Kendall’s Quest:

I heard on the radio a news story about David Petraeus, who is about to take over “training Iraqi troops” for US forces in Iraq. He wrote his doctoral dissertation at Princeton on “The Lessons of Viet Nam” and obviously did not have Thich Nhat Hanh in mind. Petraeus believes that greater violence can quell violence. The radio report, which is longer than the written report in the link above, quotes someone as saying Petraeus is “the most competitive man on the planet.” He also sounds like a man who is driven by the desire to prove himself. [read on]

Last night John and I had the end-of-semester holiday party with the prisoners in our writing workshop. We brought a movie (two movies actually, though we only had time for one and a half-hour of the other), and they gave us a holiday card with messages like, “Thank you for my little oasis of sanity.” The story of how we ended up with X-Men is worth telling, and the experience of watching that movie with this particular group of men was wrenching. [read on]

As I drove to the park for my walk this morning, Handel’s “For Unto Us a Child Is Born” came on the radio, and suddenly I was twenty-eight, pregnant with Seth, and full of joy. Throughout that pregnancy I played the Messiah, danced to it, hummed it, and grinned. The baby I was carrying had excellent genes, and our life was going to be one surprise after another. The joy of that music is the joy of possibility. Sitting in the parking lot on this warm Texas morning in December, it came to me clearly that I have spent most of my sixty-one years living in joy, expecting something wonderful. Expectation is not necessarily, as some Buddhist texts warn, the seed of disappointment or suffering. It is its own fulfillment. Anticipation fills life with wonder, hope, a vibrating YES that is not (for me) ever diminished by fulfillment. When the anticipated event arrives, it is what it is, never what I thought it would be. Sometimes it’s better; sometimes it carries a hidden load of pain. But nothing can erase the joy of anticipation. Those times in my life when I have been joyfully expecting some event, change, or beginning (pregnant, about to move to a new place, on the brink of a new project, packing my boxes and giving away my possessions, half my body already over another cliff-edge)–those times I was IN JOY. I was not living in the future but living in joy, in anticipation of possibility. The promise of joy is joy itself. [read on]

Points of clarity arrive. Last night a great sea-fog enveloped Houston, and swirling mists in the urban sky arranged themselves in auras around pink-orange spotlights towering over Highway 59. I gazed out the glass wall between my living room and the balcony, gazed into the night in wonder. Fog! If I could draw or paint, I would. Writing is another way to meet the moment. It has its ironies–by the time I find words for this moment, another has arrived. Now it is Saturday morning, the sky is thick with curling grays and whites and smudges of blue; the spotlights over the expressway are merely chrome against the sky, and the magic has passed. The Friday night sky-scape disappeared before I found words for it. However words are the medium I have reveled in since I was six; writing is part of how I breathe and be. Writing gives me focus, slows me down, concentrates my attention, allows me to meet the moment and savor it. Fog. Inner and out fog are miraculous. Maybe there will be a time for me to let writing go, but that time hasn’t come yet. So I continue. Why blog? Blogging is how I connect with other people, known and unknown, who happen to be on the planet with me in this dot of time. The comments from David, Lynda, Christopher, and Constance gave me joy and were a comfort, much as Pooh’s friends’ hanging their clothes over his legs consoled him when he was in a tight place. My community of good friends and like-minded beings is flung wide over the globe, and I note with some surprise that I have become a solitaire. When did that happen? I see students every day, of course, but I’m happy with the boundaries around our relations. I see John once a week when we go to the prison together, though we will now take a break till mid-January. Other than John, there is no peer or comrade I see or talk to as often as once a week. That comes as a surprise to me and is, I know, unusual in American culture. I don’t have a cell-phone, seldom use a LAN phone, don’t in the course of my day announce my whereabouts to anyone. The quiet in my life suits me. I have time to read, watch movies, walk, and go my quiet way without having to explain myself to anyone. That has not been easy to arrange for myself, and I cherish the odd life I’ve created. But there is something in human connection that is nourishing, warming, consoling. The blog feeds that sense of connection. And so here I am. Continuing.

Yesterday I was full of sadness. Inadequate sleep, a change in medication for migraines, end-of-semester weariness, and holiday blues each contributed its flavor to my little cup of bitter melon tea. I felt sorry for myself, and although I tried to lift myself out of the mire of ego and use my personal sadness to connect with others, I basically ended up sucking my thumb. I’d spent Friday night watching Akira Kurosawa’s beautiful film from 1952, Ikiru, and I’d started listening to an audio version of Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. I wanted to say something about Kurosawa and Tolle, and I hoped to get myself out of the funk, but it didn’t work. So this is the wonder of cyberspace. I just went back and deleted that whole post. Wiped it out! Yes. Hit delete, left that moment lying in its mire, and moved on. Ah, so much better. Some moments in life are better deleted. I don’t, however, want to delete Ikiru, which stays with me and haunts me with its beauty and tender, faint optimism. I not only watched the very slow progress of the two hours and twenty-three minutes of the film, I then turned on the commentary and listened to an insightful film critic talk about the shots, camera techniques, actors in the film, and social and political context of Japan in 1952 as I watched it a second two hours and twenty-three minutes. Today I continue listening to Tolle, alternately falling asleep to his voice and then waking up (really waking up) and laughing out loud at my own hilarious struggle with what he calls “egoic mind,” particularly in the realm of the roles I play as teacher and parent. Instead of trying to write more, I am going to listen to Tolle some more, drift and dream, probably fall asleep again, and wake to watch the vivid yellow and deep purple pansies on my balcony blow against the gray sky on this quiet afternoon.

It was an extraordinary weekend. Joe, the father of my friend Kate (aka Pho Nguyen, the nun who is SuCo Dieu Thien’s student) was in town for his annual visit with his daughter, staying at the meditation center. He was freed momentarily from Kate’s mom, who stayed in Michigan because she won’t countenance her daughter’s Buddhism, and clearly he was feeling frisky. He called me early Sunday to say he’d been up since 4:30 and had about all he could take of Vietnamese ritual for one day, was walking to mass at the nearest Roman Catholic church, and hoped I would pick him up there and see what else we could do with the day. I love this guy. He’s 80, a medical doctor with a great sense of humor and a sharp mind, and he and I have had several meetings and fifty or so emails about Buddhism, his daughter, and SuCo Dieu Thien. I picked him up at the Catholic church and we went to the Unitarian Universalist church, to hear my friend John’s mother Mary talk about daring and unconventional women in the genealogy of Jesus to a group of non-Christian skeptics. Mary is approaching 80, is a graduate of the Univ of Chicago, and has the kind of articulate intelligence I usually only encounter in great books, so I wasn’t going to miss this! Naturally, Joe was gob-smacked by Mary, so several of us went out for a Tex-Mex lunch and watched Joe flatter and flirt with Mary, who parried his attentions with grace and a certain blushing pleasure. The intellectual play between them gave new meaning to gallantry. After that, I took Joe back to the meditation center, where SuCo was waiting for the two of us with a lesson that has left me walking a-tilt, considering once again that maybe she IS a teacher of great wisdom. [read on]

Over the American Thanksgiving weekend there has been news: another cease-fire in Gaza, after a sixty-eight-year-old suicide-bomber martyred herself and gave new meaning to the world’s image of grandmotherly. I deplore her attempt to do harm to others, but I respect her nerve. Suicide-bombers, whatever they may be, are not cowards. A BBC news reporter observes that Palestinian women are “taking a more active role” in the conflict. Every time I see the news, I cry. More deaths by the minute in Iraq: parades of people beat their chests in grief, holding coffins aloft against a background of bombed-out buildings and burnt-out cars. Starvation and rape in Darfur, former Russian KGB-man murdered by radioactive material smaller than a sesame seed, more tension in Beirut, quick-stop adoptions of malnourished children in Ethiopia. But lest we despair, there is football, the Macy’s parade, the national dog show. Through it all, Americans celebrate the national day of thanks-giving by shopping and worshipping their gods: one woman who waited in line for thirty-two hours kisses her Playstation 3, sobs for joy, and whispers, “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, God, for letting me get my Playstation 3.” A young man who camped for two days on the sidewalk next to an electronic discount store tells the news camera, “It was worth missing Thanksgiving dinner. I got a plasma TV for 50% off!” In a bizarre twist of cultural juxtaposition, a major network plays the movie Family Man, in which viewers are manipulated to “feel good” when a brilliant, promising man and woman sacrifice education, culture, material wealth, exciting careers, and the power to create authentic lives for a conventional life in New Jersey, complete with 2-story house, mini-van, bowling, cocktail parties, and two children: this film interrupted by ads for a cornucopia of pharmaceuticals to help people sleep, calm their “restless legs,” and overcome depression and plaque in their arteries. We are exhorted subliminally to be like everybody else, turn off our minds, go bowling, get drunk, sing karaoke, buy new toys, and take drugs. This afternoon I went to the park and walked off my grief, listening to the rustle of squirrels in fallen leaves, the whirr of insects in the grass, the movement of clouds against the clear blue sky. A line from Whitman which I taught on Monday surfaced in my mind as I walked: “demented with the mania of owning things.” What is the anti-dote to this mania?

In this afternoon’s mail I got a copy of an international journal published in 2002, devoted to “Theatre for Development” in Africa, including an article about my struggles and failures in Lesotho from 1992-94. I wrote the article in the late 90s, while I was working in South Africa, and then forgot about it. Eight years later it has found its way to my mailbox. The article is good-humored and self-deprecating. In it I look back at my ideals as I first arrived in Africa and met the first of the theatre groups I was to lead. “From my book-learning I knew how to label what I was about to do: it would be theatre-for-liberation, not theatre-for-domestication, top-down theatre, or theatre-of-indoctrination. It would come from within the community it was meant to serve; it would be shaped and directed by that community, with skillful intervention from me…. People would flock to see it, would understand and enjoy it, and would be moved and liberated by it. We would begin with information-gathering, discussion, and script-development; then would come workshopping and performance, then followup.” Dear, naive, hopeful, idealistic young Kendall that I was, I really did think it would work. [read on]

The assignment for the writing workshop Thursday night is to write about what we love, using the “toys” of poetry: line-breaks, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme. I’m ready:

Reasons to Live

wet loam and waist-high weeds breathe
on a Texas morning after a hard rain

turnip greens and pot likker soak into cornbread,
cream splays out over hot peach cobbler

aging lovers spoon to Cleo Laine and a sax
while leaf shadows dance on the bedroom wall

Carolina snow-melt tumbles over stream beds
in a shower of shell-pink mountain laurel blossoms

intense yellow dandelions fleck a lush green meadow
loud with crickets in the south of France

bougainvillea flings a spray of super-saturated
crimson over a blue tile wall in Guanajuato

a tabby cat in Georgia rolls on his back and arches
against the red earth, purring for a belly-rub

in wool socks and plaid pajamas, she strokes her
pregnant belly as snowflakes float past a street light

fat brown toes sink into the sand caressed by
the foam on a beach by the Indian Ocean

in an autumn fog, five silver geese
honk for the dawn in New Orleans

an old woman, arms aloft, dances to the beat
of a base drum in the ancient city of Braga [read on]

This week was Seth’s birthday! Happy birthday, Seth! He’s thirty-three. Wonderful number, wonderful age. He was an enormous fat Buddha of a baby, nearly ten pounds at birth, who came to light in New Orleans with an air of wisdom and wonder. He didn’t cry when he was born. I did LaMaze, so he wasn’t drugged, and the doctor didn’t slap him on the bottom because he was so large and well-developed at birth, he just took a big breath, opened his eyes wide, and was fully present before the cord was even cut. His mouth made a perfect O, and he gasped and waved his arms in the air as if to say, “Oh, wow! Lights! Colors! Action! Look at this!” [read on]