A Southward Tide

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

Tag: religion

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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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.

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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 26, 2013

Buzzards

After high school, I vowed never to return to Palm Beach, a thin sliver of island that reminded me of all things lost in the cranky cogs of adolescence: wide-eyed jubilance, minnows and unconditional parental love (Later I learned their boundless love was not as mythic as teenagedom suggested. But that took decades…)

The tropical sun was reserved for holidays when I could loosen the vice grip of New York City and laziness became art: poolside reading, Dad’s cooking, twelve-hour sleeps. Over cocktails, I hated it here – how fake, weird, racist, stupid, greedy the inhabitants, how soporific the lifestyle. Couldn’t you just roll over and die in the blaze?

Then on the eve of my thirtieth birthday, a conspiracy of fates shipwrecked me. Moored by family illness and eventually love, I stayed, bought a house over the bridge and had some kids of my own.

Time rounded those reactive edges that tugged me to and fro, that trapped in the dooming treason of choice, the youthful delusion that life is anything other than the reinforcement of habits.

And slowly, the world unfolded before my eyes.

The buzzards float along the currents of the winds, hundreds of feet in the sky. In late afternoon, they swarm on buildings that edge the Intercoastal, covering the mirrored windows with hunched bodies. Actually, they are no more buzzards than butterflies, but rather two species of vultures: the turkey vulture and the black vulture. The former is the larger of the two with a red face and beak, while the latter has a smaller wingspan, a gray face and beak.

Egrets peck through the palmetto grasses and troops of white ibis with hooked bills hang out on the curb of my neighborhood. Often bobbing alone on buoys, pelicans sometimes fly in formation along the crashing surf.

By the glittering blue of the Intercoastal, a hawk beats its wings above the water where old timers on fold-out beach chairs cast their lines, reeling in whatever they can hook, snook if they are lucky. Every evening the sky blooms purple and neon pink; the moon rises over the ocean. And in my garden, hibiscus flower, three types of gardenia and some sweet almond vines.

The two Vanda orchids hanging from my front porch remind me of my father. His grave is shaded by banyans in the old cemetery. Above him, the buzzards circle.

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November 5, 2013

The Way They Looked at Him

The way they looked at him you’d think they’d been diagnosed too.

Which was more difficult – his friends looking down on those cavernous eyes, remembering every emptied bottle, all the misbehaviors of youth, or for him to see death reflected in their gaze, exposing a nostalgia years past due?

When he could still stand, dragging himself along on his IV, did he ever look at himself in the bathroom mirror?

Does a dying person think about form?

Did he pause to look into his ice blue eyes? Did he say goodbye to his wide smile, the long slender fingers, the sallow hollow of his cheeks? Did he think – when I go, she ceases forever to be my daughter? Maybe in these last moments – did he think – I will stare just a few minutes more into my mortality, refracted in immeasurable waves in their terrible loving eyes?

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October 29, 2013

On Jadedness and Magic

I began feeling jaded during teenage hood. As the magic of childhood faded and life started to appear in all its glory, a wretched unjust affair, I experienced the common symptoms: eye-rolling, sarcasm, over-sensitivity, unfounded hatred of existing power structures, a thirst for independence occurring alongside a pathological desire to feel part of a group (my peers – unfortunately also teenagers). Then freedom! Graduation! And all sorts of new things started pouring in again. College. Undesirable behaviors. After experiencing everything there was to experience in a short span, and then moving to New York, activity and boredom capital of the world, now I was jaded again. My twenties were a decade of ugly shiftless feelings, disappointments and ebbing wonderment.

Much has already been said about my generation’s inability to grow up. We have squeezed the last drops of collegiate experience well into our thirties to thirsty, spiritually bereft results. We wait till almost middle age to have children. And to what end? Now a mother of two, I understand that psychic reconciliation with one’s own mother and father can only occur after a few years of interrupted sleep, bathroom floods and crayoned walls. How can we forgive the twisting directions of our own lives if we cannot understand our own incapacity as parents to shield a child from the arrows of existence? Since we cannot forgive, we cannot move on. We remain stunted teens with crow’s feet and graying hair.  

But more importantly, we remain jaded. I’m not suggesting that everyone needs children to perceive magic again. For others, a dog (or three) will suffice. Maybe a pet armadillo. A backyard teepee. Or a scuba tank and a fish-eye lens. But let’s just say: the magic has always been here. We just closed our eyes. And jadedness is this willing escape from the whole picture of life into the comfortable womb of resentment. It is a momentary death as we turn from brilliance to count circles on the ceiling.

Maybe the only way out is not through but on top of – flip it, turn it backwards, throw your life on its head. A call to all fellow werewolves, midnight flutists, bird whisperers and underwater stargazers (you know who you are) –  to paraquote Ghandi – be the magic you want to see in the world.

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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 23, 2013

The Interpretation of Silence

“We live…lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time – not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.” (Balthazar, Lawrence Durrell)

Balthazar, the second in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, has always been one of my favorite first reads, shattering the constructions so carefully set out in Justine. Is this not the best type of literature – the kind that piles misinterpretation upon misinterpretation, that builds a false belief system so Romeo can drink his poison, where the fiction of the story itself and the fictions created within the story merge seamlessly. In a much quoted line from Justine, Durrell foreshadows the unraveling of the subsequent books, “Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”

Ultimately, we condition ourselves by the preset limitations of our perceptions. How many little deaths do we create, how many times do we drink the poison believing our dreams to be dead when they are just sleeping? Or sometimes we dream the false dream, like the narrator of the The Alexandria Quartet, when beyond our small castle of thoughts a much larger fortress resides, an entire socio-political, even emotional, landscape. In ninth grade, I developed an intense crush on a classmate who was always staring at me. Only months later did I realize his girlfriend was seated behind me; hours of visual dialogue had occurred between them and in my head, just wasted time.

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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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