The Savoradin link on my blog is a dead link.
I am supposed to, we are all supposed to, remove them. He has asked us to do so.
I will.
I can’t yet.
We can’t do everything difficult at once.
I miss his poems. I miss his rants. I miss his wit.
I can’t hit the backspace key again. Not today.
“You must be KIDDING.”
I am angry. My skin burns. My immune system lurches. I can hear my own voice, hoarse:
“I am in the biggest crisis of my life since being thrown in a stinking Chinese prison and you want me to stop every ten minutes to be mindful of 5 uncontrived breaths?”
Silence. He is very still.
The whole room is vividly still.
I can feel the pain in my hand muscles and a wave of nausea so strong I nearly loose my balance.
“I am losing money in the 5 figure range, maybe 6, and you want me to just STOP? I am losing my health and my sanity at the same time and you want me to SIT STILL and do GODDAMN NOTHING?”
I have raised my voice. The people in the office next door can hear.
Complete silence.
Then, the One Whom We Shall Call ‘The Monk’ leans over and whispers, with the smallest nod, “Yes.”
These words and the idea itself are a kind of mean joke when you are a meditation practitioner who has sat, more or less dutifully, from one to 15 hours a day for a decade, more or less minding your breath.
Five breaths. Not 500 or 5,000 or 500,000 or 5,000,000—all of which are numbers you know.
Five.
This is not funny. Not *quite* funny, except...
This is the kind of humor that slips by in your peripheral vision and that *would* make you laugh if you were not feeling quite so insane or quite so desperate or sick.
This is the kind of humor that makes you smile and mean it, right before the noose tightens and you dangle, aware of the fine, spring air between your feet and the platform, which you notice---as your sight fails you---needs a light sanding, and perhaps a single coat of... as you fade.
These words could melt the glue between your bones. If you could let them, they would open you so wide you would *never* close. But not for me. Not yet. Not so far.
I wince and then I say, “FORGET IT,” and I slam the mouse down on the desktop.
The mouse breaks into two, neat pieces in a small flash of red light.
The phone rings and I ignore it. My message box is full and I know it.
I think I will die. I think I will break everything in the office. I think I will Leave Forever and Never Look Back at All the Goddamn Idiots on the Planet Earth.
From the corner of my eye, I see he is setting my Palm Pilot.
I know he is setting it to ring softly every 10 minutes.
I think of murder. I think of suicide. I think of Everything Explosive.
Then I sit down. There is nothing else left to try and I know it.
I notice the small, irregular bubbles on the smooth surface of the lovely, blue Danish glass vase on the shelf. I feel my bare feet on the floor, steady and still. My spine is straight and relaxed as the fabric of my skirt makes contact with the fabric of the chair.
I cannot look at him directly.
I whisper, holding the Palm Pilot, my cheeks streaked with tears, “Every *ten* minutes?”
He says softly, “Every six"--
--and turns to finish an e-mail.
I am Karma Lekshe Wangmo–“the activity of the powerful woman of sublime speech.” That name was a mean trick by wise man.
I am sitting in a hotel room in Denver, Colorado, wearing a blue and white striped t-shirt, underpants and one sock–writing about my friends. My hair is sticking out every which way, because it has not been brushed in several months. There are three pairs of shoes on the floor, all black. I have just remembered I forgot to eat dinner.
I am teaching tomorrow and I have no idea what I’ll say. I worked for months on the curriculum and I have no idea where the notes are. I’ll use Power Point. Several of the evaluations for the class will say, “I liked the new financial theories and I liked it when the teacher lay down on the table and told us a story.”
I have no idea where I am going next. I think it’s New Brunswick. I hope to see one of those big, black dogs. I’ll write you when I get there. Last time I was there, the wind blew so hard it blew the roof off the local pool.
Pat is my mom. She is Entirely Too Young to be my mom. She is wide-eyed and wise. She will not be pushed around, except by herself, which happens on far too regular a basis, in my opinion. My mom is funny. She is generous to a fault. She is organized. If she reads this, she will print and file it.
My mom was a Bad Girl when she was young. Not really, but she wore straight skirts and red lipstick and a perky little scarf. She had saddle shoes and she still has that Poodle Skirt Energy in there somewhere. Now, she drives a shiny, black Lexus. She could marry pretty much any man she set her mind to. But she likes to do Whatever She Wants, Whenever She Wants, so it may not happen.
My mom is not a quaint, old lady. She is not "cute." She is smart as a whip, though slightly slow to piece things together. She stews and percolates. She has natural and unaffected good taste.
My mom has saved more people in her life than a Baptist minister.
Sally is a studious strawberry blonde who lives with Jeff, a pale, self-effacing string bean of a genius writer from Idaho.
Sally cooks like Martha Stewart, but she will never spend time in jail. She has matching things and I think she will not ever file her taxes late. To say she is good at board games is like saying Colin Powell was all right at being a general. History will decide, I guess.
Sally’s main charm is that her Unusually Large Vocabulary is spoken crisply, but with a slight lisp and a habit of pronunciation that causes her tongue, which is delicate and pointy, to stick out at the Cutest Possible Angle. Thally. Thee Thally Run. Thee Boyth Drop Dead with Delight.
I don’t think she knows, but this odd conjunction of laser-like intellect and Six-Year-Old Nature melts most of the men who know her. Jeff has nothing to worry about, if Thally ever should leave him for someone else, someone lesser, the entire female gender will likely sign up for his writing class, even though he is reputed to not show up, ever.
Karen is Mostly a Mystery. She is a dancer and has hop-skipped-leapt-rolled all around the world. She moves like a cat with no bones. She is small but her energy is Bigger Than Life, bubbling and slithering and ka-powing into space. bOInG.
Karen’s face is Most Wonderful. Her eyes are the seeing kind. She has an exclamation point mouth and tiny, articulate hands that sign pure muse talk.
When she speaks, the words come out in poetry–odd punctuations and musical pauses. Unexpected changes in pitch and silence that suddenly land you on your butt. I have fallen from her eyebrows many times. You blink, but you never recover.
When Karen meditates, the whole world stops. Even I slow down. The stars turn over in their star beds and something is lifted and a grand space is opened.
Even when she carries the compost out, it’s magical. You know something is going to grow. It’s garbage and somehow it’s going to come back as brussel sprouts or roses.
I don’t think Karen is going to die. I think one day she’ll evaporate and the sun will come out. The grass will stand up straight and reach for the warmth, like we do now.
Dale is a soft, noodling, romantic sop who has a brain that can never be fully indexed, since it’s constantly in progress. He must own a hundred pairs of suspenders, all wonderful, which hide nicely under his chamois shirts. All soft.
Dale is drawn magnetically to All Things in Skirts, especially the wounded and the wild ones, while still tautly held by a thread to his best friend, Martha, who is firmly planted on Planet Earth. Martha is Dale’s foundation and he is her Knight in Rusty Armor. They are both Christmas lights on the planet–all colour and joy, though sometimes tangled.
Dale is both Startlingly Advanced and Amazingly Naive, which explains why The Things in Skirts are magnetically attracted back in his direction. He comes through. He stays. His hands are delicately pointing in all the right directions. He never takes credit but he always takes responsibility, and sometimes takes delight.
I think it is possible that he actually lives in another century, while miraculously inhabiting hands that move a pen in this one. We have all taken note. He has drawn more pictures on napkins than any artist of this century. There is reported to be a man who collects them.
Tony is my friend. From the first time I saw him, standing in doorway, messenger bag slung over his shoulder, thin as a wraith, nearly bald, and disheveled, I knew I was going to watch him All My Life.
He used to be a bike messenger, but in true kamakazi style, he ruined his knees and saved his bike. He went to India and France and eventually, too many other places to keep track of. He saw girls, I think, and learned to speak passable French. He followed some thin dreams and banged his head a little and then took up a Big Project, where he has now pitched the World’s Biggest Tent and taken on hard work with Karen, a small, wood sprite who lives in the pine forest on the edge of the meadow.
When I see him, I see a faint light on the horizon. I always think it’s his future. I have the notion that on the other side of his wandering is something homeish and worthy of such a fine, if bull headed softy.
I remember when my mother said she was afraid of bugs, and Tony said, seriously, without blinking, “I think I have some on me right now.” My mother told me she had thought he was fragile til then. After that, she just laughed and enjoyed him.
I hope he goes slowly. Carefully, now to the future. Walking in those genX black leather boots with the white heels. Mister I Don’t Try I Just Naturally Look Cool, Tony. *laughing.
I am in Denver today, teaching. All this week, more or less. Across the street, there is a lovely old stone church. It seems a bit out of place among the hard stalks of high rise offices and the empty-box store fronts. It has no garden to speak of. I notice that the lights are off, even now, at 9:30 PM.
Yesterday I read that the Jesuits had a practice of praying 7 times a day, in community, and then once again, together, in the middle of the night.
I was talking to my teacher and I said, “I am so inspired. I am so inspired. Do you know why?”
He said, “Yes, Lekshe, I do. You are inspired because you are a sop.”
It’s true. *laughing* I am a sop.
I felt good about that little speech below. And when I gave it, I remembered, with gratitude and with some red-faced humility a time when my teacher saw me teach and he saw my pride in how spell-bound my students were. He said, in private, and only in my general direction:
“Ah. The suffering of sentient beings is so great. They are drawn to even the faintest light.”
I have not forgotten that little teaching. Ouch. You will not understand it unless you understand that it’s my experience that his affection for me and my practice is unmatched in my experience. So the sudden tug into attention and humiliation was a blessing, a gift.
I love us all.
Senior Consultant for LERN (Learning Resources Network)
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