What's in your cup?

This morning I walked into my local Starbucks for a triple shot of decaf espresso before work. It’s my usual drink when I’ve fallen off the no coffee wagon, and since the wagon’s wheels left me in the dust some time ago, I had my nifty spillproof Contigo travel cup with me.

Conservation is a no-brainer to me. It takes building a new habit, but humans are great at that (when did you last glance at your smartphone?) The way I figure it, I would not want 365 used coffee cups in my bedroom, so I do my best not to live with a mystical belief about where things go when I throw them “Away.”

My Starbucks is full of locals (you can tell, because it’s right in the heart of boy’s town and the bicep quality is well above par) but it also gets some tourists from the hotel just down the block. The mother with her two adolescent daughters before me in line was clearly of the second variety. She was fitting three drinks into a cardboard carry tray as I screwed the lid onto my travel cup, when I heard her say “Now, that’s a great idea!”

Um. “Yeah,” I said, with no detectable sarcasm. “It is. I save a few hundred cups a year, I figure.”

The usual barrage of judgmental thought was staunched along with the sarcasm, with just a tiny bit of effort. As I stood there and saw her regarding my cup with a smile, I realized, in a way that was completely unrelated to her charming Midwestern accent, that on this Friday morning in the year 2012, it occurred to this woman for the very first time in her life that she had an option not to use a disposable cup. She had the option to conserve. She had the option to save trees and plastic and space in the landfill, as well as all the unaccounted pollutants generated behind the scenes for anything that’s mass manufactured and distributed world wide to deliver a hot cup of creature comfort to us in the morning in whatever city we may find ourselves waking up.

That was what really woke me up this morning. I realized how I sleepwalk through my worldview, which presumes that everyone, everywhere knows what they can do to help our planet get a little healthier.

When I set aside my assumptions for a second, I had the opportunity to share a great idea with someone else. This woman didn’t deserve scorn for flaunting what I consider one of the simplest measures of personal environmental responsibility. Quite the contrary: she gave me the gift of being inspired by an action that I take almost without thinking about it. I paraphrase George Bernard Shaw:

If you have caramel frappucino and I have a triple decaf and we exchange cups then you and I will still each have one tasty beverage. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

And that idea tastes much, much better.

A Month of Metta

There is a wave in our culture that values practice over achievement. A cadre of tie dyed hearts who encourage us to play, observe, soften, and experiment instead of hammer down an unbending path towards a clearly defined goal. The space of practice, of disciplined playfulness and gentle committedness to return and return and return to a task that at best may feel meaningless but occasionally is downright painful, paradoxically generates a deep sense of accomplishment. 

Perhaps it's just masochism. Wheee!

But it is very clear to me that love, kindness and soft-relating need practice in my world. In particular softening to my own experience, observing rather than judging my reactions, playing at my life rather than performing it like every day is a doctoral dissertation, is often not easy. 

So in characteristic goal-oriented fashion I declared July the month of metta*. I expressly dedicated my time on the cushion to lovingkindness toward myself. Every day. As they say, charity begins at home.

Below are some reflections from the month - an offering to anyone looking for love.

O, what a tangled head we weave.

I.

I commit to sitting every day and sending myself lovingkindness. I invite friends in my spiritual community to join me and sit daily for one minute or more and wish love to themselves in whatever words ring true. I seek to be comfortable where I sit. I strain to recognize my own inner voice of compassion. I feel for my heart and relax into it when I can.

II.

I conjure a mental image of myself and when I find one that moves my heart I recite to that woman in my mind:

may you be happy

may you be at ease with suffering

may you be safe

may you be healthy

may you be peaceful

may you be free of suffering

III.

I start out sitting 20-30 minutes a day. I average 18 minutes. I sit on my own 27 out of 31 days. I know this because there’s an app for it. God I love technology.

IV.

I spend a good amount of time finding my favorite bell on the meditation timer on my iPhone. It's better than the marimba, or the cricket. I'd like something clean and clear. Some of the sounds are tinny and cheap, like some Indian import I bought at Cost Plus. One bowl is too high pitched, a shrew, a nag. The gong warbles like a drunk in danger of falling over. I find my favorite. I hear it for about 5 seconds a day. I smile and sigh.

V:

When I sit in vipassana my mind wanders, most often to plans, calls, connections to make. These relations, explanations and interpretations all seem to shore up an identity. Medieval buttresses. Mind building mind.

I:

Monday: I set the intention to really relax with my thoughts in vipassana, which I will follow with metta. So often I react to the drifting. It feels like a tightening in my chest, a condemnation that wordlessly constricts my throat. How counterproductive judgment and frustration at mind's natural wandering are to metta practice. “Real-time non-judgmental awareness” as Noah Levine calls it. My minutes in metta glow.

VII:

I envision a woman kneeling behind me, her hands smoothing my hair, calming the storming mind. It feels like a saint's mantle streaming from my crown.

VIII:

All the day's frustrations rush back to me: when I was passive/aggressive, when I was impatient, when I rigidly clung to my plan. I feel my being tighten as I sit. Then I think: these are what need compassion. These are what I will hold in my embrace. I hug my own tight spots.

IX:

My heart opens in the calm of meditation. I have been looking at shelters for months. I met a tortoiseshell kitten last week. I am so clear that I want to adopt that kitty. 

X:

I cannot feel the warmth of my heart. The other day sitting with my hands crossed over my heart I felt softness, warmth, a compassionate seed growing, pulsing. Now there's only tension, and my mind wanders to the restrictions in my life, to the areas I feel tight. My heart beats tight in its bands.

XI:

My body feels too much, too big. I place my hands on my belly just below the navel, the point in Chinese medicine called the dan tien. It is so uncomfortable, too uncomfortable. I raise one hand to my heart. With this connection, I find more ease in my belly.

XII: 

A four month old kitten named Kriya lands in my life on July 13. The sleeplessness is mostly blissful, and revelatory. How challenging for me to root into self-compassion when something else, someone else, presses in on me. All of a sudden, my mind has a project.

I get caught in a whirlpool of ego and purpose. Worry presses in on me. My self care slips. Sitting for any length of time is a struggle.

XIII: 

I chant metta phrases at the shelter, surrounded by caged animals. Dozens of lives. May you be healthy. May you be safe. I stand there with eyes closed wishing them well.

XIV:

There are great moments when I am aware of my kitten’s experience. She is Present. Utterly in the moment. Inclusive. Unapologetically rooted in her life. She is always in walking meditation on four paws.

XV: 

I spend a weekend in movement and stillness at Against the Stream with Kate Shela and Matthew Brensilver. I dance my compassionate experiment. As if in aftershock, I find myself gesturing when I express myself later that week, moving the emotional energy through my hands like I'm in tai chi practice.

XVI:

Coming to crosslegged after an ecstatic wave of dance, I feel like I’m slotting myself into a cinderblock bunker with no roof. How much rigidity I bring to my sitting practice. How joyless this makes it. Listening to Pema later that night I hear: there is nothing harsh about it. We joyfully return to the breath.

XVII:

Having watched the sky lightening from 4am, I get up and go to 7am yoga. I am sure the restless tension and toxic exhaustion that plagued my rest will keep me from rooting in to the class. Half of the sludge flows out of me in the first forward fold.

XVIII:

I am struck by the value of community. I need not force myself out of quiet or solitude, even when I crave company. Other hearts beat and warm the space below my palms whenever I sit in metta.

XVIX:

Ananda asked "Is it true what has been said, that good spiritual friends are fully half of the holy life?"

The Buddha replied, "No, Ananda, good spiritual friends are the whole of the holy life. Find refuge in the Sangha community."

XX:

Mindfulness is the safe space inside us between suppression and entanglement. I sit at the apex. I breathe love.

XXI:

I cannot sit when I’m exhausted. Thirty minutes of dream drift. Or can I? The bell sounds, three spacious chimes.

XXII:

I fear I’m metta-washing my experience. Some nebulous anxiety rumbles, refusing to be suppressed. It cries and worries just below the surface of the metta phrases I repeat.

XXIII:

Caffeine is not helping my sitting practice. But I crave that buzz. My heart beats, but it’s fuzzed over by the static of the drug. Caffeine is not helping any of my life practices.

The shit and the bliss.

XXIV:

I hear the kitten on the kitchen counter and my eyes fly open. I lose my seat to shoo her. I take my seat again nine hours later after work. I hear the kitten on the kitchen counter. Something in me sighs. Maybe she’ll get bored. A moment later I hear her jump down. Or maybe I will.

XXV:

After nearly a month of practice I discover I recite phrases of compassionate self-love like a military cadence. Boots on blacktop. It hits the empty bowl of my heart like a wood tocsin.

XXVI:

I sit with my back supported. I slip into the comfort of breathing. This simple space of breath is the most compassionate space I can be in. Nothing needs to change.

XXVII:

It will be over in the blink of an eye. Love yourself.

XXVIII: 

For a few unmarked minutes after the bell sounds, I hold my heart. I change my mantra. May you be compassionate. May you be curious about your own experience. May you be healthy. May you be safe. I am.

*Wikipedia defines metta or maitri as loving-kindness, friendliness, benevolence, amity, friendship, good will, kindness, close mental union (on same mental wavelength), and active interest in others. It is one of the ten paramis of the Theravada school of Buddhism, and the first of the four sublime states (Bramaviharas). This is love without clinging.

Pema Chodron on metta

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s-rRMUl04I

5 Rhythms, a moving meditation

http://www.kateshela.com/rhythms.htm

Insight Timer

(Wheee!)

https://insighttimer.com/

The shape of the Earth as we know it.

This morning I woke up with a ravenous soul. The weekend promised a much-needed respite from both the excitement and the drain of spring's rambunctious pace.


I knew exactly what I craved to replenish my inner well: the rich deliciousness of photography. I hungered for texture. For the rhythm of a substance, the flow and dance that all the materials in this world hold when we take the time to stop and look.


After this outward, social, breakneck week I was ready stop and look, and let art's vision fill the hollows in my heart, the welcoming warm space throbbing in my chest.


I looked over gallery listings as I took care of my empty tummy. I'd read about an exhibit of Ansel Adams' work in conjunction with Sierra Club at G2 Gallery months ago, and though I have a date with my dad for a Venice art adventure on the closing weekend of the show, I headed over to Venice.


Ansel's bespectacled face peers up at me from the cover of time magazine (September 3, 1979) in a case in the center of the warm upstairs gallery space that also holds his first Kodak Brownie.

The photos are mostly from the National Parks, and the original 1950 Portfolio Two stands like a monolith in a shadowbox in a corner of the gallery. That goofy smiling image seemed somehow at odds with the resonant black and white forms, the silent landmasses and snowdrifts and leaf prints ringing the room, as well as the exuberant holiness of Walt Whitman's poem* on the folio frontispiece.


You have seen these images. They are as megalithic a cultural phenomenon as the synergy of earth, air, water and light Ansel shot. And they are so humble, too. Just the play of the camera, just the result of light on coated paper, just snapshots. Just.

A picture of Schoodie Point in Maine opens to a great flat stretch of the Atlantic Ocean, articulated in the foreground by rocks below the water's surface. The water cascades from high to low, arcing over the rock, made gentle by the break in the surface level.

Were I there to study photographic technique I'd linger at the forest at Mount Rainier, a perfect composition as far as I can tell.

The texture of a jagged stump where a moth alights for a moment looks like ice floes were caught in the wood long before it split apart, cleaved maybe by the yearly sequence of freeze and thaw in Glacier Bay.

The streaked cliffs of Canyon de Chelly dwarf the millenia old dwellings niched in a pocket in the cliff face, dwarf the trees massed in the foreground. The image is called White House ruins.

One shot of a rock pile in Joshua Tree struck me less for the image than the caption. Joshua Tree was made a National Park in 1994. I went out there for the first time with my high school buddies in 1991. At that time it was still Joshua Tree National Monument. We enjoyed the great outdoors in that way that young folks do, irreverently and lightly and easily, in full joy of the absence of any authority other than the landscape itself, in awe of the desert's stillness and the revelation of an uninterrupted dome of stars from one horizon to the other which commanded our hearts at night. It inspired no undue religiosity and we understood the word "awesome."


Though I've become used to framing spaces like these in geologic time - a slow eroding that eludes the sense of one human's lifetime - yet what a transformation happened in my time when it became Joshua Tree National Park. This brought a ringing awareness of how conservation absolutely happens in the present tense. The whole expanse of it is there for us, for inspiration, education, and recreation.


Ansel's black and white image of the forest at dawn in the Great Smoky Mountains drains the rainbow foliage but replaces color with kinetic energy. The eye ricochets from shape to shape, alighting on one tree top after another. The tree's shapes seem sculpted by sparks, caught fire, as the sun ignites each tiny leaf. They look like bright ashes that, stilled by the camera, promise to dance down when we stop holding our breath.

Ansel talks about the genre of landscape photography in a way that preferences the individual's artistic engagement with what she sees: "a creative experience, in which the fact that it is a landscape, is incidental, perhaps accidental, and secondary in importance to the fact that...a subjective experience was created and expressed."


How lucky I am to have engaged so many of the places Ansel photographed: Sonoma County, Glacier National Park, the Snake River in the shadow of the Grand Tetons. And how proud I am to be part of the Sierra Club. There is probably not a single bone in my body that could be called political, but about the world around me and its beauty I am passionate, and that reverence for nature stirs me to action. On the most basic level, my journey has been self serving, because I love these spaces and how they nourish me. A quote at the entrance to the exhibit said much the same about Ansel: regardless of what he did for us, he did it all for himself.


I knew that today was Earth Day, but I did not realize that Earth Day is the anniversary of Ansel Adam's death, April 22, 1984**. What a beautiful memorial.

G2 Gallery
http://www.theg2gallery.com/


Sierra Club
http://www.sierraclub.org/


*Excerpted from "Starting from Paumanok" by Walt Whitman:


Each is not for its own sake,
I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion's sake.


I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,
None has ever yet adored or worship'd half enough,
None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the future is.


**A bit about Ansel Adams:


Born in San Francisco in 1902, Ansel chose experiential education over formal schooling, and first visited Yosemite at age 12. His amazing images served to inspire and awe with their beauty, and to gently raise awareness about conservation. His association with the Sierra Club began in 1919, and he later served 34 years on their Board of Directors. He mounted an exhibition in 1955 in collaboration with the Club, and his book Sierra Nevada: the John Muir Trail, was instrumental in moving President Roosevelt to designate King's Canyon National Park in California.

Points of Departure

what

are you leaving

are you leaving behind

what is

the point 

of departure

ask yourself

when

you arrive

The Shape of Things

Spring starts with late hours of sunlight that chafe the inward spirit. Then rain. Then heat. Do, more, out, see, world. It is the curse of a temperate, insistent, envied city.









I keep reading the message on today's calendar and it slips from my mind. No focus, no commitment. I wash from one to another project, craving the transcendence of art - strong swathes of color, the rhythm of texture, image, sound. A play of light. A shift of emotion. I crave wordless space. The wordless admixture of faith, aggression, ambition, and love that is the alchemy of a resting heart.

I do not know what this season will bring. I fell asleep this afternoon with palm fronds ripping eastward against the soft gray sky. I woke to a layer of blue slicing through the southward view: holding a space between rooftops and cloud as I stood listless before my kitchen window.








I do not know the shape of things.

What's the sound of your holiday?

I ended my first day in Ha Noi with quiet. After a day of scooters, street vendors and Uncle Ho I joined the Ha Noi Community for Mindful Living for meditation practice and a meal.

I was hungry for sitting still and good company as well as good food after walking 5 or 6 kilometers of Ha Noi's streets and sights. In the rainbow light of a Tibetan vegetarian restaurant near the meditation hall in Ho Tay I leaned back and just listened to the expats chat. 

One guy mentioned that Dengue Fever would be playing in Ha Noi in a week or so. 

My ears perked up. 

Long before I gained the escape velocity necessary to venture outside smalltown Burbank, I was a seasoned armchair traveler. I'd been jarred present by koto music in Japan, rocked my hips in lean-to clubs in West Africa and skipped over reindeer patties in Lapland to follow the darting, birdlike folk melody of a gap-toothed herdsman.

I stacked Smithsonian Folkways and Real World releases on my shelf like so many pins on a map.

One of my favorite discs is the Musicians of the National Dance Company of Cambodia. The traditional orchestra is largely percussive, knocking out the structure of the tune on gongs and xylophones. The oboe adds sinuous melody, and the human voice chant-dances over it all. Not a few listeners have found the warbling Khmer vocals shrill and annoying. To me they are sweet and deeply heartfelt.

Dengue Fever is ostensibly a local band, from Echo Park on the hip east side of Los Angeles. But their vocalist was discovered in a karaoke bar in Cambodia. They blend retro Cambodian pop tunes, akin to sixties psychedelic surf rock, with Chhom Nimol's gorgeous soprano. What I heard when I first heard Dengue Fever was traditional court music that I could really groove to. And with lyrics in both English and Khmer I could sing along in my own shrill falsetto.

Earlier that day I'd watched a traditional Vietnamese ensemble perform, and it brought tears to my eyes. The bending tone of the monochord pulled years of my heart's dreams and my listening-imagining-adventuring fully into the life I live in the present. 


Now again, my worlds collapsed. To hear a band from my home town playing in their neck of the woods on the far side of the globe a few weeks before I set foot in the singer's native country - what beautiful synchrony.

As it turned out, I did not make it to the show. Such is the nature of escape velocity: I'd covered hundreds of miles by the time Chhom hit the Ha Noi stage. But their lyrics played with me long into the trip. In one duet the couple bemoans the distance between she in Phnom Penh and he in New York.

The first thing that I'll do

is throw my arms around you

and never let go

For that moment, my first night in Ha Noi, I embraced the whole world, just as I was held in the world's sweet song.

More on Southeast Asian music:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5ke5D-D8lc

See the woman clapping before the bamboo xylophone? The rush of air generated by her hands plays the instrument.

http://www.umbc.edu/eol/cambodia/music_bg.htm

The work of Sam-Ang, an ethnomusicologist at the Royal University in Phnom Penh.

http://www.umbc.edu/eol/cambodia/pinpeat.htm

You can play the instruments of the traditional gong ensemble, called a pinpeat orchestra, here.

Half Light

My first night in Sihanoukville was my introduction to the art of begging in Cambodia. I'd met a trio of other travelers at a food cart en route to the night market, negotiating their own temperaments as the som tam vendor pummeled together hot chilis, savory spices, bright herbs and a whole black crab in the shell (optional) under her pestle.

We sat on blue or red plastic chairs in the half light of the food stalls. All of Southeast Asia swims in the milky pallor of compact fluorescence. Vietnamese shops and larger markets are as bright as an atomic blast, either as a sign of relative wealth or by the intensity of their desire for it. Cambodia, by contrast, is a twilight.

It's like being in an aquarium, or a morgue. And an odd adjustment to a westerner used to incandescents and their primordial association with the glow of candles, the warmth of the sun.

The waitress shouted my companion’s order to a cook clattering in a dim stainless steel cubicle at the back of the stall.

We poured glasses of very weak tea from the pitcher on the table. We waited out the appearance of a number of dishes that were decidedly not the plate of chicken and steamed rice my friend ordered. 

My fellow traveler and the Cambodian proprietress chattered parallel English/Khmer monologues about the order in question. I opened the styrofoam container of som tam I'd taken from the cart at the roundabout and peeled the plastic sheath from my chopsticks.

Every few minutes a child approached, appearing like a wraithe out of the darkness. Disembodied faces floated just above the level of the tabletops. They were like dust devils, their skin, eyes and hair the same muted shade of ochre, liked they’d been rolled in the red earth you see in the country. They slacked their faces and uttered pleas without moving the corners of their mouths. They stayed as far from smiling as they could.

Sometimes a mother would be there, clutching a young child in her arms. You never saw her approach. It was as if she never actually moved, unable to spare the extraneous movement, fatigued beyond compare. But there she was, her face a few feet above you muttering a request for money.

I learned to be stern with these children, leaning in as I said "No", my animation in inverse proportion to their torpor. They would linger, little fingers on table edge, then turn their whole bodies slowly away, as if rotating on an axis.

When we'd had our fill of chicken and rice and spicy papaya and tea we pushed back our chairs, rising into the illumination, closer to the bulbs suspended under the tenting, like we were swimming to the surface of some ocean.

As soon as we were up, the children massed around the table, streaking from the far edges of the market stalls to survey the cast off scraps abandoned at the table. One wrapped a glass with both hands and drained the dregs of tea and melted ice. Another opened the styrofoam box which had contained shredded papaya and peanuts and delight, but was now full of tissues used to catch my nose, streaming from a cold and the unrelenting spice disintegrating in a puddle of spent citrus.

They quickly picked over the site and dispersed, leaving empty plates even emptier of a few grains of rice.

This is hunger. This is ingenuity and life at its most pure.

In the face of bad odds, these children play a part, the simple energy in them bent into the shape of beggary. They find their sustenance through this art, plying a trade of heart strings and pity. 

And we say no, or we give them something, trying to negotiate the formula of fish and fishing poles and wondering at how we got our pockets stuffed in the first place.

This is life at its most simple, which is only ever dimly lit.