The ice and snow melted to slush, then silty streams, bringing a birthy freshness to the world. Blood, sap, salt and vomit swam on the wind and occupied a sensorial and psychic sameness. Death and birth sit together here, as they do in so many places.
All that the ice had gathered and encased in their death grip was now laid bare: piles of cedar leaves and bark yanked loose by the wind, a used canary yellow condom, cat food cans. All detrital evidence of life’s expansive capacity commingled, collected and displayed where it ought not be, but, nevertheless, was, on sidewalks cleansed by hard rains and grassy ground soggy with mud.
Last weekend, I rewatched “Spirited Away” with my family and was blessed by the River Spirit. When the River Spirit arrives at the enchanted bathhouse, he smells so bad all of the attendants believe that he is a Stink Spirit. Our protagonist, the human girl-child Chihiro, who has been tasked with facilitating his bath and has herself been described as stinking by the others, offers him kindness and the most expensive herbal bath formulas. Although she is first afraid and repulsed by the sludgy, smelly spirit, she stays with him and helps free him from all of the pollution (a bicycle Chihiro believes to be a thorn is what begins the process of recovery) that obscured his true nature and clear waters. Once the pollution has been cleaned as his real identity revealed, the River Spirit blesses Chihiro. To stay with our smelliest, most vulnerable struggles is the deepest kind of trust I know.
On the second anniversary of Thich Nhat Hanh’s passing, I sat in meditation via computer video conferencing with Touk Keo and Janice Lee. I arrived to the space feeling deeply tired, depleted even. For several weeks prior, I had been feeling a sense of inadequacy: as if I’m not doing enough in any of the spheres of my life— home, graduate school, creative projects, teaching, activism—and as if I had lost touch with my vitality and parts of myself that I treasure most. Strangely, this coincides with feeling quite competent in school. I can tell that my ideas and writing have clarified, but as I cross or linger at this threshold, I feel like I’ve forgotten how to think in poems. Intellectually, I know this isn’t true. Having the benefit of witnessing so many cycles of my own breath and life, I know that exhalation and inhalation cannot simultaneously occur, and that although the memory of exhalation is dim while I’m taking a breath, when the time comes, my body knows what to do. I’m called back to a line in Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of A Common Language: “The story of our lives becomes our lives.” For me, the story I tell is a spell. I want to stop telling myself a story of feeling like I can’t write or that I should be doing more. But what kind of spell am I casting when I reject what I’m feeling.
While Janice the practice, she spoke about not rejecting any part of ourselves. In light of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the guilt and overwhelm and many other emotions a person who lives outside of that conflict but cares deeply about the safety and dignity of all beings might be feeling, Janice shared a quote from Thich Nhat Hahn and encouraged us to “Hold the peace for those who cannot.” I still need reminding that my own peace is essential, and hearing the distillation of these teachings by Janice and Touk was truly medicinal.
Much of my childhood is a blur now, until I return to my birthplace or hear one of my sisters tell a story. But I remember feelings, or perhaps more accurately, the felt sense of my childhood was rushing. Hurrying to get from here to there. Always running late, never early or on time, never able to linger. There was always an alarm set or an upcoming activity that cut the current one short. Rushing feels like a rejection to me now. To be in constant pursuit of the next to the point of never fully inhabiting the present is to abandon the self that dwells in the ever-existing present. Let me neither rush, nor linger too long.
During the ice storm, we lost power for 48 hours. While the lights and heat were out, I made a big pot of bean stew, and we had a citrus taste-test (bergamot, centennial kumquats, meyer lemons and more!) and played board games by candlelight. A coyote stopped by our yard to hunt, though I don’t think they were successful. A peregrine falcon swooped in and very successfully snatched an oriole or kestral for lunch. After the first night, the temperature in our house got down to 48 degrees Fahrenheit, and we decamped to a hotel. Before we left the house, we turned off the water and emptied all of the pipes in order to prevent them from freezing and bursting. Upon our return the next day, we found the temperature inside the house had dropped to 43 degrees. Turning the heat back on and keeping the fire going in the fireplace, we found it a slow process to rewarm the air and particularly the pipes. The water came back to the kitchen first, then the main bathroom, but one area of the house took two more days to fully defrost and resume full function. We thought it might never happen, but it did.
READING + recommending
Atisha’s Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, edited and translated by Ruth Sonam and with commentary by Geshe Sonam Rinchen. I first received these teachings from Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo at the Krotona Institute in Ojai in 2018, which THANKFULLY, blessedly, miraculously are archived on Yoga Anytime (if you’re new to the site, you can use the code MAGIC for 30 days of free practice).
I’m slowly re-reading Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney. I know this book is polarizing, especially among folks who were very fond of Rooney’s earlier books, and (as is often the case with the books I love best) if you need a complicated plot then I would proceed with caution. I guess I didn’t read the introduction the first time around, because I only learned upon my second reading that the title of Rooney’s novel refers to a line from Friedrich Schiller’s poem The Gods of Greece (Die Götter Griechenlandes). Now, I’m reading the poem, which you can find here, translated by Edgar A. Bowring. I’ll probably write more about that in the future.
LOVE TO ALL,
kelly