A Flash of Something

In the absence of a project assigned from somewhere, reflective writing is the only kind of writing I do. There has been very little reflective writing of late.

Creative energy has been going elsewhere: to a new job of daunting emotional proportions (who knew teaching science involved so much drama?); to keeping body and soul nourished somehow (too much cheese makes everything irritable, while going unfed is discouraging); to mulling the changes taking shape on the future horizon (life in six months will be beyond all imagining).

Today, a dear friend helped Bun and I move most of our possessions (which are mostly my possessions) into our new condo. We will continue to sleep this week in the old apartment, while the paint dries in the new place. The familiar space, now empty, is spartan and beautiful. Do I really need my stuff? Do I even want my stuff? Not really.

And yet I have stuff, and it has me.

We took a break from all this to go to the ballet. Our cheap seats in the first row were breathtaking. We peeked into the orchestra pit, and watched a toddler being handed over the barrier to visit his musician father while the others tuned their instruments. We could see artists waiting in the stage right wing. We saw the sweat fly as dancers whirled; we heard the thwack as their thighs slammed together. Their athleticism was literally in our faces. The absence of visual input from part of stage left was not missed. It was so much better than sitting in the center, a reasonable number of rows back.

I know these people have made incredible sacrifices to be in their position, briefly lit and costumed. They have forgone much to be so exalted and yet so captive. Bodies bear the marks of it: of discipline and intensity and submersion in a way of life. Do they have time for anything else?

I can feel my mind and my way of being shaped by teaching. I speak differently; I jot down quiz questions obsessively; I am slightly more likely to question bad behavior. My life revolves around those 6.5 hours a week where I am up against the blackboard, up against the clock, up against teenagers' expectations.

Unlike the dancers, I have no chance to rehearse or perfect my actions--nor will I, unless I happen to teach the course again. Yet, in some spark of time, something is briefly illuminated. Chalk dust flies. Minds stretch--or stagnate at the rear of the room. Whatever it is, there's one chance, and it's over.

On Monday we will talk about the Periodic Table. Why do Argon and Potassium fall into the order they do? More to the point, can I find the magic in the ordering of elements--in the art, the leaps, the impossible beauty--in a list? Perhaps not. But that's the creative endeavor these days.

Happy Day

Dear Friends and Family,

As you may already know, last spring I re-met and fell in love with an old high school classmate. Although we weren’t close twenty years ago, I found in B an unusual combination of sweetness, energy, commitment, and steadiness--as well as very similar ideals and values. We fell in love immediately, and the months that have followed have confirmed the appropriateness of that initial warmth and adoration.

Accordingly, we were married at noon on August 8 in a very small ceremony at the Washington County Courthouse in Hillsboro, Oregon, in the presence of a judge and two witnesses.




The thought of hosting a large celebration with food and fanfare occurred to us--it seems to be the norm in this society. But it seems much more natural (for us) to be married quietly and to turn our energy toward life together. We hope that you will be able to join us soon for a visit, a meal, and a walk in one of Portland’s wooded parks. Know that you are invited to be a part of our life together, just as you have been a part of our lives in the past.

It should go without saying that we have no need or expectation of any gift. But if you feel so moved, we would treasure a handwritten blessing, or a piece of advice for married and family life. (If you would like our mailing address, please drop me a line at dgarigan(at)gmail.com.)

Warmly yours,

DTG

A Teacher Slams Back

What Teachers Make, or
Objection Overruled, or
If things don't work out, you can always go to law school

By Taylor Mali
www.taylormali.com

He says the problem with teachers is, "What's a kid going to learn
from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?"
He reminds the other dinner guests that it's true what they say about
teachers:
Those who can, do; those who can't, teach.

I decide to bite my tongue instead of his
and resist the temptation to remind the other dinner guests
that it's also true what they say about lawyers.

Because we're eating, after all, and this is polite company.

"I mean, you’re a teacher, Taylor," he says.
"Be honest. What do you make?"

And I wish he hadn't done that
(asked me to be honest)
because, you see, I have a policy
about honesty and ass-kicking:
if you ask for it, I have to let you have it.

You want to know what I make?

I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could.
I can make a C+ feel like a Congressional medal of honor
and an A- feel like a slap in the face.
How dare you waste my time with anything less than your very best.

I make kids sit through 40 minutes of study hall
in absolute silence. No, you may not work in groups.
No, you may not ask a question.
Why won't I let you get a drink of water?
Because you're not thirsty, you're bored, that's why.

I make parents tremble in fear when I call home:
I hope I haven't called at a bad time,
I just wanted to talk to you about something Billy said today.
Billy said, "Leave the kid alone. I still cry sometimes, don't you?"
And it was the noblest act of courage I have ever seen.

I make parents see their children for who they are
and what they can be.

You want to know what I make?

I make kids wonder,
I make them question.
I make them criticize.
I make them apologize and mean it.
I make them write, write, write.
And then I make them read.
I make them spell definitely beautiful, definitely beautiful, definitely
beautiful
over and over and over again until they will never misspell
either one of those words again.
I make them show all their work in math.
And hide it on their final drafts in English.
I make them understand that if you got this (brains)
then you follow this (heart) and if someone ever tries to judge you
by what you make, you give them this (the finger).

Let me break it down for you, so you know what I say is true:
I make a goddamn difference! What about you?

They Don't Makem Like They Used To

The Economist has the best of all the obituaries I've read for Tommy Makem.

Many years ago, when my mother was pregnant with me, she inexplicably went on an Irish folk-music kick. For years, I thought her brief affair with that music explained my own love for it. More recently, I wonder if perhaps it was the other way around: the developing baby was influencing her. Whatever the cause, the songs of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem resonated in my heart all during childhood. I learned to operate a record player so I cold play their LPs; I memorized all the albums; and on nights when living seemed like too much, I would lie on my back in our darkened livingroom with my head near the speaker.

At the time, I did not know that Irish vocal music is a solitary tradition. The old men in the pub in Kingscourt would shush each other with great seriousness, so that one of their number could compose himself and warble one of the old rebel songs, or courting songs, or praise-of-place songs. The Clancys and Tommy Makem were less refined: they stood around a microphone and whaled away, and it sounded alright, or at least enthusiastic. Makem was the best singer of them all, it was clear, and no surprise that he had a healthy solo career afterward, when it was just his baritone filling the air.

I had wanted to go on one of the musical pub tours he lead of South Armagh, or the folk festival he organized there. To have such musical talent come from a region that sank into such darkness and brutality, and to have music play a part in the revival of hope in that area--it's something you'd want to be part of.

As it is, I'm sad today. I'll leave with two quotes from Tommy Makem, and an excerpt from the piece in the The Economist.

On Ireland today:

We're so obsessed with modernity we don't know what we're losing. They're making gazillions of dollars in Ireland but they're losing their culture.

When asked if he planned to retire soon:

Yes, of course, I retire every night and in the morning when I awake I realise just how lucky and privileged I am to be able to continue doing the things I love to do.

He had performances booked through this fall.

---

IT ALL began in the kitchen of a house in Keady, County Armagh, in Northern Ireland, where Tommy Makem's mother Sarah, as she stirred a pan on the hob or filled the kettle, would sing of morning dew and magpies' nests, Barney Mavourneen and Mary of Kilmore, ships and red roses:

Red is the rose that in yonder garden grows
Fair is the lily of the valley Clear is the water that flows from the Boyne
But my love is fairer than any.

Tommy said he could sing before he could speak; and not long after he could play piccolo, fiddle, tin whistle and the five-string banjo. He would stand up in the church hall, no taller than a chair, and sing “The Little Beggarman”:

I am a little beggarman, a begging I have been
For three score years in this little isle of green.

Music and tales filled not only his home but the rolling fields and hills of South Armagh itself. The heart of Ireland seemed to beat there beneath Slieve Gullion, the mystical mountain where the hero Cuchullain had learned his warrior skills and where the hunter Finn MacCumhail, bewitched and curious, had tracked a white doe to the summit. Tommy Makem picked up those legends too and, in 1955, took them to America, together with his bagpipes and a suitcase patched up with tape.

He meant to work in a cotton mill and do a bit of acting, but one St Patrick's night he was paid $30 for singing two songs in a club: “and I thought, by God, this is the land all right. Gold growing in the streets.” By 1958 he had teamed up with his friend Liam Clancy and Liam's brothers Paddy and Tom, who had come from Tipperary to America before him, and the gold continued to accrue. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, all kitted out in Aran sweaters knitted by Mrs Clancy, triumphantly rode the wave of a folk revival that was turning Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie into stars. Adapting to the new world, they added tin whistle and banjo to the old songs and quickened the pace, because, as Tommy said, “The heartbeat of America is so much faster than the old country.” They did “The Morning Show” and “The Tonight Show”, Ed Sullivan and Carnegie Hall, landed a $100,000 contract with Columbia and ended up singing “We Want no Irish Here” in front of Jack Kennedy at the White House, while Kennedy flashed his white teeth and rocked with laughter.

Tommy Makem was always the key man, with a baritone sweet as buttermilk or sharp as salt, nipping effortlessly over his “hi the dithery idle lum, dithery oodle idle loos” and his “roo run rye, fa the diddle dye, hey the O the diddle derry Os”. And for a lifelong teetotaller no man had more feeling when he sang of hoppy beer or dark-frothing porter or devilish golden whiskey, or almost anything at all served up in a jug in a bar:

When I am in my grave and dead
And all my sorrows are past and fled
Transport me then into a fish
And let me swim in a jug of this.

The songs he wrote himself he dismissed as “garbage altogether”, never to be compared to the old words and melodies he wanted to preserve in live performance. But a few he was proud of, and none more so than “Four Green Fields”, in which “a fine old woman”—Ireland—sang of her fourth field, Ulster, that was still “in bondage/ In strangers' hands, that tried to take it from me”. In America his audiences, largely third-generation Irish of the diaspora, would weep and sing along until, according to the New York Times man, they were “ready to go out and die for Ireland”.

All told, Tommy Makem's choice of songs was fervently nationalistic: children's rhymes about “King Billy”, or rebel songs such as “The Wind that Shakes the Barley”, in which the hero's sweetheart is killed, as they caress in a glen, by a British bullet. And most stirring of all, in a voice with an edge like a knife, he would sing “The Patriot Game”:

Come all you young rebels, and list while I sing,
For the love of one's country is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear with the speed of a flame,
And it makes us all part of the patriot game.

Bob Dylan adapted this for his great anti-war song “With God on Our Side”. But Tommy Makem tried always to separate his love of country from the horrors of sectarianism. As Northern Ireland slid into the Troubles after 1969, he kept away from politics—a task made somewhat easier by staying in America, where he went on singing to the end of his days. In the dark low-ceilinged bar he bought in New York in the early 1980s, the rule of the house was tolerance and good fellowship. And the slow dawning of peace in Northern Ireland was celebrated by the founding in 2000 in South Armagh of his International Festival of Song, a deliberate declaration that singing could lead men out of darkness, just as Finn MacCumhail at the top of Slieve Gullion found the doe he was following transformed into a beautiful young woman, who smiled at him.

Shy Thoughts

I've been feeling private about my private life lately, which seems reasonable. Thus, what follows concerns sex mostly in the abstract. Even that feels like a lot.

What I have to say is that there are things we don't understand. The world is built the way it's built, regardless of our delusions around being able to master it, if only conceptually.

Now I will leave you to read it, and go to yoga.

---

I remember vividly the brief exchange that gave me the first clue about the power of sex.

I was six years old, and the kids at school were giving me the idea that “sex” was very important and naughty. I lived on a sheep farm where we recorded the gender of baby lambs on file cards: where it said “sex” you wrote either M for male or F for female. That was hardly worthy of fuss.

So I asked my mother what sex was. Silence fell. Her face looked a little funny.

“There are two sexes, male and female,” she said. No surprise, but I sensed I was onto something. Over the months that followed, I kept asking the question, mostly to see her squirm. Eventually, she confessed that sex had to do with animals breeding. But where was the juice in that? And why would my classmates care what our ram was up to?

Of course, other answers came in time: sex is what mommies and daddies do; sex is how babies are made; sex is something you must avoid at all costs. The anxiety became more explicit as the years passed, and the funny look remained. For years I imagined this was a kind of bashfulness, some desire to avoid sullying the innocence of a little child whose naiveté was already slipping away by slow increments.

Only recently did it strike me: Nobody has a good answer to that question. What is sex? It may be what mommies and daddies do, but do they understand what they do? Can they say why?

The experience of sexuality, of life as a sexual being, can drive our entire life. The urge to couple, to reproduce, to have someone, to just get off now, careens a stable life into chaos; it throws us off course into dark territory. Chasing the thrill of sex, the mighty are laid low; finding the thrill, the humble imagine themselves to be king or queen; hoping for love we are depleted and derailed; finding it, we feel glorious. Whatever sex is, defies simple understanding. Like thirst and hunger, its pull is something we share with insects and beasts. How does a polar bear explain sex? Or a wasp? How could our knowing be any more complete? We do not turn that wheel; we are turned by it.

Sexual desire is so close-in that we fail to recognize it. The primal is both commonplace and commodified. From our inexplicable needs, a culture based on titillation and gratification rolls forth.

So when my child asks, “Mama, what’s ‘sex’?” I’ll say, “Sex is the thing that drives adults mad, and makes them do things they never thought they’d do. Be glad that you are a child now, with a child’s hormones and a child’s concerns. Because when you start to grow up, you enter a mysterious world, and come unwittingly into a power that is beautiful and dangerous, inspiring and devastating, depending on how you use it.” I don’t expect her to understand. After all, none of the mommies and daddies do either.

A Poet Writes Back

Here is a fragment of an open letter from the poet Sharon Olds to Laura Bush declining the
invitation to read and speak at the National Book Festival in Washington,
DC. It has been circulating out there on the internet since October, 2005. Alas.

[T]he prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought
of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I
thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the
citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way,
even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we
should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to
invade another culture and another country--with the resultant loss of
life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their
home terrain--did not come out of our democracy but was instead a
decision made "at the top" and forced on the people by distorted
language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have
begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism--the
opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to.

I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear
witness -- as an American who loves her country and its principles and its
writing -- against this undeclared and devastating war.

But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if
I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning
what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.

What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food
from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that
unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of
permitting "extraordinary rendition": flying people to other countries
where they will be tortured for us. So many Americans who had felt pride in our country
now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and
fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the
flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.

Sincerely,
SHARON OLDS

A Cow's Life

At my cousin Doug Leman's farm, the dairy cows live row on row in a huge barn. Eight hundred ladies in various stages of lactation and lactational readiness. For a few weeks before giving birth, they go dry and are moved to another location where they are put out to pasture. But mostly they live in a giant barn.

You might think this would be unpleasant for the cow, being cooped up all day. But you'd be wrong. An unhappy cow does not give milk. The converse is also true: if she's giving milk, she must be happy. These ladies give milk, so they must be happy.



So sensitive are the cows that if you kick one or yell at her, there is a measurable decline in her production. You can keep track of who is who by means of the microchip each carries in her ear. The pampering continues in the special nutritionist who monitors the bovine diet. Nothing but the best silage, hay, and grain on the menu.

This sensitivity to adversity is astonishing. It is well-known in the dairy industry that electric fields impair milk production. Presumably because they make the cows feel crappy. Special consultants will come to your dairy and tell you that this machinery must be moved, or that that heating coil--which thaws the drinking water in wintertime--must go. The farmers comply, you may be sure.

Considering the hemming and hawing over the effects of electric fields on humans, and the inconclusive studies that have come out, you'd think this would merit some notice. Here are animals kept under uniform conditions, and a recognized deleterious effect to EMF exposure. If cows get to be shielded from electric fields...why not the rest of us sentient mammals?

You Have One Wish...

In Japantown today, there were wishing trees for the Tanabata festival. At one point in the lunar calendar, the stars Rigel and Vega come near one another in the sky. The Japanese imagine that these are lovers being reunited. It's a very sweet summer holiday. A good time for invoking a certain celestial tenderness into one's own life.

People had written wishes in English, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. Ninety percent of the ones I could read were for money ("OKANE!"). Five percent were for perpetual togetherness with a girlfriend, boyfriend or pet (too bad all things are marked by impermanence). The other five percent were for someone else's well-being, or for family togetherness. Those gave me a feeling like having found a gift.

As I looked at the trees, I knew what my deepest wish was. Not to become Buddha. Not, specifically, to free beings from suffering, or to serve the world in some way. Just to have a long and happy life with the man I'm going to marry. I think that does actually include sila, samadhi, and prajna. It includes someone else's well-being, and family togetherness. And I'm OK with that.

Existence/SF

I will be in training for three weeks at SF Zen Center.

There are many old friends here--and many familiar faces I've met elsewhere--all gathered to ask a question about the essence of Dharma apart from cultural and sectarian convention. If the Buddhadharma isn't the robes or the bowing; if following the Buddha Way can be accomplished by any number of practices, of which seated meditation is but one; if the Dharma is not a thing that resided in India or China--then WHAT IS IT?

I don't know, but Paul Haller feels studying the Sandokai and meeting teachers from a variety of Buddhist sects will help us tease through the puzzle. So I'm game.

Each of the myriad things has its merit,
expressed according to function and place.

I had thought it would be nice to get out and about. I lived in San Francisco for seven years, and I used to live in this neighborhood. It was a different life then: I had a biochemist boyfriend; I lived in a moldy old house; I was presumed to be a geneticist.

I was tied to the elements of my life in ways both wholesome and otherwise. Mostly, I liked my entanglements. I was my entanglements: relationships engender identity. So I was that person once. Just being back in San Francisco, some feeling of being the old Self is revived. I realize I visit this place, and other places I have been tied to, in an attempt to reconcile Then with Now. In an attempt to find out who I was, and what I am. If I am not a PhD student, and and my true self is not a scientist; if my ideas and concepts about myself can change so radically--WHAT AM I? Who is this walking down the street? What is this remembering? Where does it come from?

When I walk down the streets of what, four eon-years ago, was my neighborhood, I can barely see anything, because everything is so familiar. It's grimy, it's Victorian, it's chaotic. In the coffeeshop, on the streetcorner, on the steps of houses, the people are all different, but they're the same. Same personalities, with different faces.

Along the projects, two emaciated black women with headscarves are sitting in the sunshine. As I pass, I bid them a neutral, but cordial, good-day. They return the greeting, and I hear one say to the other, "That was real polite."

In the Walgreens, the lady at the checkout has nappy bleached-orange hair. I ask her how she's doing today. "Blessed and delivered," she says. "Blessed and delivered."

Aren't we all?

I went out to a café in the evening, thinking it would be enjoyable. It wasn't, really. Maybe I would have been restless anywhere, but it didn't feel right. I wanted to be back at the Center rather drinking bad tea in a room full of people pretending to ignore each other. It was dark and cold and windy. San Francisco summertime.

It was late, and wakeup was at 6am. Trudging up Church Street, I saw a pair of legs that left me breathless. They belonged to a gargantuan homeless man steering a bicycle laden with bulging sacks. There must have been twenty bags hanging off the handlebars, the top tube, the racks. He wore a massive backpack and cutoff pants. In the middle of each calf, grimy bandages peeled away from a pair of bloody wounds. Symmetrical black mouths. Filthy. How does that happen? It was too much. But it is his life--and the merest corner of my life.

I walked quickly, and took the Jizo Shingon as my mantra, for this strange man, and all who travel through this realm.

OM KA KA KABI SAN MA E SOWA KA

It was more of a question. How do we come to fear others? And how are we connected with them anyway? "Emaciated black women" equals crack, or AIDS. "Filthy bleeding man" means danger. This story might be true or it might not. If it is true, are we are Blessed and Delivered, regardless? Even on crack? With AIDS? When abused and brutalized?

Perhaps the question is not whether life is sacred, in all its decay and defilement, but how.

Praying 4 U

I'll confess: I have been angry, and thought way too much about, the few individuals who have done me harm in this relatively painless life. It was pointed out to me the other day that perhaps a person of the Dharma would pray for those who have intentionally and selfishily harmed one; perhaps a person of the Dharma would urgently hope that these beings be spared the nasty karma that results from behaving nastily.

Me? That? Well, 'tis the point exactly. Forgiveness is beautiful concept, until it is belatedly understood as an option.

Adventures In Reality Part 2

I hadn't been to Indiana in a while (19 years), and my grandpa's health isn't so great. I told B I wanted to visit but didn't think it could work out. B thought otherwise, and somehow he made it happen.

So, after a weeklong meditation retreat where time slowed to an invisible pace, I whisked myself to Indiana, drove through the countryside with my man, and delivered myself to a pair of happy grandparents.

They immediately took us around to share us with my mom's aunts and uncles, all of whom live in beautiful little houses about 50 feet apart. I am wearing my clothes from the retreat, I have had almost no sleep, and I am happy.



There is a meeting of cultures at work in these photos. You can't see the photographer, but he's part of the interchange.

Adventures In Reality Part I

We are buying a flat.



I never thought that would happen.
I told B I would be happy there regardless. But the bathroom tile could be improved.