A Southward Tide

Poems, essays and excerpts. A favorite quote or two. An observation. A compendium of imagery. A dream analysis.

Category: Essay

May 20, 2014

Kriya and the Eternal Quietude

I’ve been meditating. At first sporadically, then regularly and now sporadically again. I believed once I became a regular meditator then the desire to go within, to experience the soporific bliss of the quiet mind, would never leave me. I believed I would never stray from the path of spiritual enlightenment. But challenging my mind to shut up has proven to be much like physical exercise, on/off and sideways in binging frenzies. I wish it were not so. I wish I enjoyed routines and was less of a commitment phobe. Or that I was an early waker, a start-the-day on the right foot person, someone who did not forget important diurnal details like being grateful. I also wish I was less susceptible to my emotions. So be it. I am nothing but what I actually am.

We’ve started a bi-weekly group meditation practicing Kriya Yoga. On Mondays we meet at a yoga studio, the door open to a landscaped courtyard. In the dimming purple light, we enjoy the tired squawks of the island’s host of green parrots. On Thursdays, we meet at my mother’s surrounded by hundreds of my father’s orchids. Over the stereo comes the voice of the guru directing our breath and focus – up along the chakras, through the crown of the head, the base of the spine, mantras slipping softly through the blabbering particulars of the mind. Somehow this brings it all together and forgives my daily discrepancies. In the group, my meditation practice thickens into subtle shades of oblivion. Each time these friends and strangers coalesce with mats in hand, I am amazed. Why do they keep coming? Somewhere in the space of silence we become threaded together.

My father was a classical music aficionado who had also filmed some of the great performers and conductors of the past century – Karajan, Arthur Rubinstein, Menuin. In his last days with cancer, a friend threw a private concert in his honor at our house, with a harpsichordist, cellist and contra-tenor. At dinner, the contra-tenor asked my father what the most beautiful performance he had ever heard was. Later this contra-tenor would sing a cappella at Dad’s funeral. My father answered that it was the sound of silence in an ancient 10th century monastery, monks in genuflection, heads bowed to the great final prayer.

1 Comment
April 11, 2014

Lucky Stones

As a young adult, I wore a boxy Liz claiborne purse, gray or light tan with a thin leather cross-over strap, filled with pencils, erasers, flavored lipgloss and a few lucky rocks. I had collected a gray skipping tone, the size of a big grape, and a smooth hematite. I was shy and when I felt challenged, my fingers would turn over the stones in my bag, infusing me with providence and power.I was an animist; my stones had souls. I cannot quite remember when I grew out of them but it was not an obvious transition. In high school, I shoplifted crystals from nature stores at the mall. In college, I collected frogs.

Finally I abandoned the needs of childhood to ground myself with physical objects and instead retreated to the colorful recesses of my mind, where fantasies trumped the day. For years now, I have hedged on reality. Even when two beautiful children have presented me with magic beyond human imagination, I have maintained my own dream life, a foot-out-the-door of this world, a vague morass of happiness and drama where no decisions need ever be made, just possibilities, endless possibilities.

I have my own versions of lucky rocks, ideas that help me get through it all: moving to Los Angeles or even better, Bali, irrational crushes, careers I could never pursue, hobbies that remain out of reach and things I have no intention of acquiring. At my wedding, I felt terrorized by my own uncertainty not so much because I lacked in love but more because I lacked the ability to live within the compass of regularity. Happiness was something for people that understood what this game of life was about, I reasoned.

Yet as I pursue mindfulness,I must let go of the notion that something outside of myself, be it a rock or a distant dream, fulfills me. And for a dreamer like me, this is bittersweet.

1 Comment
March 18, 2014

Freedom is Bought With

I was twenty-three years old when I broke up with a long term boyfriend in Cairns, Australia. Six years together, I felt dead, suffocated, spit up and rehashed. On the great Australian expanse, I was walking in a cage. I thought it was him.

After the cataclysmic breakup, I travelled south, alone and against the advice of my family. Previously vegan, I started smoking cigarettes and living off ice cream and beer. I lost weight. I tanned brown. Somewhere along the Gold Coast, I hitched a ride out of some crappy backpacker town. It was a long road to wherever we were going next, maybe a day’s drive. The driver’s name was Pip. He had red hair and was kind. I cannot remember the others but the station wagon was full. Pip drove through a straggled eucalyptus landscape, a pale orange earth, snakes sunning on the strip. Sometime after dark, we pulled into a rest stop. It was dangerous to drive through the bush at night, animals on the road, kangaroos smashing fenders, cars in ditches, no ambulances for miles and miles. Pip fixed up a hammock above the picnic bench. Underneath, I rolled out my sleeping bag, a feeling of giddiness in my heart.

No one knew where I was. Not my family, not my friends. I was thousands of miles from the last memory of me and for the first time in my entire life, all the expectations, all the stories and lies disappeared. I was relieved of myself. Under the southern hemisphere sky ablaze with stars, a feeling of total freedom crystallized and with it, concurrent, at the exact same moment, I suffered the loneliest feeling of my life.

The following morning Pip took me aside and asked, “Are you okay?”

“Why?”

“You have barely spoken since we left town. But last night, you were so happy sleeping on the bench. You even smiled.”

“I just broke up with my boyfriend of six years,” I told the half truth and he seemed satisfied. Truth was, it was not the boyfriend that was breaking my heart. It was life with its gaping mouth and awful truths: freedom is bought with self. The freedom we crave is the freedom of little deaths. We pay with pieces of ourselves – the triumphs and failures, the dreams and delusions, even our loved ones, even our names. And without me, what else is there? Freedom is a feeling best left for the gods.

19 Comments
March 18, 2014

Where do the Balloons Go?

Today I saw an deflated aluminum balloon land in the surf. It wafted down slowly until it was an inch above the ocean, swayed to and fro by a skimming wind. Finally its aluminum skin was gripped by the fingers of the sea and wrenched to the bottom of the breaking wave. How will circumstance make use of this aluminum intruder -how long will it roll along mountains of underwater sand before wrapping itself around a sea fan? A clown cluster floats into the sky, long filaments hanging behind to catch the wings of eagles and rubber to choke the great leatherback sea turtles.

I wonder if they all land in the ocean. Do some have enough gas to last them to the upper limits of the stratosphere? Do they just explode? Where do all the pieces land, the torn Spongebob faces and Happy Birthday letters?

I read recently that our world’s helium supply is dwindling. In thirty years, we will ration balloons to the rich only, fifty dollars for a single Thank You balloon, twenty thousand dollars for an MRI. What will the brave new world bring?

My one-year-old celebrated his birthday with a three-foot wide aluminum balloon. It’s still hanging about the playroom bouncing dutifully when his chubby fingers pull its string. The smile on his face is so wide, it is worth an uncertain future.

Leave a comment
March 5, 2014

The Temptation of Eve

On rare occasion, I attend church. This Sunday morning, a young blond man educated by hard-bound textbooks from his local evangelical college, tertiary sources at best, gives a passionate sermon on the temptation of Eve by the serpent. He does a good job. He really does. But for me, it is not enough. It is never enough. These literal interpretations are unsatisfactory; the biblical stories are elusive, deep pools of meaning that leave much to be gleaned, much unsaid, and yet the sermon only offers one possible explanation. I wonder, could there ever be a scenario in which Eve refuses the forbidden fruit? Attempt the experiment a billion times over and she will always say yes. Why would she not? She is like an innocent child yearning for adulthood. At fourteen years old, I made a series of life decisions which put me on a path of certain destruction. But to do it all over again, I would always pick the forbidden fruit, I would always choose the fall, I would always seek the promise of greatness down the dead ends of the midnight hour. Only in our older age do we covet innocence, do we seek back the serenity of the garden.

These are some thoughts I have during the sermon.  How did Eve have a choice? Original sin represents the first act of free will. Eve fell before the fall. Eve fell at birth, the first millisecond that her brain began making neuronal connections, her impeccable genetic material coding itself into human form.

1 Comment
February 21, 2014

Memories of Koi

Behind the Episcopal church of my youth is a walled memorial garden and a koi pond. The Neo-Gothic structure dates from the 1920s, a booming era for South Florida architecture and opulence. After Sunday service, the church served refreshments under wide palm fans and the twisted spines of guava trees. I savored the cheap orange juice and the sugar cookies we were never allowed to eat at home. Crouched on a stone bridge in a white  smocked dress with a handful of pellets, I fed my orange, black and white friends over the broken surface of the black pond. The fish bustled for a turn, slipping around and over each other in exuberance.These memories surface like bubbles of unbridled rapture. Childhood time is frozen, crystallized into eulogistic forms. Back then, were they just the fish I loved visiting after the constraining horror of Sunday school?

Sometime in my listless twenties, I found the garden again flattened by the midday sun, sweaty and bland. There were less flowers and the fish were like bullies, a grotesque ball of wrestling pythons. I had lost my wonder.

I return to this concept again and again. The lost wonderment of childhood, the “growing up” that damaged my spirit. While joy is not the sole property of the past, it is something we must recuperate. It is not our lost youth. It is our lost soul. We can leave no stone unturned or else we all die the quiet deaths of adulthood.

In the garden once again, I rest in quiet contemplation.The longer I sit in stillness, the deeper and wider the garden becomes till voices rise once again from the dark waters, koi older than time itself swimming calm circles around the lily pads. How many wide eyes have they seen from their vantage point below the surface, cherubic faces gazing at them with the wonder of a billion earth-bound years?

Leave a comment
February 18, 2014

The Polyphemus Moth and other important moments in literature

Every now and again, a book tattoos itself on my life. I  hark back to the first time I read Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell or Rider Haggard, Richard Brautigan, Notes from the Underground, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Hernandez’ Piano Stories or The Master and Margarita. I filled journals with quotes. I thought, life will never be the same now that I know what literature has made possible, my perceptions shaded by the disclosures of fictional worlds. I recall the year, the mood, the mundane dramas of the period when I read such work, when Marquez murdered his protagonist, Santiago Nasar, in the first line of his novel or when Annie Dillard’s polyphemus moth began its infinite crawl down a winter drive.

I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in high school. A decade later, I remember two passages from her non-fiction account. In one instance, Dillard describes the histories of newly sighted patients, blind from birth, after the development of safe cataract operations – their wonder and confusion at the two-dimensional plane of color patches and textures where space, form and size are indistinguishable. Their perception seems akin to an acid trip. A twenty-two year old girl keeps her eyes shuts for two weeks. When she finally opens them, she “repeatedly exlaimed: ‘Oh God! How beautiful.'”

And then the next passage: the moth, the fateful cocoon brought prematurely to life by the hot hands of school children, born in a mason jar, its wings forever crumpled. Upon her memory is etched the image of the beautiful crippled moth hobbling towards its death down a cold long driveway. I still cry when I read those pages. It has been seared on my subconscious too. It pains me that she did not spare us her morbid image. I have my own horrors tucked away too – the corpse of the baby sparrow we snatched after its nest fell, despite my mother’s insistence that if we touched it its mama would never return, the beautiful subsaharan tortoise I named Henry dead on our hot Manhattan roof. All these things brought back to life by the polyphemus moth, our hearts burned by the same sad destiny.

1 Comment
February 3, 2014

Music and Writing

Things that help me write prose:

1. Music
2. Driving; music
3. Walking; music
4. Staring off into space; silence
5. Dancing; music
6. Music
7. Spinning, handstands, cartwheels; chirping birds

Things that help me write poetry:

1. Weird Mood; silence, tumbleweeds

And if the music is good enough, words pop right out of the sky, streaming in my head, colored sentence ribbons variegated like a bouquet of tropical things. I count on music to inspire me; the musicians do most of the work. For a recent short story, I listened exclusively to Chopin while writing and then the soundtrack of Waltz with Bashir to edit. Right now, Vampire Weekend’s new album. What inspires you?

Leave a comment
January 14, 2014

Coyotes, Skunks, and Possums

Life is life wherever you choose. The moment you are alive and aware of where you are is the exact moment you become aware of who you are – I am Diana, alive and in good health (and even if I wasn’t in good health, I would still be: Diana, alive). Behind a veil of feelings and opinions there is the constant me. Life is life whether or not I’m sad. Life is life whether or not I have published a book. Life is life whether or not I actually believe what I am saying. Life is just life. The set of molecules that comprise me is the same set of molecules wherever I take myself.  I am no different than a rock. The building blocks are quasi identical, and in any case, irrelevant in the grand scheme. Rock, Diana, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, ideas in physics beyond my ken.

So logically, where I exist geographically is irrelevant. And yet, I am a big fan of Los Angeles. Because I love: the ocean, palm trees, broken down warehouses, spanish-style stucco homes, korean food, skunks and all the things that roam the hills like coyotes, mountain lions and snaggletoothed possums (we have those in Florida too). I am still a creature of heart. I follow it blindly, hoping that one day my spiritual buddha nature catches up with me and fixes me to a rock to write poems and stretch in dawn’s cold fog.

Leave a comment
December 28, 2013

The Christmas Gift

Of all the presents I received this year, my favorite was a bright yellow raincoat with fleece-lined pockets. My aunt said she had lost her mind while shopping; she was cushioning the blow for what she assumed would be my disappointment. But just the contrary: it was as if Christmas had been distilled into one single moment, a childlike delight at a discovery of the thing that I had been imagining for some time (a raincoat) and its  superior counterpoint in reality  (the yellow raincoat). A rush of other joys came upon me – the elation of tropical rainstorms, the memory of yellow slickers I wore in Brittany as a child, and even a vision of myself at the windy helm of some future yacht.

My favorite book of Roland Barthes is the slim volume Camera Lucida. With a masters in film studies and a particular bent towards the documentary image, this has always been my kind of text. I’m also a sucker for the morbidly sentimental (read: he discusses dead people a lot). Though the book is light on theory, Barthes does posit a duality in our reception of the photographic image: the studium, call it the biographic information, the explicit and implicit meaning structure, and the punctum, the detail that holds our attention and pulls us into the world of emotions or synesthetic memory.

Instances in reality, be they fleeting sights or sounds, encapsulated moments, sentences, or facial expressions, can create a similar punctum, piercing through the substratum of ordinary meaning. And for me this Christmas, the triumph of the holiday season was a yellow raincoat, glistening with all possible future rains: a simple gift became a multitude.

Leave a comment