About Vipassana (part 2)

It's turning out to be a sunny day in Oakland. About ten thirty. I don't teach until Thursday (Friday Saturday) but volunteered to sub for a class this afternoon. I'm waiting to hear back. It will be good to go back to work, as yesterday was a tough transition from the meditation course. After two weeks of a very controlled schedule it was difficult to have a full day at home with nobody to tell me what to do. Um, did this then did that, then did this, etc. As a result, when dinner time came I wanted to eat something big and cheesy because it felt like I had earned it. Which is a kind of preview into how the cleanliness of the ten days unspools: reacting to vague and broad feelings (in this case, a generalized anxiety about time and work and things to do) instead of hanging out with them. Instead of sitting across from them, chatting and listening and maintaining one's own autonomy. Our constantly troubled friends driving us to drink.

But oh well. Kitchens eventually get dirty, and one the first things I did on Sunday was to eat a chicken burrito, thereby cracking the delicate shell covering my "sila" (morality): not killing, stealing, lying, sexing, sexting, sensual entertainments, or anything that would rev up my juices. Since it was going to end anyway, I thought I might as well get the pursuit of perfection out of the way. In the past, coming back from a course I haven't written much about the actual experiences of being there, a little embarassed of if being a mediator meant being religious or a "buddhist", and as I was sitting, wandering away, I thought that I'd write in detail in this blog about that. But those thoughts were early on in the course and I don't remember exactly what it was that was that I wanted to communicate that was so important.

So here I am trying to write about the past. In the future, I have twenty minutes to finish before I need to put some shoes on for basketball. I heard back from the ESL people and they don't need me to sub. Maybe get back to 1Q84, the new Haruki Murakami book (it's great!). Since I haven't looked at a newspaper yet (avoiding it) I have no stories to report though I will ease myself back into the habit soon. I thought about so many things up there but they come and go, like clouds, one day something seems so important, and you're sitting there, paying attention in a particular way, and then somewhere somehow this thing that was generating so much trouble and stress is no longer there. And eventually something else comes up and the same thing happens. It's like cleaning out an attic, you have to get through the stuff on top before you can get to the really old stuff. Kind of like writing, writing, writing, writing to remember why we started writing in the first place.

About Vipassana (part 1)

Ah. Back to my empire of ego. Whew. Feels good. Vipassana meditation is not easy. Neither is learning to tie your shoe, how to ride the subway, or play a realistic flight simulator with all those terms like "yoke" and "yaw" and the fact that when you pull back on your mouse the nose of the plane goes up and when you want to turn you have to plan way in advance. Not that any of things are comparable to the meditation, but come to think of it, these are things I've had trouble with. I didn't learn to tie my shoes until middle school. My mom got me elastic shoe laces so I never had to untie them. I didn't learn to ride a bike until fifth grade. I still get lost on trains, sometimes, especially the New York ones (the BART not so much) and have no interest in ever playing a flight simulator again after summer afternoons with Adam and Matt, playing the Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer on their dad's super powered Mac.

Instead it's more like sitting still all day, or trying to. Lots of time to think, but eventually it becomes more interesting to pay attention to what's going on with the body. For me, this time, I didn't get to this point until the 8th day. In the last three and half years, this is the third time that I've done a ten day course and they haven't gotten any easier. I try to make it through an hour so I can make it to the next one. Then to breakfast. And then to the next hour, and then to the next one. Time passes really slowly but usually that phrase indicates a kind of boredom, which is not really the problem. The problem is more of a survival issue, trying to make it though each day. It feels like an enormously long time in part because I'm usually not focusing my attention as consistently and repeatedly as I do while there. Instead, at home, I'm doing one thing or another, reading a newspaper or watching a car go by. Mostly responding to external stimuli and letting my environment dictate where my mind wanders. When my attention is focused the day gets longer in a full way.

Over and over, even before the actual Vipassana meditation starts, we spend three and a half days focusing our mind, over and over, feeling "sensation" for as long as continuously possible on the patch of skin just above the lip. If we wander away we come back. All that to have a fighting chance to expand this area of sensation to other places on the body. So as, the body becomes a kind of landing pad for a continuous parade: a puff of air, an itch, a tingle, a warmth or a chill or whatever. There's a a lot ways our bodies hit the world and we're responding to these sensations whether we're aware of it or not. Regardless, once this kind of eyeball opens and begins to look around it turns out that there's a lot going on other than what we're thinking about. Why is this important? Because when we're looking at a thing, for example a back pain, instead of feeling the pain, we can instead hang out with it. Ask it questions. See how big it is, how long it will last, and eventually we see that it goes away. Or with bigger kinds of feelings: how long will this anger last? How big is it? What does it feel like and eventually, we see that it goes away.

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Tomorrow I'm going away for a little while, about twelve days, for a meditation course. Also known as a "retreat", which isn't exactly an accurate word as sitting for twelve hours a day ten days on end actually brings most things a little bit closer, but, the point is, I won't be around. No email or cell phone, and no blog postings. The semester begins day after I get back, so will all of a sudden be back in the swing of things, Spring 2012 until the middle of May. Non-stop, and I'm sure you'll read me complain about it many times between now and then.

The good news, at least in my own lists of things to do, is that most things that I set out to accomplish in these last three weeks got done: finished my grad school application to the best of my ability and will hear back sometime this spring. Spent a couple intensive weeks working on two collections of poems, improving little bits, here and there, sequencing and sorting. That and sending out some submissions, individual poems and manuscripts, as well as submitting to a residency. I didn't get to finishing any music projects, cleaning up old files well enough to share them (I counted 78 MP3s of "songs" that were borderline finished) but there's time for that when I get back.

So as, like many, I've been busy, and now I don't have too much pressing as I head out tomorrow. It's nice to have time to work, though it's necessary the person who teaches reading and writing actually have time to read and write, or else one ends up teaching the same thing over and over again, like a boring high school history teacher. At any rate, in the spirit of automation, please enjoy this video while I am gone. The world is full of mystery. See you in February.

Greetings from Oakland California. This post is not a post but a way to put off working on the personal statement that I must complete to complete my application to graduate school that is due is six days. I should of written it earlier and I did but it was bad, twice, and now I'm on my third foot dragging draft of trying to explain my desires in a way that doesn't transparently pander and stays true enough to the nebulous and unformed ideas of what I like to call myself. I'll get on that in second, but first, no news but no news, I've been very busy this last week working on a couple different writing projects, mostly prepping pages to send out to publishers, collecting and revising and stringing together days in a row of writing time, which unfortunately never ever happens during the semester. So it's been really productive. It feels good to get back to these things in earnest.

But, even though it's been a week since I posted last, I figured all anybody really needs when it comes to reading is that last paragraph I posted (see below). Probably one of my favorite little pieces of writing, though it actually comes at the end of the book, so as, maybe I fill that paragraph with all that came before it and maybe it doesn't stand alone on it's own. Don't know and won't know. Not much else to report, no thoughtful short essay or joke to make or picture to post. The weather has been warm and the cats have been sleeping. Saw A Dangerous Method, the Freud/Jung movie, that I quite enjoyed, have been watching basketball, running a little, hanging out, and also getting over a little bronchitis, which actually, though it was kind of painful, forced me to keep a reasonable schedule that lead to getting much done, unlike today, where it's eleven in the morning and I haven't started. Okay. That's enough. See you.

But oddly because that was two paragraphs I feel compelled to write a third solely for the sake of symmetry or balance or something like symmetry or balance like lining up a fork with the wood grain on a table, folding a napkin neatly or lining up my foot along the edge of concrete the mildly OCD impulse to square things up live, in action. Of course it's difficult when there's not as much to say and instead the only impulse that fills space is the impulse to fill space and if I were you I would just stop reading right now because I'm not going to say anything interesting or of note for the next six lines, entirely self-referential makes me think of a little article I read in the paper about Animal Studies, studying animals outside the context of biology and instead in a field like philosophy they cited Derrida who wrote, "An animal looks at me. What should I think of this sentence?"

Happy New Year.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their back were vermiculite patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

_______________________________-Cormac McCarthy, from "The Road"