Rich with possibilities
I have now received warm, welcoming, encouraging emails from HKF and Sravasti, and I also got info from the Chamber of Commerce in Spokane (60 miles south of Sravasti), which slighly allays my fears about the winters at Sravasti. Maybe the winters are less long and severe than those in Massachusetts. On paper it seems so. Every time I pick up a book, an essay, or a dharma talk by Thubten Chodron, who has built Sravasti from a vision to a solid place on the earth, I am drawn to the teacher and the teaching like hummingbirds are drawn to the blossoms in the hanging baskets on my balcony. Then I play one of Bo Lozoff’s tapes, and I lean back and smile with his easy, laughing wisdom. Then I think about Joan Halifax and her wonderful work for prisoners, for the planet, and for the dying, and I think Upaya, in Santa Fe, is a great place to toss my small energy into the mix. The least logical place, because the only thing I know they do is gardening, and I am no gardener, is Green Gulch, but I can’t get its beauty out of my heart. Is it not astonishing that there are four such places, that all of them might take me as part of their community, and that the world is completely lit with possibility! Oh brave world, that has such people in it.
Manko will find a place to go, a way to make a life for herself one way or another, and will take most of the household (such as it is) with her. I am ready to let go of Pookie and of the remaining traces of my worldly accumulations (books, CDs, photographs) and leave whatever is left (a precious few pictures and small treasures, my favorite chair) at Seth’s place in Nashville. I am waiting to see what will happen with Basho. One friend may take him. I begin to see more clearly every day that it is possible to have a life–a glorious, beckoning life, doing the work I most care about–after teaching.
I no longer berate myself for spending or giving away all the money I’ve ever made, and for not accumulating a 401k or whatever it’s called. I’ve made enough at this last job to pay off my debts and maybe to take care of medical insurance for a while. Spending and giving away what I earned were exactly the right things for me to do. If I hadn’t done that, what would I do with my earnings now? Oh, I suppose I might have accumulated something for my children, but each is making his or her own way without anything to lean back on, exactly as I did. Their inheritance is the stories they have lived.
Now I see that whatever happened, I was coming to this: which is what I would have wanted to come to, even if I had property and savings and a retirement account. To live simply in a beautiful place, to meditate, to love the land, to give service, perchance to write (if only journals, blogs, or emails)–this is the good life as I see it.
This reminds me of my last year in Austin, finishing my Ph.D., wondering where I would end up teaching. I used to walk on the trail by Lake Austin every morning, full of joy and wonder, loving the trail and the beauty of that place, wondering what would be next, imagining the new life. When I ended up at Smith, I fell into a depression. It was not what I’d dreamed and hoped. That’s the danger of dreaming. Nothing is ever what we dream it will be, and if we dream or expect the perfection of all our dreams, we are bound to be disappointed. But there were surprises at Smith, gifts–not of Smith, but of the world around it, the people in it. Surprises I had never imagined. That is another thing I can count on. There are always surprises.
Right now I’m hoping my next move will be my last. I want, as Andy Goldsworthy says, to know one place really well, over time. That may or may not happen. The place I go to may or may not be the right place for me–for the rest of my life. That’s a big order. But it will have surprises. It will be different from teaching five courses a semester and grading papers every weekend. It will be different from what I know now. I’m ready for that. I leap toward it. I am feeling my way to the cliff’s edge right now. I can feel the different wind that rises up from that other place. And on the way to that edge, I pluck the strawberries of this life and eat them slowly, knowing that something could change before I get to that edge I plan to leap over. Something could always change.
This weekend Margaret, who was so much part of my life in Massachusetts, was on NPR for twenty minutes. They called it, “Augusten Burroughs’ Mother Speaks Out.” I knew him as Christopher Robison. I didn’t know him as the fictional character he has now made himself to be. I laugh at the ironies of his swearing to everyone who will listen that Running with Scissors is TRUE. Right. It is “true” for the fictional Augusten and his fictional mother, “Dierdre.” He has taken some of the facts of his life and his mother’s life and made of them a grotesque fiction that he calls a memoir. Margaret was completely Margaret on NPR. She said she will go see that movie when Chris comes to her house and takes her to see it. He hasn’t spoken to her since the book came out. What must it be like to be making a fortune off the betrayal of your mother, your closest childhood friends, the world you knew and grew in? I have always appreciated Joan Didion’s dictum that “writers are always selling people out.” True. And some writers make gargoyles from the material of their past and hang those around the structure of their ego. Jackie Leyden did the opposite when she wrote about her mother in Daughter of the Queen of Sheba. There was a book about the truth of a mother with a mental disorder. There was a book written in love. Chris, or Augusten, will have to live those distortions he swears are true. I wonder how the money he has earned by making a monster of his mother feels, running through his fingers.
Tags: Books and Movies, Buddhism, Manko, Seth, Where to plant myself
Kendall
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