I’m much of a big city person anymore. I do love effective public transit, but I totally understand now why people want to escape to farms and rolling hills and such. It’s quieter. Maybe easier to feel a sense of peace or reflection or whatever.

no goals

I’m finishing work this week in Chicago, where I’ve been for the past few months. It’s been a mixed bag, honestly, but I’ve worked with some lovely people and gone from loathing this town to being rather fond of it.

This week I don’t really have any fixed plans, though I came at the suggestion of colleagues who believed we’d get together or meet or something. So I kept trying to make those plans. Last night I extended the idea of daytime work plans to nighttime fun plans and nearly kept myself from having any fun at all.

Today, my last day in the city, one person called me & we went walking in the park. First we kidnapped another colleague. We walked a bunch, played a bit (splishing and splashing in the park also gave us time to talk about our project experience), and wound up collecting yet another person for lunch. Oh, and then we totally reorganized our plans for the evening.

After that, I went to a museum, got a cupcake & ate a taco underground. I made this great plastic dinosaur at the museum!

this little machine made me this brontosaurusy thing at the field museum

This unplanned day has turned out both more fun and more productive than any of my planned efforts this week. Conveniently, someone also emailed me this Zen Habits post about just that: life without goals and objectives.

It’s often pleasant to have conversations about the future and what a good one might look like, but I think he’s right about at least the shortest of terms.

i do not love a parade

Chicago’s Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup two nights ago. It’s been awhile for them.

The city’s excited. Revelers were still hooting in the streets, doing some strange pantomime of a pow-wow, as I walked to work the next morning.

Today, there was a parade! It marched through downtown, brushing the corner of our building. Everyone spent extra time and heroic effort to get to the office – and that was hours before the parade even started.

It was, technically, over by the time my colleague and I started our walk to a meeting on the other side of the commotion. Hockey fans were cheering and drinking (mostly drinking) at something happening on some giant screen. Downtown’s streets were closed and littered with excess: beer bottles and cans, massive piles of ticker tape and slightly less massive piles of horse manure.

We stumbled gape-mouthed through the detritus. Overwhelmed and a bit horrified, we fled through the underground walkway and under the festivities. Whew!

After the meeting, I had a plane to catch – and very little time left to catch it. I hoped foolishly to find a cab somewhere on my side of the parade. No luck. I was stuck making my way back across the throng, hoping the train could get me to the airport on time, anything to make sure I made it to my flight home that afternoon. Then, of course, the trains were also running slowly to accommodate all those hockey fans.

I’d like to say that I relaxed and enjoyed the process. It’s a parade, after all. People love parades, right? I’d like to think of myself as present and aware. Well, I was aware: aware that I was frustrated and annoyed, struggling to balance work, wanting to be home. And the mess, the excess, consumption and destruction – that just made me sad.

As the train pulled out of the city, leaving me with 45 minutes to catch that plane, 30 more of which I’d spend sitting on that train… it started to rain.

My flight was two hours late.

moving in silence

A few weeks ago I went for a weekend of meditation instruction. I’ve continued to lose and regain what I learned since, so I’m glad I left this piece unfinished.

The instruction itself was valuable – probably more valuable than I know – but I was also surprised by how much the “supplemental” teaching, the movement stuff, the food, connected me to the awareness work. I maybe shouldn’t have been so surprised. Everything makes more sense to me from a physical perspective. I like ideas tangible.

I attended a yoga class, a tai chi class, and an Alexander workshop. I keep forgetting in the press of the city to be light and gentle, physically. I slog through things, fall instead of walking, hold instead of balancing. All three physical disciplines are part of my body’s memory already, so it really only took a tiny reminder.

And there was silence. Part of the weekend participants (not the teachers) were theoretically in noble silence, though not understanding the concept deeply, most of us opted simply not to speak – not to eschew other sharing of thoughts and information. I like the idea of silence expressed in that link a lot, though.

Even the perhaps lighter-weight silence we practiced drew my attention to stuff. To my own awareness, to my feet on the ground, the breath of the wind and the grand hugeness of the poppies all over the place.

I often feel like reflection and contemplation are… maybe a bit self-centered. It may be true, if you approach those things out of neurosis. But. Getting the silence and the body involved makes that sort of contemplation seem so overwrought, so much unneeded effort. Awareness of mind can be so light. The body can be so light. So happy. It’s pleasant.

the rose garden

Garden of miracles,
what kind of garden are you?

It’s been awhile since I posted any of my daily Rumi. That dude sure loved garden metaphors. His work makes me want to plant more roses. Or maybe gardenias (which I think don’t survive Virginian winters). Roses aren’t my fragrant flower of choice.

One of my favorite things at home is sitting in or looking out over the back yard, which is a bit of a garden and a bit of scraggly urban landscape. It’s easier to follow a meditation discipline with the support of the green things and the city. All that oxygen to breathe in! And that nourishing carbon dioxide to share with plants! Of course it’s easy to feel interconnected with things when you so clearly are – sharing air and nutrients and everything.

Rumi’s gardens are more spiritual metaphors than physical places. More than the metaphor, though, I love the idea of the physical place containing miracles. It does.

Just this morning,
contemplation
led me into
the rose garden that is
neither
outside this world
nor within it.
- Jalal-ud-Din Rumi
(both of these passages were translated by Andrew Harvey in A Year of Rumi)

chicago! chicago?

As I walked a mile or so home from the ballet tonight, two guys about a block and a half from each other were playing a sort of competitive saxophone. One played popular standards and the other went with a sort of free-form jazz. A few weeks ago, when we had that spell of warm weather before it went back to being unspringishly cold, I saw a puppet show on the way home from the office.

A puppet show! On my walk home! It was operated from a wooden box towed by a bicycle.

There are some spectacular things about Chicago in the spring. Once it’s fully in flight, people will be all over taking pictures and touristing, and there will be even more than the usual public art (there’s a lot already, also a spectacular thing, but year-round if you can stand to go outside). Downtown is so constantly populated that I feel safe walking alone almost all the time. On nice days, people also stand around outside soliciting donations and political participation and religion and clubs to go to, or weird shit people are selling. They’re pretty aggressive. It’s charming in some ways.

But. The street hawkers also provoke this blindered thing Chicagoans do. I find myself doing it, too: walking down the street trying to avoid eye contact or interest. It’s the people begging that get me. I want to be helpful, want to give everyone a dollar, but I’d need to get $50 in ones every morning to do that thoroughly.

At home, if I don’t have a dollar for each person I see (which is rare; I usually see something like one a day), smiling and hoping their day goes okay at least gives them a smile in return. It’s not much. Chicago’s street folk are rarely interested in smiles. I wouldn’t refuse someone my dollar if they were an asshole, but when they show the same anger whether I give money or not… well, the world’s suffering makes me sad and uncomfortable sometimes. It should, I suppose. There are sad things in the world, and I live much of my life insulated from those things.

So I understand the blinders, and walking down the street with ruthless attention to purpose, the sidewalk, and one’s wallet. Being confronted with suffering several times a day is pretty painful. I start believing that nothing I do is helpful if I pay too much attention, and I start to forget that the universe doesn’t exist purely for my benefit if I pay too little. It’s a constant effort to find a balance of some sort. Mostly effort. Little finding.

I’ll keep trying.

hey, everyone, i have a bad metaphor!

This post has been sitting around for several weeks. I’m still not sure it says what I mean, but I suppose it expresses my perplexity well enough now that other people could share it.

I feel like the world needs a better way to think and talk about love – well, all love, but here I mean specifically romantic or partnered love – than possession. The language of “my” this or that applied to any being with will or sentience is weird. Unfair. When I talk about “my” possessions or “my” feelings, for instance, it’s assumed that I get to decide what happens with them. I’ve certainly thought about people and animals in that way & with that language before. It often leads to disappointment – people, strangely, do not tend to behave according to my desires (leaving aside, for the moment, what business I have desiring stuff of them in the first place). And it’s just not the way we ought to think of others, with that sort of disregard for free will.

Some of “my” non-people things have hatched an idea of a different way to conceive of possession. I own a house, for instance, in which live three cats. Conventional wisdom would say that all these entities belong to me in the way I described; I purchased them (for the most part), so they are mine to control. But. It’s clear to me that the cats aren’t entirely. It’s easy for me to impose my will on them by force (they’re very small, and largely dependent on me), but they do in fact have their own opinions. My relationship with the house, too, isn’t entirely about control: a big part of it is about responsibility. Both cats and house provide things for me, and, in exchange, I have responsibilities to them. Like keeping them from freezing. Or not setting them on fire.

So. I’ve been pondering for a bit what that means with people.

Hugo Schwyzer’s epically titled We have used our power to dominate and our weakness to manipulate: more on the egalitarian vision, and the fundamental sinfulness of traditional gender structures helped me solidify this idea today. His post reminds me that “my wife” and “my husband” used to – and still do for many folk – come with a fairly specific set of encoded responsibilities to that other person you possess (and yes, some control and imposition of will, too). Egalitarian approaches to love, with [implied heterosexual, since that's where gender disparities are most obvious; I feel like queer couples skip to the next paragraph in this post] marriage as a focus, tend to start from de-gendering those responsibilities. It’s a good starting place; that set of roles directly constrains people’s time and happiness.

So, we remove – or at least question – some of the gender-based role constraints in love. Then what? People complain on occasion that they don’t know what to do now, and that’s probably true. There’s still one familiar notion, though – that the other person in a relationship should conform to your will in some way (yeah, the wording here is a bit strong, I admit). We still end up with an awful lot of manipulation and ego in play.

I’m intrigued by the idea of using the language and ideas of this third entity construct. It’s apparently not very popular, since I can’t find a good, non-sexist [Seriously. One dude uses the notion that "all men want group sex" as his example in an otherwise not bad definition, and in the process I think misses the point.] explanation of it online, even from the Center for Right Relationship people who invented it. Simply put, the third entity in any relationship is the relationship. It’s a thing some number of people create among themselves.

Shifting to a language about that entity seems pretty easy. Conceivably, we could stop saying “she’s my friend” and pick up “we’re friends”, and that problem would be solved, semantically speaking. It also offers a much wider range of specificity, whole sentences in places of nouns: “we’re sleeping together” vs. “he’s my *awkward pause*”. Perhaps the majority of people wouldn’t be so direct about it, but you could be if you liked.

Shifting our thinking might follow along naturally from the language change. Naturally confusing at first, maybe – if we take away the gender role and the conform-to-my-will language (heh, and then add all the complexity you want to the new language), it turns relationship definitions into a bit of a big white hole. I feel like that’s what they ought to be, though: like, if we acknowledged that each relationship is at most only similar to another & not the same thing, we might make better choices. Be less burdened by expectations, at least by ones that don’t relate to the other party in a relationship.

I also believe that thinking about relationships as a separate thing that people participate in, rather than a thing that people are (or at least are as individuals), could move us to think of the responsibility we have to a relationship. Not things you owe a person, a role you play, or things you must do for them, but the care you tacitly agree to give a relationship. Making it a little like my house: your relationship is a container you can inhabit, but don’t freeze it or set it on fire.

falling

Convention holds that love bears some kind of metaphorical resemblance to falling: out of control, maybe, or crushing, sinking, something like that.

I’ve gone a long time thinking I maybe had a part missing or broken, because I’ve never experienced anything like falling when it comes to another person. People close to me talk about being in love, too, as if it’s another form of insanity or possession. It makes you do things, right? As though your actions aren’t your own, but some parasite’s. Well, as far as I know – though I doubt whoever might be researching this would call me right away, there’s no love parasite. There could be one, and maybe I’ve never ingested it. Anyhow. Let’s assume this idea is not the result of parasite evolution, and is purely figurative.

I don’t think I have a problem after all. No, I haven’t seen any kind of light. I still have absolutely no falling feelings, and rarely feel anything but fairly in touch with all my faculties. I’m just not bothered by it. There’s nothing wrong with the conventional notions; I have different ideas, and that’s pretty neat.

travel broadens the mind

I am awake at 3am local time, which is a little annoying. If I could, I might poke my internal clock in the eye.

This is the thought I woke up with: when did I stop using plastic baggies? My home airport keeps an enormous box of them just outside the security line, and I picked up the second plastic baggie I’ve acquired in a year as I left on this trip. I think at some point I decided that, whatever I was doing with regard to plastics, at least I wouldn’t willfully buy small plastic bags to transfer things out of larger plastic containers. As for the small plastic containers used to transport toiletries in carryon luggage… well, those are pretty easy to reuse, at least. Except for toothpaste. [Well, people have suggestions, but how many pairs of scissors does one household have?] Yet another argument for finding a toothpaste recipe that doesn’t taste awful, or like dessert.

There are other ways traveling shows – and perhaps creates; cause and effect are pretty subtle sometimes – the changes I’ve wanted for myself over the past mumble mumble years. I packed – as I’ve been telling everyone – one large carryon bag & a laptop (in a bag that will also be my purse and walking bag) for a week. This is going to be my new standard for work travel, so it may as well be my standard everywhere. One Bag is right, though: if you’re doing a single bag, wheels are a bit stupid – they’re heavier, and a bit unwieldy even in airports. Noted.

Bag logistics aside: I forget sometimes that I was once given to impressive meltdowns when forced to travel. The first time I went to Hawai’i, I cried at a Starbucks in LAX – before we even got there. And possibly again at a rental car counter in Honolulu? My poor travel companion! I finally left the US for a bit this year, in part because I gained a sense of humor and let go of that overwhelming need to have things happen according to plan. Nothing ever goes exactly according to plan. Which is great! That’s where the real fun starts.

Partly, also, I think I used to be afraid of… well, anything that wasn’t familiar or comfortable. Forcing myself to deal with new degrees of discomfort helped get me over that. In fact, as I try to list examples, none of the things that should sound uncomfortable actually are – I mean, sure I’ve camped in 100 degree heat, but there was a shower and a swimming hole; or there were those there-and-back-in-a-day job interview flights, but the tacos were fantastic; getting up to the tip of that mountain was hard, but it was amazing and only took like an hour and a half anyhow. The more I think about it, the more I feel like I need to do scarier stuff. My stuff just isn’t that scary. But. It sure would’ve seemed that way to the version of myself who melted down at LAX that one time.

And the tacos really were fantastic.

appreciations

It snowed a lot – probably a foot  - in town last night. I remember some years ago being terrified of driving in any amount of snow, so much so that I’d basically stop where I was when the first flake fell.

Last night I stopped to buy a giftmas tree (a little one I could maneuver into my car and put up myself), knowing full well I also had a hospital visit (to a perfect baby and his wonderful, strong mothers) still to make. There were at least a few inches sticking to the ground by the time I made it home. It’s a route I drive all the time, even a couple of times in snow last year, though it would’ve been easier to walk if I were wearing the right shoes & not carrying a giftmas tree. I’m less afraid of a lot of things. I suppose none of that story is a surprise.

I was the first person in the neighborhood to shovel their walk this morning. Not that I did a great job – it’s hard work – but it was pretty enjoyable. I may go back out in a bit and get a start on the alley next to my house. Anyhow. Many things came together to make clearing snow a pleasurable experience, and I wanted to note my appreciation of those things.
- outdoor CST training, for which I bought a warm under layer of clothes a couple of years ago
- a prior version of me who did not think enough about the worth of all life & therefore got leather gloves that fit my tiny hands – and I’m certainly not so squeamish that I won’t wear them now
- Buddhists and hippies and meditation – in other words, joyfulness found in work and single-minded focus
- my former roommate’s broad, square shovel (I can’t justify buying a snow shovel for one use a year, but this thing is great for moving compost and snow)
- that plastic-bottle-fleece jacket; man, that thing is warm
- the neighbors who walked by and stopped to chat
- jazz versions of holiday tunes playing on NPR
- the snow itself, which is nicely and heavy, but still dry, so it shovels like rice but sweeps like flour
- still having power & therefore heat and hot water, making it cozy to come back inside
- and of course, the physical capacity to shovel and sweep in the first place – simple activity feels so good sometimes