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.

Agreeing to be Transformed. Yet again.

The world of sesshin is as different from this one as Childhood is from Today.

When I return to the monastery, my body will fall into its old habits and associations, some of which actually promote harmony and stability of mind. The place is familiar, but there is always some new novelty. In the past, novelty was most unwelcome: why, oh, why, must we now use this mallet to strike the densho bell? How in hell did they come up with the idea of removing all the towels from the guest area?

With time and distance—and the illusion of safety in my life—there has developed some measure of curiosity and generosity in the face of change. Last time, for example, I paid special attention to my least-favorite activity, meal washup. Normally, the glut of clueless anxious neophytes being inefficient in the kitchen would get me going, and the worst aspects of mind wold flare up in those precious minutes before the post meal break—a break that wasn’t happening, because here we would be, dealing with somebody trying to mop the floor before having swept it, or some such.

But last time, as a person with a home of her own and a decent paycheck to go home to, I considered the fact that meal washup is an event of finite length. The fact that, regardless of how painful it may seem, meal washup will eventually be over. The fact that, no matter how irritating others’ behavior is, it must be far more painful to be them than to merely witness their befuddlement. The fact that, if I am not the one in charge, it is none of my business! how--or if--the person who is in charge, decides to be in charge. I can go, and try to do some good for twenty minutes, and be done when we’re done.

Having a home of one’s own, and a decent paycheck to go home to, seems to promote this sense of perspective. When I lived at the monastery, and had nothing, and no sense of a safety net, every little stressor felt like a survival issue. I was not as well-liked as others, I thought. I had no family to retreat to if things did go sour. There was no backup plan. And yet, stressed as I was my time there could only be temporary. I was flinching before the stick came down. I was flinching, even though there was no stick.

That flinching was itself the problem: the way to stay at a place is simply not to leave. But it was right that I did go. Or maybe leaving was just what I did next. You have to leave before you can come back. And coming back is quite OK.

Although the world of sesshin is distinct from the world of bathroom tile choices, and miles away from the realm friends who drink wine and tell stories until late, there is a certain smearing that happens, consciousness-wise. Sesshin does not take place within normal time and space. (This is just as well, since in the conventional world I seem to be sleeping ten hours a night--not exactly monastic.) The retreat is out there, like a sound on the horizon. As early as last week, I felt it: a thinning of this life, a sense of that-which-shines-behind-everything.

Last night, we went for a walk as night was falling, and I just couldn’t. Couldn’t go uphill, couldn’t go in a particular direction. I told B how a friend of mine literally runs a fever on the way to sesshin. He knows to keep going, in spite of the urge turn around and drive home. I’ll be alright, I said. I just need to be distracted. So we found a coffee shop and worked on my favorite procrastinated task, overdue taxes, instead.

But B was a little worried. I used to do this every month, I told him. It came to be like a break from the regular schedule, since we had to work less, and nobody could bother me. I could just sit, and not have to be anyone, for a week.

Sesshin seems crazy if you haven’t done it. Especially sesshin with no eating after noon. Some of us look forward to that as a macho challenge. Some of us, meaning this person who has, at various times, thought it normal to throw bales of hay around, kill animales, walk barefoot on gravel and dung, ride her bike in ridiculous danger, discuss science with Nobel laureates, and live without electricity. There were winters when I had no proper coat, and long stretches of time, past and recent, when I owned one pair of disintegrating shoes. I have found myself far afield from consensus notions of reality and selfhood more than once. None of that was a problem at the time—and it makes for some good stories—but none of those adventures would come easily now.

So I’ll go off and sit for a week. If you go into it thinking you own it, you’re going to get smashed by it. But: curious, generous, knowing it will end? You’ll come out OK, even if you’re not the same person who went in.

A Birth-Control Moment at Three Lions

It's a bright day in Northwest Portland. As I walk to the coffeeshop, sights and sounds slip by. Everything seems as it should be, unremarkable and good-humored. Ahead of me, a man is bent over, reaching into a newspaper box. Instead of a newspaper, he pulls out a little boy.

It takes a moment to register, but now I am paying attention. The man is in his early twenties, with large eyes and a full beard. One of your modern hippies, maybe. The boy is around five years old, and he is being propelled quite forcibly--and silently--toward the coffeeshop that is also my destination.

Inside, a young woman is hunched over a computer. The man joins her, and the boy begins running around the coffeeshop, interacting with the chairs, going into the bathroom, chattering constantly. The couple are examining the computer screen with great care.

"Dad, will you go outside with me?" The screen continues to fascinate.

The mother takes him to the bathroom, and leaves him there to do whatever little boys do. The parents scowl at their laptop, and all is silent until someone's phone rings.

Phone Call from Central Asia

My father calls. It is 11pm in Baku, Azerbaijan, and 11am in Portland, Oregon. We are literally a world apart, but we talk anyway about our lives and various administrative tidbits. He tells me he's in a park, sitting on a bench in the darkness.

Is that safe?

Probably not, but he'll be OK.

He says he goes for weeks without speaking English. When I was growing up, my dad's command of language always seemed comically optimistic. He had no compunction about foisting his fractured Spanish on anyone at all. You can imagine my embarrassment, but the reality was even more excruciating. I took Spanish quite seriously. I took everything more seriously then. I conjugated verbs and considered the subjunctive. My father was trapped in present tense, to the extent that he could utilitize even that. Still, I wonder now if I inherited some language talent from him.

Now father's lingua franca is Russian. Since leaving the US 10 years ago, the place he's worked--Estonia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Azerbaijan--have all been countries hoping to join Europe after decades of Soviet influence. Almost everybody understands Russian, even if they don't want to. Since my dad is obviously not a native speaker, people are willing to lay resentment aside and answer him. Someone complimented his Russian the other day and he told them, "Oh, no, I sound a lot better than I am."

It’s true, his accent is so good that you could imagine he knows something about Russian. Even I can tell that it comes to him easily. Not like Spanish.

Everywhere my dad goes, he seems to get along well. In Baku, it was the same story. After about three minutes he finds himself having a drink and laughing and getting to know people. There is a language barrier, but it doesn’t seem to bother anyone.

One time he went on holiday to Egypt and came back saying he hadn’t been kissed so much since he was a little boy in Winamac, Indiana. Presumably, being Egypt, he made all these friends without even drinking.

The next port of call for my father may be Kyrgyzstan. The first challenge, I think, is learning to spell the name of this country. I find it goes easier if you insert the letter "y" in every conceivable location.

The next thing to do when heading to Kyrgyzstan is to see what Lonely Planet has to say. I think my dad will fit in just fine in a place with "a healthy distrust of authority and a fondness for drinking fermented mare's milk."

The distrust of authority part is self-evident: my dad is an itinerant globe-trotting IT consultant who takes no crap from no- one. And he already knows plenty about mares and milk.

A lifetime ago, when we lived on a farm, my dad milked goats by hand; and later, he hooked up our Jersey cow to an old vacuum milker. He engaged in tests of will with at least two mares, and took no crap from them, either. So he’ll fit in great with the Kyrgyzis: he can probably already discuss mares and milk, in Russian--after a fashion.

It’ll be great: the Kyrgyzis can put him in a yurt and he can design a database or two for their government. Sounds like a good sort of exchange.





Our conversation is interrupted then, and my father takes a call on another phone.

In the silence, I hear women's voices in the darkened park speaking words I do not understand. Somewhere in the world, it is night, and somewhere people live an ordinary reality I cannot imagine, expressed as a language I cannot grasp.

Somewhere, in a city on the Caspian Sea, my father will happily talk to anyone in any language he can dredge up. He sounds better than he is, and his secret is that he doesn't let that stop him.

Awhirl

Awhirl
Originally uploaded by Shugetsu.

I said, "Sweetie, what are we going to do this weekend?"

Maybe see the sunrise on a mountain.

Heedlessness vs Engagement

On the wall in my kitchen, just above the little folding table where I eat my breakfast, there is post-it note that says “heedlessness,” with a line through it. A few inches away is a prayer plaque from a Japanese temple, depicting Bodaidaruma.

Bodhidharma was a hundred years old when he made the sea voyage from India to China. The winds opposed him. The dharma he taught concerned the importance your true nature. Not falling for illusion or ideas, but systematically and exhaustively investigating the self as it truly is. To make this point, Bodhidharma sat in a cave meditating for nine years, and accepted as his first disciple an experienced meditator who was nevertheless willing to sacrifice his own arm for the key to freedom.



For a long time I thought that freedom, in the spiritual sense, meant that one had cultivated the mind so extensively that one no longer needed to calculate what effect an action might have. The advanced teachers I’d met, and myself on a good day at the monastery, moved and acted with a unselfconscious ease, like flowing water. It seemed they did not know what they were doing until they did it. Their answers were always profound, and they met all of life with a light touch.

One day, fresh out of sesshin, with an expansive mind and a ready tongue, holding forethought to be anathema and impulsiveness a virtue, I found the limits of this easy-flowing freedom. A friend and I were perhaps too intoxicated with our own cleverness, and one another’s cleverness, and we carried on a conversation that caused harm to others. There was trouble--not a lot, but more than enough.

Working my way out of that steaming pile o’ karma, I was confronted by the question of how a person acting from a free and unencumbered place can possibly do harm. I hadn’t been harboring any explicit malice in my heart; but I had been a jerk anyway . And others had been hurt by my actions. The answer seemed to be something like the resolution of the koan of Baizhang’s Fox: an Enlightened Being is aware of cause and effect. (The link is worth a click.) No matter how high you might be flying, ignoring the consequences of volitional actions turns you into a low, slinking creature--the fox of Japanese folklore--bound to inquire endlessly into just how this outcome came to be.

---

Three weeks ago today, I met an old friend for sushi at a restaurant in my neighborhood. Bun and I had gone to high school together, and although we weren’t close, we had all the same friends in common. I last saw him a few years ago at one of those friends’ weddings, and I don’t have any memory of him, really. Except that we later went for a walk on the beach in San Diego, and had a good chat together.

When I look now at the group photo from the wedding reception, I see that Bun’s gaze is direct and true. Now, I recognize it, but at the time what stuck in my mind was the incredible abundance of delicious food at the reception.



After about five minutes at the sushi restaurant, Bun had invited me to go with him to the country of his birth, which he left as a tiny child. I accepted instantly--perhaps heedlessly, who knows?-- and came home that night smitten.

I have come to enjoy being single, finally, after so many cycles of heartbreak and disillusion--many purely imaginary, but some all too real.

(Like so many with a taste for dharma, I see disillusion as a good thing: incorrect ideas drop away, fantasies are punctured, the harsh medicine of reality releases the bondage of grasping. But it’s been hard. It hurts. It’s supposed to hurt. In fact, what hurts, hurts because it is delusional.)

But here was Bun, eminently qualified in every external way to be the man for me. And truly a man: grounded; knowing himself in an important way; having found some understanding, in spite of never having sat with Bodhidharma. This deeply noble and generous person was lit up from the inside. I was lit up from the inside, too! After our next outing, he held my hand and told me how much I meant to him. The next time, he kissed me and told me he loved me. Since then, we haven’t spent much time apart.

In my diary I wrote, “I didn’t think people like Bun existed anymore.” If I had known... what learning experiences I would have missed--or perhaps become have become embroiled in anyway. But so it is. This.

Normally, I am the outgoing and impulsive one. I find myself in a Zen monastery. I find myself not in a Zen monastery. Then, I find myself in Portland, working hard. I am keeping commitments, making some money, taking a job for next year that will require my effort and skill five days a week. Some maturation may be happening. By contrast: Bun, who has worked for the same technology company for nine years, patiently and earnestly doing some good inside the bowels of the behemoth. Not particularly interested in dating--certainly not in dating just for its own sake. But he knew, when he met me. And he acted.

I look at the “no heedlessness” sign. I have known this person for twenty years, and although I never really saw him until last month, an understanding and a trust arises from that history together. I look carefully at the outcome I am headed for: buying a place together, getting married, and the valuation is positive. Beneficial. As though there is some inkling of a deep spiritual bond already present, which is being reenacted in the surface world in a manner that is at once natural, inexorable and full of delight.

Having sat it silence, it is time to move, to take up the heart’s desire and step into the future. To pay attention to the pull of karma. Not heedless, but engaged.