mantra virumque cano

I just found out that one Thomas Ashley-Farrand just passed away. Well, sir, here's an extended toast to what you came to teach us, and in the meantime, I've circled around a mala in your honor.

Thomas Ashley-Farrand was a well-known and widely beloved teacher of mantra. I've read a couple of his books, and I just so happen to be very deep into a practice I pulled out of one of them. And so I just want to talk about it. I want to talk about mantras, I want to sing their praises, I want to talk about this practice I'm doing.

When I was young, mantras seemed...well, this was not an attractive practice to me. I imagined the people who did mantras to be spaced-out, fern-bar-frequenting, white-tunic-wearing California hippies. And yes, I grew up around these people, near them, but my own family prided itself on being the intellectual wing of spiritual kooktown, if you will. The drone of a mantra seemed to me like it drained your intelligence and free will right out through your mouth. Like I said, I was young, and vulnerable to cliche.

I'm an unabashed fan of the mantra these days. I'm not going to work too hard to sell them to you. This is not in defense of the mantra. This is in praise of the mantra, free-style.

Magic old words, bona-fide abracadabras that chimed out of primordial not-nothingness straight into the finely-tuned ears of the ancient rishis. Psst. Hey. Psst. Would you like a magic key? Would you like another one? How about another one? How about another one? We can go all day like this. We can and we will. Why not? It's the least we can do for you. There you are, stuck. It's comical pitiful tragical. Can't stand to watch it anymore. We're throwing you a bone. We're throwing you a thousand bones. Better than bones. They're keys, like we said. But you have to turn them and turn them and turn them, and slowly something will unlock and unlock and unlock more and then more.

Perhaps you saw that lovely creature I have in a position of honor there up on the sidebar. Lakshmi. I'm following her trail right now, around and around my mala. Let me tell you a little bit about her. So, Lakshmi represents bounty in all its forms. Beauty and grace and wealth and...uh...you know what it is? You know the real reason I'm working with this particular mantra of hers? Oh, blush, damn it, I'm really maybe going to tell you. It's going to make me look silly. (Transparency! yells Mr. Ashley-Farrand from beyond the grave.) (Yes, sir.) (Ach.) So, he said that this one particular mantra is to...[blush]...[die]..."Invoke and Eventually Become the Abundance of the Universe Itself." Ahem. He said that the appearance of Lakshmi wiped all cares from the minds of those who first beheld her, and that this mantra...oh, hang on. I'm just going to quote it, skipping a little up top.

Vishnu [Lakshmi's sweetheart -T.R.] spoke these words in the story: "God's love, through whatever door it comes, is the end of all desire and yearning." The highest abundance is Love. If you feel that your true inner nature is one with the loving, abundant nature of Lakshmi, that you want to bring an abundantly satisfied state of mind to every person and thing you encounter, these two mantras [same mantra with a slight variation depending on whether you're above or below the age of 29 - T.R.] can begin the process of your transformation into such a bountiful and beneficent state.

Well, who wouldn't want that? And, damn it, I do feel that way. I've always been exceedingly lucky, and for whatever reason, I've always been able to make people feel better. I don't know why. It's just true. And I'm going through some kind of profound life change and I thought, well, this is something incredibly positive upon which I can hang my hat awhile.

So I'm going for something called Mantra Siddhi. After years of observation back in old India, it began to appear that 125,000 repetitions of a mantra is enough turnings of the key to make something special happen wherein the power of the particular mantra really sinks into you and becomes your own. You absorb it deeply, it becomes permanently lodged in you. And if you keep going, the effect of the mantra is magnified and spills out onto others as well. I can share the wealth, as it were. So that's just what I'm doing. I have a plan, I have a timeline, I'm underway. I'll be there within a year, maybe a little quicker. And then I'm going to absorb another one, and another one, and I think that I'll just be insatiable for these magic keys. It's the nicest path that I'm falling along. And I owe all of it to Thomas Ashley-Farrand, who sang the praises of mantra in the key that I could really hear, the key that spoke to me.

I can't imagine why everyone alive doesn't find their own key like this.

Safe and happy travels to you, Mr. Ashley-Farrand. Thank you.


I dare you to note that he's wearing a white tunic, here.

convoy

Everything’s going along pretty smoothly. We live in Port Chester, NY. Third grade is drawing to a close. My pixie cut is growing out, I’m looking more and more like a girl by the minute. I made Gerald Braun laugh on the Third Grade Circle Line Cruise around the Statue of Liberty. I’m considered a damn fine speller, if I do say so myself, despite the mishap with “playground” that one time.

Then my dad goes on some kind of sudden trip to Seattle.

My mom is on the phone with him, crying and yelling, “I hate my life! I hate my life!” My brother and I are looking at her and looking at each other. What the hell is going on? She hangs up and tells us we have to go stay at our friend Elaine’s house. She has to go get on a plane to Seattle immediately, tonight. What?? We scramble some things together and my mom calls a limousine service to take her to the airport and drop us at Elaine’s on the way.

Bad vibes.

-Mom, why do you have to fly to Seattle?
-I have to go look at a house.

Holy shit.

Two weeks later, we’re ready to launch this thing. We’re moving to Seattle. Like, right now. We’ve had the garage sale. Danny Covino came with his mom, which was weird. I wondered if it meant he was in love with me. That seemed like the only reasonable explanation. What a time to find this out, right before we’re separated by a country. Ah, well. And now it’s midnight and the giant moving truck is here from King Van Lines, and we were supposed to be on the road several hours ago but something keeps holding us up and it’s making my mom angrier and angrier. It’s about the driver of our moving truck, something about him coming with no people to load the furniture, and something about a gallon of rosé that he’s carrying around and drinking out of all day. His name is Jim, and he wears a t-shirt that says “The Canadian Hippie” on the front. His daughter is about my age, and we get along great. We play in my room while it gets darker and darker and later and later, and it’s difficult to see what my parents are getting all worked up about, but there you go.

1:00 a.m. and we’re finally on the road. Can’t make it too far because, well, it’s 1:00 a.m. We sleep in the car at a rest stop in New Jersey. I’m going to begin to agree that this is weird. We’re sleeping in the car. Yes, I’m with Team Mom and Dad on this one. Sleeping in a car is lame. This is The Canadian Hippie’s fault, we all agree. And suddenly our family is united, and thus begins my two week summer adventure wherein Tina Kunz of the New York Kunzes will become Tina Kunz of the Seattle Kunzes.

Back up. Why are we moving all of a sudden? What’s that all about? Well, at the time I don’t know. But later I’ll hear something about a nervous breakdown, maybe? My dad had a nervous breakdown? Results have never been conclusive. Let’s agree that he had a nervous breakdown. There has always been a lot of mystery around this. I have no new information.

Once we’re on the road, though, he seems fine. He seems great! So, here’s the setup. We have our two cars. My dad drives one of them, and a young friend of the family, Irving, drives the other one. We’ve got CB radios, and we all have handles. (It’s 1978, right in the middle of the CB craze. Everybody’s feeling very Smokey and the Bandit.) My dad is Slowpoke, because he drives really fast. My mom is Mother Hen. My brother is Numbers Man. Irving is Cookie Monster because he eats bags and bags of Chips Ahoys. (He has an alternate handle, Life Saver, because my mom keeps telling him he’s saving our lives.) And I’m Light n’ Lively, which is a brand of milk in New York but not in Seattle.

I always ride with Mom and Dad. Numbers Man sometimes rides with the Cookie Monster, sometimes rides with us. I’ve got my firecracker flag pillow by my side, which was a gift from my third grade class. Everybody signed it. It’s shaped like a firecracker, patterned like a flag. Andy Haas informs me that the Mariners suck. Everybody else writes something sweet, even surprising people. The pillow makes me feel sad and good, and it smells fantastic, sort of warm and powdery. I smell it all the time and I’m always afraid I’m going to suck the smell out of it with my nose by smelling it too much, but that great smell really hangs on. In other flag news, I have a flag puzzle that has all the flags of all the countries in the world, with the name of the country beneath the hole where the flag piece goes, and the name of the capital city printed right on the piece. On their own, released from their countries, the capital city names sound like people’s names, and I assign genders and personalities to them all, and have them mingle with each other. Any capital city that ends with an “a” is a girl, with a few obviously feminine exceptions like Paris. All the others are boys. Ankara and Brasilia are my favorite girls. Athens and Amman are their dates. I have all the cities and their countries memorized in short order.

My superb memory proves to be a coup for us all in Pennsylvania. We stop at a Dutch restaurant for lunch, and they have a challenge going. If anyone at the table can memorize this very long poem about a bird before the check comes, lunch is on the house for your whole party. Our eyes light up. I grab that pansy-ass poem. I’m like a machine. “The Golden Finch is a lovely bird. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.” I have that shit filed away before we order dessert. The moment comes. The waitress and the manager watch as I reel it off. Lunch is free! As a reward, my mom and dad let me go into the gift shop and pick out an enormous, swirly, multi-colored lollipop to take with me in the car. This trip kicks ass. I don’t know what any of us were worried about.

Indiana is GREAT. Don’t know what my parents find so boring about it. There appears to be candy and ice cream available for sale no matter where we stop. Motels everywhere across the country are fantastic. Ice machines.

Every now and then, we'll listen to chatter over the CB, have a little back and forth with Cookie Monster and Numbers Man. I much prefer just talking with our own party. I don't like it when my dad gets into conversations with real truckers. I know they're going to be on to him. They'll know we're driving a Mercedes. They won't care that it's old. They'll know we have no business trying to mingle with real men of the road, that we're fronting like we're CB people. My dad's voice sounds too jovial, too folksy, when he's talking with truckers. My throat closes up until the conversation's over. My dad's average speed is 90 miles an hour, so once in a while we'll pick up a message about a Smokey or a Bear, and my mom'll look anxiously behind us while my dad pretends to be a guy who drives at the speed limit. Then the CB seems worthwhile.

When we're approaching Chicago, my dad gets into a conversation with a trucker. The day is extremely hot and sticky, an irritable kind of day. I don't know what's going on, but I guess this conversation isn't good. My mom looks more and more worried as it goes on, and then it ends. The atmosphere in the car is tense as we get closer to the city, but maybe this is still residue from that conversation. I don't understand. Then we're on a bridge in downtown Chicago, and an eighteen-wheeler has pulled up next to us and is apparently trying to run us off the bridge. My mom is practically screaming. She tells me and my brother to hold a pillow over our faces. We do. A few minutes pass? A few seconds? Nothing happens. We don't fall over the bridge, we're not crushed by metal, but fear and sweat and silence fill the car for many miles.

Iowa's not much to talk about. Corn, corn, corn.

The Badlands are compelling, those strangely formed green hills and cliffs. I peer at the land intently, trying to feel the badness. Something bad must have gone down around here, I think to myself. And then we get to Montana, and Montana fucking outdoes itself. We stay at a giant Holiday Inn in Helena. It has a motherfucking Polynesian-themed pool! Any hotel with a themed pool makes me want to run up and high five all the staff. AND! When we’re going into this hotel, I hold open the door for a man in a ten-gallon hat, and the motherfucking awesome old wealthy cowboy tips me a dollar! This is the first money I’ve ever earned. I stare at my dollar all night.

We’re getting closer to Seattle. Who knows what’s going on with The Canadian Hippie? We’re in worryingly less and less frequent contact with him as we drive across country. The atmosphere is increasingly chilly when we do see him. When we get to North Bend, which is about an hour outside of Seattle, some kind of confrontation happens between my dad and The Canadian Hippie. I don’t get it. I hang out with his daughter again, and we can’t figure out what all the hate is about, but it’s making things awkward for us. It’s less fun to play with her this time. We’re clearly on different teams, like it or not.

We arrive in Seattle on my birthday. July 3rd. It’s overcast. We don’t know anybody. We don’t have any furniture. (The Canadian Hippie abandoned us and our moving van after the mystery confrontation. We found it unlocked in a nearby mall parking lot a week after we got to town. ) My mom buys a Pepperidge Farm cake and puts a cutting board on a small box and throws a pillowcase over it for a tablecloth. She has silver candlesticks that were in a box in the car, and we have candles. We sit on the floor and they sing the birthday song to me. The trip is done. It’s cloudy and strange and quiet here, and I’m nine, and I live in Seattle.

********
(Cross-posted, as is the trend these days, from Writing, Writer, Writest. I've expanded it for The Gallivanting Monkey. I was respecting word limits over there. I don't have to respect a goddamned thing over here. Also, our moving truck looked just like the one in the picture. Atlas Van Lines ate King Van Lines. Based on performance, that can't have been too tough. I like to think that Jim is passed out just below view. Okay, then. All the good numbers* to you.)

*best wishes

i will never marry you

When my husband and I got married, a friend of ours read a poem aloud called The Very Short Sutra on the Meeting of the Buddha and the Goddess. In the poem, the Buddha’s kicking it of an afternoon, wandering around like the Buddha does, walking. Just walking. And then this naked red goddess with long blue hair pops up in front of him and blocks his path, all HWAA! Here I am! And the Buddha’s all, hey! Why you gotta pop up and get in my way? I was just going about my business, cool, Buddha-style. (Also, the Buddha clocked that she was a very foxy naked goddess, because he’s not dead, after all.) And she said, and I quote, “You can go around me, or you can come after me, but you can’t pretend I’m not here. This is my forest, too.” Then the Buddha and the Goddess get into this sort of sexy, challenging face-off. He assumes this rock-solid meditative posture, and starts telling her about how after arduous practice he’s penetrated reality, and she’s like NOT SO FAST, I AM REALITY. And then they really get into it, but never mind. We can leave them there. I’ve arrived at my point.

For years I’ve been toggling back and forth between Buddhism and Hinduism, and it’s driven me nuts that I couldn’t land on one of them. They’re each so attractive in their different ways. Buddhism is cool, impeccable, unflashy. You can’t argue with the logical empiricism of Buddhism, or you can, but Buddhism doesn’t mind. It can wait all day. Argue yourself in circles. Eventually you’ll tire, and Buddhism won’t have been even mildly scratched by your efforts. I can’t think of another religion that gives near as much attention to epistemology as Buddhism does, and then it has the grace to set it down and get to pure practice. It’s so incredibly secure. It’s the most secure, unflappable religion in the world. When did the Buddhists ever flip out and wage a holy war? Never is when. They’ve conducted themselves with great class through the centuries. Buddhism has its head down and its eyes on its own work, and it gently suggests you do the same. Am I gushing? I might be. I confess a crush. I had a crush on a fella one time purely because he was so calm and sensible -- so calm and sensible, in fact, that it struck me as terribly manly. Buddhism’s like that for me. So elegant and brave and adult. Swoon.

At the same time, though, if we’re going to run with this choosing-a-religion-as-taking-a-lover notion (and we are), hmm. Buddhism, gosh. You’re so cool, such a catch, quietly sexy in your way. But I’d sort of like to have the sense that you could flip out now and again, get mad, get ecstatic. That’s what I’m missing. That’s why I can’t commit. It’s not that you don’t have danger. You do. There are some essential safety nets you don’t provide, and that’s daring, that’s provocative. But you never seem to do anything wrong. You never mix it up.

Cue the sitar and a supersexy four-armed blue god strides on to the scene. WHAT…is that? And then the sky fills with somersaulting gods and goddesses in all flavors: ridiculous, wonderful, elephant-headed Ganesha, Hanuman the Monkey God, the triumvirate of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer, with their respective girlfriends (!) Sarasvati (special power: music, knowledge and the arts – she plays the veena) (Me neither. Like a guitar?), Lakshmi (wealth, grace and beauty: who can turn the world on with her smile?) and Kali (who will fuck your shit up and add you to her necklace of skulls). There’s Durga, riding down the sky on her tiger or lion, whatever she’s in the mood for that day, swinging her ax and taking out demons. There’s Krishna, The Cosmic Player, with his long lashes and his blue skin, and his patient main squeeze, Radha, and they’re hot with love for each other. These gods and goddesses are like a divine Superfriends - and they sound like cartoons - but when you dive in to each of their lore, you see they stand for particular principles of reality, laws of physics, natural phenomena, and there’s plenty of sophistication in the layout. Hinduism is full of epic stories, battles and sex and revenge and undying love. It’s unreasonable and fiery and vast, and it sizzles with nuclear magic. The cosmos is like a giant silver screen, and the Hindu pantheon strides across it like so many movie stars. It’s the oldest religion in the world, with thousands of years of heft to it. Plus: gurus*! If you can wade through the sea of false ones and get lucky enough to find your very own real one with your name on him or her, zing! You have booked a ticket to enlightenment. May take a while, but it’s booked. Your guru is contractually obligated to make that happen.

*Buddhism quietly adds, “We have teachers. It’s in the same neighborhood. It’s worth noting.” You do, Buddhism, and I like your spin, there. Your way feels less confining, and you seem to invite more personal responsibility. No, I dig. I dig it.

Quit armwrestling, fellas**. You’re BOTH gorgeous.

**by which I mean quit trying to arm wrestle Buddhism, Hinduism. Buddhism is ignoring you, anyway.

Okay. The sex appeal of both religions has been established. Time to examine compatibility. I would so like to pair up with just one of you and make a go of it.

Buddhism, I like who I am when I’m with you. You make me get serious, you encourage me to let go of my illusions. You calm me, ultimately, even if you make me terribly tense for a while on the way there. I feel mature, womanly, ready to face facts. You cool my proverbial fevered brow. You drag me out of my head and into the stream of time and place in front of me. It’s now. It’s here. There’s nothing else. The world may be twisted and dark and relentless with suffering, but we’re not hiding, and the blessings we find along the way are as real as rocks.

Hinduism, I like the world best when I’m with you. The world seems like a miraculous, benevolent circus with glowing peel-away layers through which more light shines, more dazzle manifests. I feel like a child, incredibly well-loved, with my hands held by enormous cosmic Mommies and Daddies who leap me over the puddles and whisk me out of harm’s way. I work my way around my beaded mala, chanting the mantras you gave me, and I feel something sparkling through my body, wafting around my head. You let me be so human, you meet me where I am, you never make me feel ashamed.

I can’t do it. I can never choose. I will never choose. I want both, and I’ll have you both, but never fully. And it’s all right, almost. Well, it’s wonderful. I’m very happy. I have, of course, just one relationship with one Divine, who switches shirts according to my mood. I can swing from one vine to the other and get across the abyss just fine the way I’m doing it. When I meditate, I can touch you both. And if I’m honest, I’ll confess this: Hinduism, you’re probably my true love. I’m fairly sure that you are. But as long as Buddhism walks the earth, I won’t marry you.

(Cross-posted from Writing, Writer, Writest. But I'm gonna give you some extras, because I can do that over here.)

SPECIAL FEATURES:

1) One of Finn's favorite Hindu YouTube treats. (He could watch these all day.) This is a slightly pared-down version of the go-to Gayatri mantra, which my brother taught me when I was small.



2) Sita Sings the Blues. By rights, you should have seen this in an art-house movie theater somewhere. Second choice is watching the DVD. It's my pleasure to bring you the lamest option of all, knowing that it's still so much better than nothing. Don't even think about not watching this in some form. You'll rue the day.

nothing

It’s the hot water you were born into. You were in it before that, even, steeped in your mama’s body. But you come out and go right into the family pot, and the flavor is simmered right into you, for good or for ill. It smells like your family, it tastes like your family. You can’t get away from it, no matter how far you go, but you won’t really know which part is you and which part isn’t. Is some part of your bones your own? How far down into my body do I have to go to find some purity*? Is all I am apart from my family some faint dot of light, a web of thoughts? Whose brain is this?

*I almost exclusively see this purity in my own children, though. They may have steeped in me but I feel more like a door they walked through, completely independent except for the shape of an eye, the angle of an eyebrow. They had to get here somehow. It had very little to do with us. To me, they came as the adults they’re going to be, wrapped in the temporary, frustrating chrysalis of their own baby suits. But that’s them.

On the one hand, I don’t want to be a part of a family, a member of an inescapable group where fifteen of us are walking around with the same mouth. A family is like a cult, and the curl at the side of your lip that you share with Cousin Sue is the telltale marker. We’ve both been there. We know.

Bound by a secret, bound by something that only your family understands, bound by a sadness, your family’s sadness. Your own family’s shame: no one else’s is like it. Good to have a place to go where people also know the secret, the secret thing that renders you a family. Not everyone likes this soup. It’s a family recipe. It tastes familiar, we all love it. We’re used to it.

Two blood lines. One side of the family dominates. The other I can’t see. It’s like the portrait you can stare at that’s a woman from one angle, a vase from the other – only here all I can see is the vase, no matter how plainly visible the woman is. One side bullies the other side out of existence. Van Gelders* trump Valtanens. My father’s side wins.

*My father’s mother’s maiden name was Van Gelder. My maiden name is Kunz, so wherever you see the word Van Gelder, you can substitute Kunz. However, it was the Van Gelder wing that was the loudest and the closest, so it’s Van Gelder from here on out.

In the Van Gelder family trunk: 1) Clairvoyance, passed like a beam from generation to generation, a light right between the eyebrows. No, a window, and through that window the light passes. 2) Volume, vehemence, fight. 3) Something bent, something twisted. Secrets. Pockets of ill mental health. 4) Treasures from the Far East. Chinese and Indonesian blood, years logged in India and on Java. Philosophy. Spices. A framed, gilded leaf from the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha sat when he reached enlightenment, the leaf an offshoot from the original plant, like all of us descendants that have come down the line. 5) Vintage stories with famous faces passing through. Henry Miller, Gloria Swanson, Salvador Dali, George Bernard Shaw, E.E. Cummings. The effect altogether is shabby, tweedy, glamorous.

And then, shoved into a corner, is my mother’s side: so vivid for her, so inaccessible for the rest of us. She grew up on a farm in Northern Finland. The farm was called Siertola, and for her it was like Tara. Her memories are of cows, and skating on frozen lakes, and yellow leaves, and the texture of her wool coat. They’re beautiful to her, they’re moving, and they can barely be heard over the Van Gelder din. The Valtanen music is too quiet, it’s too spare. Long, slow, single cello notes against a wintry background. So much is marked by absence. I met my grandmother before she died – she was just like a stick figure. Skinny, with straight hair that stuck out, and no English. I couldn’t tell what she was like. And then she was gone. My grandfather left her when my mother was one, so he wasn’t there. He was a streak of dark hair, a cloud of alcohol, one meeting with my mom when she was 15. “I hear you’re my daughter.” “That’s what they tell me.” And then he was gone, too. Valtanen faces are broad, their limbs are sturdy. I only know what we look like. I don’t know who we are.

Finland was too far, and we only had the one representative, so we defaulted to Van Gelder. We were swarmed by cousins on Sunday nights, talking about Theosophy and arguing over curry at the dinner table. Voices rising, arms waving. Privately, I loved it. It was warm and wild and loud and familiar and it felt almost like mine. Publicly, Van Gelder blood was freak blood and I wasn’t happy about it. We were vegetarians before anyone knew what the hell that was. We were Theosophists. “What the fuck is that?” asked everybody. (Can’t do it for you. Not now. God bless Google.) My grandmother was a famous clairvoyant who as a young girl transmitted messages from soldiers who died in Gallipoli to their families, healed people with her hands. It felt like we were the goddamn Munsters. I felt like Marilyn, looked like Eddie, worked on being the Munster who could blend in, pass for Grade B if not Grade A American. I dumbed it down, blanded it up, played to the crowd. “What religion are you?” (Oh, shit.) “We’re…Christians.” I learned to tell jokes, be cool, shake off the familial stuffiness. I loved being free of it. I loved making my own persona.

Oh, man.

Here comes the regret. There’s something too poignant here that I don’t want to look at. Distancing myself from my family, rejecting them. Subtly. There’s betrayal in here somewhere, and I don’t know who did it first. I don’t want to look. And there’s a love that I don’t want to talk about either.

KING LEAR
What can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak.
CORDELIA
Nothing, my lord.
KING LEAR
Nothing!
CORDELIA
Nothing.
KING LEAR
Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.
CORDELIA
Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth.

There’s something at the core that I didn’t show you, that I can’t show you, that you’d never be able to see anyway, because you’re not my family.

This is hard. Family. Jesus. I’m losing my way, here, maybe on purpose.

I buck at being part of a family. I would sort of rather be alone. It can’t be helped, though. Also, that’s not true, and I love them. Oh, who knows? The topic makes me want to stick my head out of the window. It makes me need air. And we don’t have time to properly address this. The hot water we’re born into, the haunted houses we grew up in. The drama soaked into the walls. Aeschylus, Tolstoy, Ibsen, O’Neill. Everybody knows the family is a killer. The safest place on earth, right? Your home. Wonderful. The back of your hand. Yes! True! And you spend your whole life dismantling the little bombs they accidentally planted inside you. (That’s too dramatic and also not dramatic enough.) Whatever note I leave this on, it’s the wrong note. What did you do to me? Thank you for everything, sincerely. The other one. Both.

This did nothing any justice. Sorry, family.

P.S. This is cross-posted from my dear friend Josh Grimmer's new concern,Writing, Writer, Writest, which he's set up in order that not-writing-enough writers could begin to write more. So I'll be writing there each week on their given theme, and occasionally cross-posting over here. Do go and look. There are some real gems.

violence redux

Oh, Christ, people. I've put this post up without a disclaimer, and then removed it. I've put it up now with an enormous disclaimer, and then removed it. I guess I only need one disclaimer, and it's this:

I don't hit my children.

Don't anybody let me change my mind again on this post. Jesus.

P.S. What Ingrid wrote was beautiful, and I'll put most of it in the comments section.

********************

I don't want to write this post. I mean, I guess I want to. I'm here, the engine's running. But I think I had to hijack/kidnap myself to get myself here to do this. I'm pulling myself out of the trunk at gunpoint. Write it, bitch.

Ok, ok.

(pause)

Can I do a little more preamble?

No, fuck you. Get to it.

FUCK! I DON'T WANT TO. IT'S UGLY.

I don't even know how to let myself start talking about this. I've had that ball in my stomach that's made me want to come here and write, but every time I've felt it, I thought, "No. I can't talk about that. I'm not even taking that to my journal. Find something else to do with yourself, ball. Go assimilate yourself into my organs. Cancer's treatable."

SPIT. IT. OUT.

It's about parenting. It's about violence. It's about avoiding child abuse. Narrowly.

Finn.

(This is so halting! And I can't make it be any other way. Sorry for my halting prose.) (Like I'm going to come here and be fluid about this. That would be terrifying.)

Finn. He, himself, is not my bête noire, but he fucking summons it. He's the dangerous little angel that leads my bête noire in on a leash, dancing around me and laughing. Wait, who's doing the dancing and laughing? Both of them. Both of them fucking are! and it's too much to take! Many times a day it's too much to take.

Obviously, our children test us. But the older Finn gets, the deeper the testing is getting and it's accessing something ferocious in me, something uncontrolled. Something that matches Finn's uncontrolled energy. Or maybe it's not his energy at all. Maybe it's mine. Maybe Finn goes wild and tears the day apart because I can't or won't or don't know how to do it. Maybe this energy is leaking out of me like some kind of toxic factory runoff and polluting my child, and he's just trying to get it off of him. That could be what he's doing. He's not fighting us. He's fighting IT.

When he's in the throes of this energy, whatever it is, he's not angry. It's not anger. It's just muchness. It's like he's plugged into some frighteningly outsized power source, and he doesn't know how to let it run through his body. Trust me, this is not simple childhood, uh, vivaciousness. When this energy starts running, I start to tremble a little. I have to plant myself a little more firmly wherever I'm standing, dig in, grab hold of something internal. I know it's coming. The energy starts running and vibrating off of him and he gets so wild, and he becomes this creature that you can't reach or reason with. The energy won't back off until it peaks.

Is this true? No. Fuck, no, no, it isn't true. That's how I LET it happen.

(This might make no sense to any of you, yet. Please forgive me. I'm working this out in public, in real time, here. If I take this public, then I can't pretend it isn't happening. Accountability. Possibly safety in numbers. Take it to the fire where all the other cavemen are gathered. Look, look, others. This.)

So there's a moment that comes when the energy is running. The moment is subtle, small and decisive, and if I gloss over it, I will lose. Either the bête noire is going to take over or I'm going to use my core strength to calm down and stop and breathe and allow love to permeate the situation. It's not like I can't do it. I just can't or don't or won't do it nearly as much as I should...which I guess should be EVERY FUCKING TIME. Because this is my child I'm dealing with. This is a small, fragile, tender being who's counting on me, my beloved little creature, my son.

Oh, breakdown. Breakdown.

(Finn, I'll come back to you. I will come back to you, baby. Wait here.)

BEAST! It's you I'm coming for now. You THING, you CLOUD. What are you?! Where did you come from and why are you inside of me and who put you there and what do you want? You're this dark genie, this black smoke. Anger, flailing. Coldness, too, an utter lack of concern for whomever and whatever is around you. You will do your own thing. You're supreme. Once you get going, you like it. You flex your muscles. You knock things over. It's satisfying to you, this display. You like to frighten people, it makes you glow. It makes you feel large. Makes you feel godlike. It's nothing to you. A flick of the hand and something dies and let that be a lesson to everyone.

For a split-second it's like that. A blazing dot of satisfaction and joy, like an atomic pinprick.

For me, I mean. It's like that for me when I let the beast win - and fuck love! who ever heard of love? who has time for it? - and I use my relative size and force to try and intimidate Finn (who, by the way and to his credit, gets less and less easy to intimidate) (although this results in a spiraling situation wherein I'm faced with the dilemma of pulling out bigger and bigger weapons). HA! FUCK YOU! LOOK WHAT I CAN DO! I'M ENORMOUS!

A negative re-creation of the big bang, an orgasmically destructive conflagration. I think this is why people imagine hell to be hot.

I yell, of course. Right. No shock. Kudos to the flower-like Thich-Nhat-Hanh of a parent who doesn't do this. He or she may be out there. But my yelling, for the moment, is what keeps my child physically safe.

Because the moment fucking comes. The impulse and decision. Fuck you. My body against yours. Mine will win. You'll go out the window or against the wall.

There it is. There's the horror and shame. The discovery of an anger and violence in me so profound that it could turn against my own child. I pray that this is universally true and I pray that it is unequivocally not universally true, but I suspect that it is.

When it kicks in, I feel unrecognizable to myself. I don't know what this thing is that's running me. I'm being run by something. I've allowed something that isn't me to come in. Is it me? It's not any me I know. Is it truly a part of me? Because something is in you, does it make it of you? I'm not trying to escape responsibility. I'm not. I'm ultimately - I hope - in charge of whether this energy moves my body and uses my voice and to what degree. I'm just trying to look at it. I'm not trying to run.

I will say that this degree of violent impulse only happens when Finn is doing something aggressive to me physically and won't stop no matter how often or loudly I tell him to. That's when I feel like a caged animal and the situation becomes potentially unsafe. Because that is violent, even if it's violence delivered by a four-year-old. There's a shock in being disregarded like that, a hot sense of violation. If he's hitting or kicking or pushing or squeezing or hanging on me or touching me in some relentless way, licking or poking or flicking or tapping like Chinese water torture, and he won't stop despite my hectoring or pleas, then I'm transported to the primal middle of whatever cumulative anger I've buried in this life. Dropped right inside it. And I will make it stop by nearly any means necessary.

Nearly. Nearly. Nearly.

Once, I had Fred in my arms, who was crying and needed tending to. Finn threw himself at my legs, and then threw his arms around my waist and began pulling. I told him to stop, and then yelled for him to stop, it wasn't safe, I have Fred, we could fall, I have to take care of Fred, let go, let go of me, and he wouldn't and I pushed him over. I threw him off of me and he fell on to the floor. In my defense, there was an element of the dramatic soccer player going on for Finn. He milked the fall, spun it a little, helped it along. Seemed almost glad it happened, as well as frightened and sad. Like he had his own strange pinprick of joy. But there he was on the floor, and I had put him there.

This isn't the worst thing that ever happened. Neither, though, is it small. It still lives on in Finn, who brought it up tonight when I was putting him to bed. My bête noire was activated after a jagged evening, and my patience was gone. My voice was loud and flat and I was ordering him this way and that. We had gotten into his bed to read stories, and I was doing battle with myself. I was trying to do the good thing. I was trying to breathe and be still. I summoned a softish voice, if one with a flat affect, and asked him to please pretend to be a rock for a minute (long enough for me to allow love to get a foothold, which I didn't say). I could feel the energy wanting to run in Finn still, and I could feel my own tears fighting their way up. (They won.) Finn draped a leg over me and began kicking me sideways with it. My voice got louder, a warning, and I told him that I would eventually do whatever it took to make that stop.

He said, "Would you hit me?!"

I said, "No, I would never hit you. I would never hit you. No."

He said, "Would you push me over?"

I knew he remembered. I considered pretending that I didn't know what he was talking about.

I said, "Would I push you off of me? Would I push you over?" and paused.

I answered, "Yes. Yes, I would. If you're doing something to me like this, if you're kicking me or pulling me or doing something to my body that I don't want you to do, then yes. I would. I would do it. I would push you over."

We sat there in the strange peace of this knowledge.

please hold

RSS Feeds. I always forget about the RSS feeds.

Yes, there was a post here earlier. Yes, it's gone. Yes, it will be back.

The subject matter of this post, for those who didn't have it spooned into an RSS feed before I could whisk it away, is very sensitive. I posted something and I felt ashamed about it and wanted to hide it.

My dear friend, Ingrid, she's one of the people who saw the post in her RSS feed. She called me this morning, and we hung out and talked. She's going to have my back and write a preamble for me so I can put it back up. I can't go it alone on this one. I'm afraid I'll get speared.

I forgot that long ago, when I was pregnant with Fred and spending lots of time on Babycenter.com, I set things up so my blog would post over there. When I was scrambling to take down the post, checking Statcounter to see whether anyone had read it, I saw that it had posted to Babycenter, and someone had indeed read it. I went and looked.

One comment: a crying emoticon.

You can interpret a crying emoticon a lot of different ways when you have no other information to go on. I decided that this emoticon was crying in horror.

Ingrid is going to help me and I'll have it back up at some point soon.

So, you weren't imagining things. And if you read it and got worried, please don't. What I wrote was true but it's not anywhere close to the only truth, or the most pervasive truth. I stand by it. But it needs more around it. It's not enough by itself.

Okay. Please stand by.

a man, no plan, a canal.

A year ago tonight I went into labor with my youngest and final child, Mr. Fred Rowley.

If you follow this blog, you'll, uh, notice that my posting frequency has plummeted during this last year. Call me a conspiracy theorist but I think there's a correlation between the two.

No, YOU'RE crazy.

This post wants to go in more than one direction and I'm going to let it.

First, I have this guilt that I haven't been out here chronicling the beauty of my children in the way I did after Finn was born. So, I'm going to paint some pictures for you. I'm going to let you see them a little.

Second, this past year has been the most difficult of my life. I took a Persephone-like trip to the underworld and I'm only just climbing out into open air again. I don't fully understand what happened. I know this: I turned 40 last July. I'd been looking forward to this all my life. 40 always had this corona of light around it, a gravity and thrill to it. I felt in my bones that I was going to come into my own in some critical way. Like I would be born this year, somehow.

Maybe I was in the birth canal.

Wait, I think that's right.

Oh, argh. This is two posts and I'm trying to squash them together. Well, screw it. The birth analogy for this post is a Siamese twin. A Siamese triplet. I'm one of them, and Finn and Fred are the other two. We're definitely fused together. If I birth this post at ALL it'll be a miracle, so I'm not going to require that the process be pretty.

1. Fred! Let's begin with Fred. He's the little trumpet call, the sunrise, here. Fred had a hell of a time getting here. His ride through my body into the world was fraught. So many times we thought we were going to lose him. The problem was never with Fred. Fred is the farthest thing from frail. Fred arrived in style, all in one piece, better than solid.

How do I describe Fred to you?

This is why I don't post! I'm humbled by my subjects. I'm just going to dumbly hand you images and try to begin to describe Fred that way.

Here:

* deep in the earth-->ready to be excavated --> but not excavated yet --> still all Nature, all potential --> a massive cache of ore --> gold, what else? How does it glow without being up in the sunlight yet? Trust me, it just does --> the future of this gold can only be something large and magical. A grail, a sword. Something bright and noble.

*Daffodils (yellow) (gold again) -->simultaneous flower and trumpet

*Golden retriever (right) --> your best friend, so lucky and happy and good

*THE SUN.

That's the light of Fred, the glow of him. We know he's on the side of good. We know he's on the side of joy. We know he's tough, and we know he's not mean. He's all benevolence, but don't bother fucking with him. He'll barrel right past you.

It's the summer solstice. In Finland, the midsummer holiday is called Juhannus. I was there once for Juhannus, with my mom. We went to a cabin on a lake with some cousins, ate cold cucumber soup, watched the sunlight streaming through the birch forest. The sun went down for five minutes around 3 in the morning and then popped right back up.

Fred timed his entrance here just right. Here, everyone. My signature. Sunlight.

I'm not going to try and describe the day-to-day of Fred to you. He'll just sound, you know, like a baby. I'm no fool. I'm not going to try and get across the light in his eyes. Maybe you'll get to see it for yourself someday.

2. Finn.

If I'm daunted talking about Fred, I'm doubly daunted talking about Finn. My complicated moonbeam. That metaphor isn't just me trying to be neat and easy, cheap and symmetrical. I may have made him, but I didn't MAKE him. I'm just reporting, and that bit of reportage is accurate. I'm going to let myself be primitive, again, and just hand you what I can hand you about him.

*Long, pale, willowy. Wild, sensitive. Where Fred is of the earth and sun, Finn is netherworld, elf (not quite right, elf, but it gets there), moon. He's a creature. There's danger to him. He's carrying something wild, and he doesn't know how to work with it, yet. There's a split. On the one hand, this intelligence and refinement. His vocabulary boggles. He doesn't want the music too loud. The sheets are too scratchy. And then these bursts of energy come through him, and he hides his face. Can't use words. Neighs like a horse. Plunges toward you. Plunges away from you. Careens. There's no such thing as a wild thoroughbred, is there? There is now.

He's wild as Pan, soft and bruisable as the bluest blueblood.

We watch Blue Planet together. Orcas converge on a mother and baby gray whale, separate them, take the calf down, kill it. He likes this part, defiantly. It matches something in him. He mimes shooting a thousand arrows at the Orcas. He's with them and against them, both.

Why would I be able to describe this?

Look, I said it wouldn't be pretty. I said it would be a miracle for me to get anything out at all. I can't describe my children. It's useless.

And now I'm too spent to try and talk about myself, and that's really all the metaphor you need for me for now. I'm spent. Forty, you took it another direction. Nice work. You mixed it up. You zagged where I thought you would zig. I don't think 41 is going to be a piece of cake, necessarily, but at least I think it's going to take place above ground.

I'll come back to me later. And the Pink House, don't worry. I'll come back to that, too.

attention, please

Quickly, I'm swinging on ropes across a great ravine, and your attention is the next rope.

Ah, thank you. Life-giving sunlight, your attention, strikes right in the solar plexus, spreads pleasure, propels me another slow, sure, enjoyable twenty feet.

Look, look at me! Hurry up. Thank you.

[I perform a small dance in the air, gyrations. Payment for your trouble.]

Your attention has disappeared. That's fine. I have its ghost. Your foot has come off the gas pedal but the fuel hasn't entirely stopped flowing. I'm still moving forward.

Slowing.

[(There's a trick involved, here, bystanders. You have to pick the right moment to launch your bid for attention. Do it too soon and you're wasting perfectly good fuel. This is assuming some ecological model in which fuel is exhaustible and can be wasted, but you should assume that. If you don't, and you're wrong, you may not make it all the way across to your death. You may run out of fuel and die before your death.

The cartoon character has just raced off a cliff into mid-air, come to a stop and realized its dilemma. We are in the micro-vicinity of the moment to strike. You have between now and your blinking take to the watching audience (the other watching audience, the one that doesn't matter) to launch your bid. If you wait until "reality"/"gravity" kicks in and your limbs just barely begin to flail, your performance will have a whiff of desperation about it. This isn't immediately fatal, it's just foolish. You have a long way to travel across to your death. If you are to hold the desired audience's attention, your performances must inspire trust. Your performances should be assured, seemingly careless, professional without showing it. Your technique must be firmly in place. Then you can allow real life to come into your performances! And you should, you must. You have a long way to travel across to your death. These performances should be worthwhile, should nourish your audience with something real. Your audience is also in mid-air, is quietly struggling, has a long way to travel across to their death. If you are always yelping for attention and then holding up an empty box, your audience will begin to ignore your pleas, however tuneful your yelp, however shapely your box. The trick is to inspire loyalty, lifelong loyalty, create a valuable symbiosis. You and your audience should have a real exchange at each of these desperate crossroads.)]

[(However, you both have a long way to travel across to your deaths so you should occasionally also just have fun. For every four times your bid for life-giving attention involves the removal of your skin and bones and the revealing of your pulsating internal organs, there should be at least one bid that's just flashing some skin or telling a joke or popping and locking for a second. Feel free to adjust that ratio, if you're confident. Play it by ear, if you have a good ear. Don't fuck with it, otherwise - lives are on the line. When in doubt, 4:1.)]

And....

NOW.

if the world is a stain, let me love what spilled

I want you to start right this second and come slowly into focus. Be relentless. Be slow, infinitesimally slow, and infinitely persistent. Be slippery. If I’m afraid, slip around it, slip under it. Start with a warmth. Slowly let it spread. Make it like that day at Balmoral Beach when the sand was white and glittering and the air was warm and cool and the bay was still underneath its small busyness. Everything bad had drained away and I was on Earth but I wouldn’t have believed it. The inside was unrecognizable. The green and yellow ferryboats were gliding silently by and my ring was shining. We were on our knees in the sand. You propose to me like that. Then start lifting the veil, and like I said, do it slowly. Make everything get clearer and brighter. Let it all be visible. Where it's beautiful, I should know the extent. Where it's awful, I should know the extent of the damage. It should be slow, but don’t let it stop. Don’t make me wonder if you’ve left. If I have to see something that I’m afraid to see, let me know you’re with me. Do it by a warmth. Do it by a hand on my shoulder. Never make me wonder if you’ve left. I will begin as a newborn kitten, I'll blackmail you like that for gentle treatment. These training wheels should soon become funny. When you can tell by my heart rate that I’m properly strong, then you can splash it out. Throw out something dazzling, like a vast cape of fireworks-flowers-something I can't imagine. Something with teeth, something that burns. Cause awe. Sustain it until it crumples everything weak in me, until only a worthy companion is left. When I’m really strong, make your move. Surprise me. Kill me if you have to. Bounce me up and out of it and then you can decide if you’ll keep me or throw me back. If you keep me, I shouldn’t mind. If you throw me back, keep my illusions. Let me know what it’s like to move down here without sticking to it. Give me the thing that unlocks the suffering, the light that shines behind it and reveals a different shadow play. This is a prop, and that is a prop, and these were the actors. Credits.

emergency techniques

1. Emerge.
2. Check for bleeding. Are you bleeding? You're not. Good. The accident was a metaphor.
3. If you are bleeding, please stop reading this list.
4. Imagine that the accident only just happened a second ago. Assume you're in shock. Assume the accident was grave. Your responsibilities diminish immediately. Let others determine fault. All you need to do is accept the blanket and the cup of coffee and let yourself be squired to a nice hotel.
5. Watch movies on hotel cable.
6. Pretend you have amnesia and that this ignominious business is nothing to do with you. Nothing whatsoever. You're a Habsburg, for the love of all that is holy. You're descended from Confucius. This is all too ridiculous and will all be straightened out presently.
7. Just get here. "What happened? I just got here!" "There's too much to explain. Just wash this." "Okay." Do this constantly.
8. Many of the techniques have to do with denial. Note: these are emergency techniques.
9. I'm just a nice little hedgehog who lives in a tree with her seven children! Has there been some hullabaloo? Hm. Well. It all sounds awfully difficult. Off to bed, everyone! But not until you finish eating all your jam. My, my.
10. A classic technique is to be French. "It is complicated."
11. Hatch a plan, very impossible, with a rapidly approaching deadline. I have to be elected President by when? Jesus. I better get to work.
12. While campaigning, don't be alarmed if others are alarmed by the sight of all the imaginary blood on your shirt. Fold this into your campaign in a positive way. There's no time to change shirts! Only to roll up sleeves and solve problems!
13. When you're elected, this will be an accident of a different color, and completely consuming. You will have advisors to help you develop new techniques for your new problems. And finally, you will be able to launch an investigation into everything that happened previously. Don't do it, though.

letter to a good friend

What if you were one, and what if I wrote you a letter? Not an important letter. Just the letter of the kind that good friends used to write each other when they lived far away. And long ago, too, before emails. I just want to write you a rambling letter.

This is what I'm thinking about.

(I'd ask you first about all of your things, but there are too many of you and I don't know all of you. I trust that Aunt Karen is on the mend, and that your quilt is coming along, and that the charges were ultimately dropped. Tell me if I'm wrong.)

I'm thinking about October, ten years ago.

Wait, first let me tell you that I've been thinking about acting, and how I've missed it. I read an article in Vanity Fair about Penelope Cruz, and how immediately after she stopped filming her last scene in "Nine" (a musical number sliding down a rope, which blistered her hands), immediately upon reaching the bottom of the rope, she slipped behind something to cry because she was done with this role. I'd been doing fine without acting - really well, thank you - until I read that.

Ten years ago this October, one of my favorite acting teachers was in town from Vladivostok. (Hang on - oh, my goodness. Giant cascade of yellow leaves shooting by outside my window. All right. It's stopped. I can go on.) Leonid Anissimov. He was teaching a class at a loft in Belltown; we were working on The Cherry Orchard. We never rehearsed with artificial lights, only ever with lots of candlelight. Class felt like church, in the best way. I remember sitting there next to the little makeshift stage, with its hanging windowpanes, and being filled with eagerness. Everything about me was on the edge of my seat, ready to lift off. It's an exquisite feeling being in a room with someone who knows all sorts of things that you want to know, someone that you believe in, someone who's like this giant, oh, let's call it a samovar full of tea, and you're a cup, totally empty and all you want is to be filled over and over with this tea.

I remember a moment when we were talking the script, and suddenly I was filled with this understanding about Ranevskaya. No, it wasn't understanding. It was a feeling, like I was Ranevskaya, and I was overwhelmed with her shame. Tears, everything. My hand shot up and I could barely talk fast enough to explain what I knew. Laura, Leonid's translator (I loved Laura. She was so warm and calm and beautiful, and she called me "Tinochka" which made me feel scooped up, part of a family) murmured what I was saying to Leonid. He looked serious, and nodded, and then was suddenly full of energy and looked right at me. "Da! Da! Yes." He said something in Russian and Laura translated, "Now we are rehearsing."

When I used to perform, what I would do in the few minutes while I was hovering backstage waiting to make my entrance was this: I would touch everything, all the objects around, to take their temperatures. I was especially glad whenever I found anything cold, because it would wake me up. I was really looking for cold things to touch, that was the real mission. Another thing I liked to do, while I was warming up, was to go out into the house and touch every seat. I thought it would open something up between myself and the person who would eventually occupy it. I remember reading that Michael Chekhov wouldn't perform, wouldn't go on stage until he loved everyone in the audience. My word. I wouldn't have even one performance under my belt. I'd still be waiting to go on in The King and Queen Can't Speak, back at Ridge Street School, back in 1975.

Leonid used to take a nice long time talking about different things before the real work of class began, in order to get us ready. The idea was that you shouldn't get up and work until you're in the water. That's how he described it. When you were ready to work, some transformation would have occurred. You can't swim until you're in the water. I thought I understood the concept pretty well. And then once, during a performance of The Seagull many months later, I found myself in the water! I was on stage, but I was in the water. I didn't have to do a thing; I was in the water. Buoyance was palpable, and ease, effortlessness. No decisions to make, just letting the water bob me where I had to be. I arrived everywhere perfectly, lightly, fully. This is not a tribute to my great skill. This was more like receiving a blessing. I was weightless. I couldn't miss.

I thought that maybe I would never need to do it again, but I miss it. With Finn and Fred so young, it's difficult to imagine rehearsing and performing an actual play. It's too much time away, now. Maybe I will take a class, just so I can feel those muscles working.

Here come those leaves again.

What else, what else, is that it? Is that all I have to say to you?

One more thing. I discovered something. I'm always discovering ways to outwit my worries. This is what I discovered today. It's just another way to say the same thing that everyone always says, so don't get too excited. But so, here: I'm hiding from my brain, right here in my life! It will never find me here. I'm hiding in the curtains, in the sink, in the counter, in Fred, in soap. It can't get me when I'm out here. And what's out there can't get me when I'm in here. I feel like I've been whisked to the Canadian Rockies, to a safe retreat, right in front of me. And then I don't have to work so hard to fight my worries, and I don't have to browbeat myself about them. I'm on vacation, on retreat, hiding away and I brought everything with me, and nothing that I don't need.

That might not make sense, but if you're my friend you'll just let it go.

Write me.

what you are unaware of is this

The sky is a low ceiling with your death directly on the other side of it. Anyone not present is a fairy tale until you see them with your own eyes. When someone leaves the room, they may as well be stepping off the edge of a skyscraper. The play you are watching is the only play ever to have been performed. These are the first actors in the world. You are a wine glass made of air and you could shatter at any minute. Everything apparently solid is a fakeout, a dream, a mass of congealed sound waves. Every word floats between invisible quotation marks, pointing to a terrible underlying purity of experience. Could anything be more frightening? If your solar plexus doesn't recoil at the thought of such purity, you are thinking of something else. Where you are going, language isn't following. Language clings to everything with the desperation of that knowledge. You will be hit by a bus, just as everyone said could happen. Everyone will be hit by a bus. You're going. You're going. While your blood is leaving you all your possibilities will rush away from you, the one more kiss, embrace, look, not one, your rightful thousand, your rightful million. Your favorite books are leaving you. The kind of light you like that comes in from the side: the light in the morning, the light in the late afternoon, the light from a lamp. Goodbye to gentle sideways light. Blood red, cobalt and canary line up to administer their last kiss but you have no time to receive these kisses and your lingering hunger for color could drive you into an unfortunate rebirth. Emerald stands waving forlornly at the gate but you have already gone and will never know how it loved you. You are going towards an overhead light that comes up from the middle and travels everywhere and has no gradation, the quality of which is unfamiliar. It is a terrible light and you are required to love it. It is reputed to be wonderful but it is peeling away everything you know, even your old stuffed horse, even your mother, especially your lover and so you hate it. You will be thrown towards this light again and again until you receive its message. There has been talk of love but you are conscious only of brutality. The part that is conscious of brutality is being killed by the light. Something will remain and you will receive more instructions at that point. Some of this is true. Some of this is not true. Something, ultimately, is the truth. You must practice disappearing to know which part is true and to receive vital further instructions. If you rely on instinct, your instinct will fail you. Everyone here is wearing fifty layers of clothing over a fat suit, making it so that no one can perceive anything correctly. No one wants to. This is why everyone says, "You never know." But the clothing is coming off and the suit is coming off and your bones are coming off and you do know.

when ganesha met sally

I love Hinduism. It's in my top two world religions. Among other reasons, it’s the only religion that’s ever marched right up into my face and said hello. (Your move, Buddhism.)

Once I heard it speak, or someone I can only imagine was connected with it, somehow. I was sitting on my bed one evening reading Autobiography of a Yogi, and I was reading some bit about The Divine Mother, and all of a sudden I heard....well, it wasn’t inside my head, but it also wasn’t outside my head. It sounded as though it were coming down through a tube about fifteen feet over my head, but the tube was, in fact, in my head. Whatever. It was a beautiful female voice, and the voice said, mysteriously and simply, and as clear as a bell, “I live forever.” And this wasn’t my voice, my thinking voice. This was a completely separate voice from my own, sugar-sweet. And that’s all it said. “I live forever.” I’ve never heard a voice before that and I’ve never heard one since.

But that took place a couple of months after the story I’m going to tell you now, which is when Hinduism introduced itself to me.

So Hinduism has a doorman, and his name is Ganesha. Surely you’ve seen him. He’s an elephant-headed god with a bulky man’s body. Hinduism has a long list of marvelous gods and goddesses. But Hindu protocol says you’re not heading to those VIP tables until you have a conversation with and pay your respects to Ganesha.

This is the story of how my big, floppy-eared Godfather-in-the-Sky and I met.

In a time I like to call The Sensitive Summer of 1999, I was a raw nerve. There's no time here to tell you why and there's no need. But maybe I’d taken some Ecstasy a couple of months earlier. And maybe things went a little haywire after that. It’s not important. Just know that I was like an antenna made out of a mimosa plant, hyper-alert and wobbly.

One day towards the beginning of this summer, I went on the spur of the moment to a yoga class. I was not a yoga go-er, but I needed the medicine that day, so I prescribed myself a Level One class. I'd say Level One was approximately one level too difficult for me. I was struggling, gasping, tipping over. Maxed out.

Eventually, it came time for the meditation. The nice part. Relief! We were guided through. We sat with straight spines. We were told to breathe through our noses. And that’s what I did, breathing in and out.

And then things started getting peculiar. On every exhalation, it felt like my nose was lengthening and dropping, like a trunk! Not my nose itself, but...let’s call it my spirit nose. (I know.) Anyway, yes. Every exhalation, longer and longer, this thing, this essence, this wispy elemental protuberance from the middle of my face. Back in 1999, we didn't have these expressions like OMG or WTF, but if we would have....

OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK

All right. Never mind. Continue. I have a trunk now. Whatever. That's cool. Yoga is wa-a-ack but there you go. Mine is not to wonder why. Now we're told to envision ourselves looking in a mirror. Very good. Hello, mirror. There I am. Nothing special going on there. And now we're told to envision ourselves looking in not a regular mirror, but an internal mirror. We are looking inward to ourselves, in an internal mirror. I wonder what I look like in an internal mirror, how that’s different from an internal external mirror. Let’s see.

I look like a charred elephant head. My head is an elephant head, blackened to a crisp.

Let me just shut and rub my internal eyes really hard and try that again. I look like a what?

Charred elephant head.

Okay, Eight Limbs, thank you for the incredibly difficult and super-freaky class! I will be on my way now.

Later that night, at my boyfriend's apartment, I had something close to a panic attack as I was trying to fall asleep. I was agitated, and everything felt ominous and rubbery, but I sweated through the sensation and eventually sleep took over.

And then I’m woken up. Speaking of sensations, I’m woken up. I feel for all the world like I am being pierced all over, like I'm being sewn. Not my body, more like the air around my body, but it's me. I can feel it. We can call it my aura if we want. I don't know. It was my airspace, palpable. Prick, prick, prick. I don't open my eyes because I don't want to see what might be doing this. I am supremely uninterested, if by uninterested I mean scared shitless. This pricking, sewing sensation just goes on and on and doesn't stop.

Then, behind my closed eyes, I see this clear pattern form. It's a pattern of green and white floral geometric arrows. Like a futuristic sort of feminine wallpaper. Arrows, with their stems wrapped in these soft flowering lines. Green background, white lines delineating these arrow and flower shapes.

Aha. Okay. And all the while, the piercing continues.

Now the next stop on the Lunatic Express is this sensation: do you know how normally you feel that your consciousness is in your head? Behind your eyes, say? That's command central, right? Go ahead, take a second and place yourself. You sort of think that you are in your head, yes? Well, my me dropped. My consciousness, my self, my command central dropped a foot or so down the hollow tree trunk of myself, right into the neighborhood of my heart. If I opened my eyes, I would have fully expected to be looking right out of the middle of my torso. I was there. I could even hear my heart beating right next to me, freshly loud. Right on top of me.

And all the while, the piercing.

I was terrified. I thought maybe these were aliens. Truly. Like extra-terrestrials were performing some kind of surgery on me, or some kind of examination. It just didn’t stop and I was petrified.

And then suddenly I remembered yoga class, and the elephant head. It crept into my consciousness that the Hindus...don't they have an elephant-headed God? Right, Ganesha. Right. I'm going to think about Ganesha. Maybe that will help. Maybe he'll help me. And the minute, the minute I do that, the fear disappears and the most delicious feeling in the world comes over me. I feel like I’m suddenly in a warm shower – not of water, just of warmth, flowing down over my head as I lie there, and I feel so sweet and peaceful, even though the piercing has never stopped. And then! Then! Instead of the trunk I had in yoga class, I suddenly feel like I have giant, floppy elephant ears! Waving back and forth next to my head! This is surprising and super-amusing and very comforting, and I find myself getting drowsy again and I drift back to sleep, while all of it - the piercing, the sense of relocation, the floral arrows, the warm shower, the flapping ear feeling - all of it continues.

You can imagine that the next morning I am awfully very goddamn curious about Ganesha. So I go to a little spiritual bookshop and seek out a book. There must be something. Hindu shelf, Ganesha, Ganesha. I'm expecting that I might find a slim little tome. OH. What have we here? Who's THIS fatty? I’ve found an 800-page number called Loving Ganesha: Hinduism’s Endearing Elephant-Faced God, by Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. An illustrated resource on Dharma’s Benevolent Deity, Remover of Obstacles, Patron of Art and Science, honored as first among the Celestials. This will do!

I go home and start devouring this giant, weird, delightful book, which is like the most fun bible of Ganesha you can imagine, with all kinds of stories and lore and drawings and poems and imagined letters from Ganesha. I read about the Milk Miracle, which happened on September 21st, 1995, wherein statues of Ganesha all over the world accepted and drank milk for 24 hours. This is a real thing. They reported it in the New York Times. Devotees would hold up spoonfuls of milk to these statues, and the milk would disappear. It happened in India, in Canada, in Nepal, in Kenya. It happened in L.A. It happened in Queens. The crowds went wild. Milk disappeared by the gallon, through straws, out of trays. Sometimes the Ganeshas would refuse the milk from devout believers and gobble the milk offered by nonbelievers. Anyway. Well into the book is a big section that has a list with drawings of all the symbols associated with Ganesha. Heaps of them.

Now, it took me a while to get to this part. It took me a few days. And then I saw this.

Pushpashara, Flower Arrow: Loving Ganesha shoots flower-covered arrows from His sugar cane bow in guidance to devotees, so they will not wander too far from dharma's path of true fulfillment.

What do I make of all of this? I don’t know, and I think it’s foolish to try and make anything. There’s nothing flimsier in this world than a conclusion. But somebody else said it well, and I’ll finish by handing him the mic, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” And to that I say “Word, Bard.”

now i can call him fred: the birth story

Sixteen, going on seventeen days old. Fred Harrison David Rowley. Here he is on Day One:



Stats at birth:

Entrance into world on Monday, 6/22/09, 3:48 p.m.
20 inches long.
8 lbs 4 ounces...wide.
Apgar* scores of 8 and 9

*Score measuring general robustness of baby, administered once and then again in disbelief. Is he really that awesomely robust?? Yes, and then some.

Story time.

I awake Sunday night/Monday morning at around 3:30 from my tiny, two-hour sleep. Braxton Hicks contractions* are afoot, as they have been for a good while towards the end of this pregnancy, but these ones have a spark about them, a feeling of show time. I get up and noodle around on the internet. I get a message from an old friend I hadn't been in contact with for fifteen years, and I'm so delighted by this that the Braxton Hicks contractions change out of their rehearsal clothes and put on their real costumes and also cross off the "Braxton Hicks" from their dressing room doors. I call the doctor around 4:30 and describe what's going on, and she says we ought to head on over to the hospital.

*These are contractions that happen throughout a good portion of a pregnancy, sort of like practice contractions. On the American Idol finale during the year Finn was born, Taylor Hicks and Toni Braxton performed a duet. I couldn't believe it and I'm still mad that they didn't form a band called "The Braxton Hicks Contraction".

Team Fred's Birth consists of myself, Dave, my dear friend Elizabeth and whoever happens to be on call at Swedish that day. (Hey, wait. Last you knew about it, you blog readers, I was going to have a c-section. Well, some things happened and I changed my mind and a nice lady took out my cerclage stitch and the c-section was cancelled.) I was hoping beyond hope that the aforementioned nice lady would be on call that day, and she WAS. Dr. Susan Harvey. Cool Hand Luke! The first good news of so many good newses of the day.

Elizabeth comes to get us, we go to triage, iv/blood draw, blah blah, and then we are shipped off to our room, where we meet our second good news of the day: our nurse, Ms. Tracy Sharp. Oh, Tracy. Oh, sister. She's bossy and pushy and all business but in the best way, a kind way. She ascertains that we're trying for a vaginal birth, now, as opposed to the repeat c-section. Nurse Tracy lets us know that if a baby CAN be born outta there, SHE can MAKE IT be born outta there. If SHE can NOT make it be born outta there, IT can NOT be born outta there. Nurse Tracy apparently makes it a point of pride with herself that this baby will leave through the traditional exit, but she tells me that I will have to be putty in her hands all day long. She gets to flip me around and move me here and there and I have to do whatever she says. As I do not have the conviction that I can make a baby do anything in particular at all in regards to its being born, I gladly throw myself at her mercy. All day long, I am all "HOW HIGH?!" before she can even get the "Jump" out.

One of my annoying personal qualities is a sort of Zelig* phenomenon wherein I inadvertently mirror the energy of any person I am in contact with for more than five minutes. (I eventually had to stop seeing this one particular hairstylist because she was this loud, obnoxious, Texan party girl and I couldn't stand myself whenever I had an appointment with her. I was all, HA HA, OH MY GOD, I KNOW! Old ladies who live in the apartment beneath you and are just trying to sleep while you have loud parties are total bitches who deserve to have cruel practical jokes played on them for months on end! TOTALLY! Also, I think I will not schedule my next haircut just now, thanks. I will slink away with my cute hair and never return.) Also, I can be a bit of an ass-kisser. These are not positive traits but it appears that I was born with them just for this very day! Just like Owen Meany and his crazy voice, my Zeliggy ass-kissing would bloom into great purposefulness on one pivotal day, this day of Fred's birth. I would have Nurse Tracy on my side. I would zigzag back and forth between ass-kissing and mirroring all day long. Doulas? I agree! They're totally stupid! I know! We hired one, but we fired her because we suddenly realized that they're totally stupid and against everything good! You feel that way, too? I feel that way, too! We want to bring our placenta home, though. I mean, no, we don't! Of COURSE you can move my leg that way. Also, you're really pretty. And a saint!

*Great Woody Allen movie. His character, Zelig, morphs *but exactly* into whomever he's with. If he's talking to a psychiatrist, he becomes a psychiatrist. If he's talking to an old Chinese man, he physically turns into an old Chinese man. If you haven't seen this movie, rent it now and then come back and read the rest of this post later.

Dr. Harvey broke my water around 8 in the morning, and then we didn't see her until later in the day. (I have changed tense. I might do it again. It's late.) For a while, Dave and I walked the halls of the childbirth wing with our iv tree and me very large in my hospital gown and little hospital socks, waiting for labor to intensify, feeling like a a couple about to give birth in a Hollywood movie. Oh, honey. A baby! Stroll, stroll. Pause. Ouch. Resume stroll. Oh, honey. A baby! Stroll, stroll. Switch direction.

Nurse Tracy said that I was progressing really well, and that I could have an epidural any time I wanted, but the longer I could hold out, the better the chances to avoid a c-section. I couldn't believe that I had arrived at the point where I could have an epidural already! Glorious! So do-able, so far! We strolled some more, and then the contractions got more powerful, and Tracy steered me to a rocking chair, which...good. Very good. Elizabeth had gone to seek coffee and breakfast, and when she returned I was heading into the most serious contractions I would have to feel all day.

I put myself down a little, earlier in the post, talking about my Zeligness and asskissomania. Here's where I give myself a dose of the opposite. I am incredibly, incredibly good in difficult, hospitally situations. I do say so myself. Elizabeth said I was like a Jedi during contractions...and I WAS. I WAS like a Jedi. The pain would kick in and I would get very quiet and peaceful and root myself to some solid place within. All stillness, all acceptance. Very strong-feeling. Eventually, the pain was enough that I didn't want any more like it, and I gave the word for the epidural. The anesthesiologist arrived in her hat with cupcakes all over it, and administered the epidural. Did I flinch? I did not. Did I stay perfectly still, even during contractions? You know that I did. When a person came into the room to ask me a question, did I hold a calm finger up during her question and say, "Just a moment. I'm going to have a contraction right now, " and assume my silent, meditative contraction pose, and then did I peacefully open my eyes and address her question? Friend, I did. Nurse Tracy talked me up to the nurse who filled in for her during lunch. "She is awesome," said difficult-to-impress Tracy to lunchtime Deirdre, "She NEVER COMPLAINS." She bade Deirdre treat me right, and Deirdre did.

After the epidural, I had to lie in a funny position for a good while in order that Fred might change positions. He was facing the wrong way, sunny-side-up, and Tracy knew the trick to convince him to move. I lay on my side with the uppermost leg curled up toward my chest, shaking and shaking from the epidural, and Fred worked away for a couple of hours to reorient himself. (Small hero. Helpful wonderbubble.) I had a fever. There was a cool washcloth. I knew when contractions were happening, but they didn't bother me. I slept a little. Everything progressed beautifully. Fred turned and descended, I dilated and thinned, all at a steady clip. At 2:00 pm, Fred and I arrived at our places. I was at 10 centimeters, he was down at the entrance to the exit. We were ready to push.

Clever Tracy. Before we began pushing, she turned off my epidural without telling me. She wanted me to be able to feel what was going on in order to be able to push effectively, but she also wanted me to stay relaxed and avoid internal freakouts about pain levels. So she just quietly turned things off. I love you, Tracy.

Dave was stationed at my left knee, Elizabeth at my right. The pushing began.

All right. So. Pushing. A baby. Out. Is not my idea. Of. A good time. First of all, it feels totally futile. No, first of all, what it feels like is doing situps wherein you're also not allowed to breathe and you're also making some kind of heroic physical effort at something you don't quite comprehend. You're directed to push down with this part here but also push the baby up towards the light, and whatever you're doing is great, really great, but you should also do it, like, five times harder, whatever the fuck it is you're doing, which you're not quite sure but it's really fucking hard already. Second of all, it feels futile. It doesn't feel like anyone is getting anywhere! And your loved ones (which now include your nurse) are telling you, "You're doing so great! He's moving!" And you're thinking, "Why are they saying that? Why are they lying to me?" And then they're like, "Ok, push! Push!" And you're thinking, "No shit?! I should push? Like I was going to do something else during this contraction? 'Hey, you guys, with this one I'm just going to do a great visualization! And with the next one, will you hand me that magazine?' Of course I'm going to fucking push, whatever that means, for whatever that's worth, which is NOTHING, not that you're ever going to level with me about that!" And then they're like, "Push harder! Harder, now!" And you're like, "THAT IS EASY FOR YOU TO SAY, MOTHERFUCKER. ALSO, HOW ARE YOU GAUGING HOW HARD I AM PUSHING?? DO I NOT APPEAR TO BE OPERATING AT MAXIMUM??!" And then Tracy says "Go!" which means "Take a deep breath and hold it and begin pushing" so you take a breath and then someone else says "Breathe!" and you breathe again but realize you already did that and you're supposed to be holding your breath and so you do this stutter breath and you have to figure out how to kick off into this round of pushing on this weird stutter breath, and you plan to speak up when your next little rest period comes up between contractions. Between contractions, all you want to do is breathe deeply and go limp. You have to give some notes, though, to your birth team, because you're all figuring out how to do this. You say, "Don't say 'breathe' after Tracey says 'go' because then I do a double breath," and your team is incredibly sweet and understanding and receives this note like a champ. Next rest period, you say, "Don't say 'push' so much." Next rest period, you say, "When you tell me not to arch my back but then tell me to push Fred UP, I get confused," and they say, "Cool, great, we don't do that any more." During the next rest period, they say, "His head is showing, do you want to feel it?" And you do, halfheartedly, and there it is, but whatever, you just want to breathe cool air and lie there like a dead fish. And during another rest period, they say, "Do you want me to get a mirror so you can see?" and the question seems so irrelevant and far-fetched, like, "Hey, there's this really neat documentary about spiders on right now, do you want to watch it?" No, I don't want to watch a documentary right now. I'm trying to have a baby. I don't even want to watch a documentary specifically about me, Tina Rowley, having a baby named Fred. I just want to have that baby. I have no time for these sideshows.

At one excellent, beautiful point, however, Tracy announces, "He's going to fit." He's going to fit. This is not going to be a c-section. This is the moment when we know it. I am going to have this baby the way nature intended. Lift, rush, lightness, amazement, joy. The c-section with Finn was terribly difficult, our meeting was delayed by a few hours and dimmed by medicated sleepiness, the recovery was slow and painful, and as a result my bonding with Finn was adversely affected for a while, and a fierce depression ensued. I felt useless, wanted to fall off the face of the earth. So, that, THAT, was not going to happen this time. Whatever did happen would not be that. It would be better, for sure, maybe good, maybe great. He's going to fit! (We later found out at that his head is in the 25th percentile, circumference-wise. My beloved small-head. My considerate bunny rabbit.)

At the most excellent point of all, Fred rounded the toughest corner of the exit and made his way to the light. His small, thoughtful head worked its way out. They call that bit "the ring of fire". Fire, no. Ring of OW, FUCKERS, yes. Fire is an exaggeration, though. But his head came out. Then Dr. Harvey was there and she pulled his body out. And then he was up where I could see him, in the light. A baby. Mine. Fred. Visible. Lit from within, sure, but definitely lit from without. Jaw drops. Tears of joy. 3:48 p.m. And then he was wiped off and wrapped in a blanket and then he was on my chest, warm and squirming, with his soft face and soft limbs and soft head, warm like a bread roll. (Bun in the oven is the perfect description of the thing. Bun out of oven.) Heat, weight, movement, sound, happiness. Can't convey.

Other things happened, fine things, good things, but nothing else matters. Fred is born. Stop typing now. The story is told. Maybe a few more details later, maybe not. Shh. Fred is here.