A Southward Tide

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

Tag: meditation

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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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November 3, 2013

Feelings Aren’t Facts

Feelings aren’t facts, they tell me when my father dies. What are we going to do with all those tears, Dee-da, my aunt said while we wait in the hospital corridor for Dad to go. Dry your eyes up before he sees you that way, my uncle says.

Feelings aren’t facts, they tell me when I am pregnant. Why do you have every symptom in the book, asks my husband, as I cry all the anger away and lash out all the fear?

Feelings aren’t facts, they tell me when I try to explain myself. You over-process your emotions, my therapist says, cataloguing them in binders colored Magenta, Cyan, and Yellow.

Feelings aren’t facts, they tell me when I am sad.

How do I meditate when I feel this way, I ask the guru. He replies, you meditate anyways.

Sadness is a river that flows straight from the gut, the river Styx into which our tears eventually trickle, deep pools of sorrow swirling through all consciousness, around our ankles, always within reach. Joy seems like Sisyphus’ fruit.

The guru says build from the ground up and your arms will reach the fruit. Elevate your consciousness and you will no longer be stuck in the morass. The fruit has always been there but you have been too busy staring at the puddles by your feet.

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October 26, 2013

Baudelaire Preferred Laudanum

I misread a Baudelaire poem once
and thought:
“He had it all wrong.
Conversations with nature
are, in fact,
hard to come by.”

The ocean never answers.

Cross-legged, cradling
quandaries like lambs I’m hesitant
to cast upon an implacable altar,

I beg the rolling tide
for some sign.

close by a sandpiper needlepoints

is that a sign?

a gull
swoops

sign?

waves crash
louder than

a moment

ago

Thank God –
there is an ice cream shop nearby
because this business is tiring.

Baudelaire preferred laudanum.

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October 20, 2013

My Mother is an Extinct Bird

My mother is an extinct bird
sketched in children’s books,
surviving in imaginations
grand and small.

The old mantelpiece man
narrates this flight of auburn fiction,
his pipe alit by the tale’s wind.

How can I follow her
when she is a vellum-bound kite,
tracing pinpoint crescents across the sky?

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October 17, 2013

The Terrible Always Now and Other Ontological Problems

“For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another.” (Virginia Woolf, Orlando)

At a lower school gathering, our discussion turned the media blitzed world of pervasive gun violence and pedophilia. Over coffee, we plotted to protect, insulate, even isolate our children from this cruel new decade. And yet, is this era worse than before? What of mangled vets returning from Vietnam? What about Emmet Till? And Jerry Lee Lewis and his 14 year old bride? What about age old alcoholism and The Valley of the Dolls? The Cold War?  Studio 54? The present is myopic; it accumulates no knowledge beyond our own existence. We are like blind moles digging ourselves a circular tunnel that fills in behind us.

St. Augustine questions, “How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.” (The Confessions, Book XI). Accordingly, the present is fluid, unmeasurable, indivisible, time flowing from future to present to past. Change is the only constant, but isn’t the present immutable, always being, always the same?  Is the present the moment where all of life and experience is born and dies simultaneously? If so, as Augustine ponders, does the future or past even exist?

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October 14, 2013

One Hundred Years Past

It was a long way she trod from
second one till a hundred past.

Paris bombed!
The wars did come and go.

From the windowsill, she sewed rag to rag
and watched them all. She tied her
things up in boxes stacked a century ago,
mended clothes pressed flat in a Norman cupboard.

She died in a modern hospital room
that resembled nothing the year she was born,
the early century – 1908.
She was just a child when all those boys died.

And then she bore her own in the second war.

Paris liberated!
Flags waved, firecrackers burned.

Years later, they fought.
My father left.

For decades, she was old.
We sat her at a table once a year
and smiled when she was gone.
She smelled like musty things.

How little we notice until they die,

then we try on their heavy shoes,
we unpack their boxes, flip
scalloped pictures, yellow and gray.

We touch their things as if
we knew how to cradle a hungry child
and yearn the taste of milk.

How little we build from souvenirs,
how little we cared to ask when
she sat old by the windowsill.

Life is long – but the same length for all,
the same second one till years gone past.
And the pain it takes to remember,
we soon forget.

She lived to a hundred and three,
and we shall soon forget.

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