Catching Now

Sitting down to write comps on a warm brown Sunday morn (34˚!?), I wonder about traveling, and movement. Wouldn't it be strange to presume that adventures only happen in foreign countries? Or that my actions are only novel if laced with Oriental mystique?

This morning I rolled out of bed just after eight, coaxed something a little like coffee from my french press, and pulled on my industrial navy blue rain boots. As I sloshed through snow-melt on my way to the library, I wondered about the present moment. Now.

If the present moment is the only thing that ever exists, then why is it so damn difficult to get your hands on? I feel like I'm constantly reminding myself to be where I am, to stop looking backward into nostalgia or forward into stress and fog. It's a strange circumnavigation of the present, a constant grasping that never quite results in union.

So, tromping through slush-puddles, I brainstormed possible ways to catch Now:

--Stalk it with a butterfly net at a River bend.
--Tickle it as though it were an anemone, so it wiggles and opens.
--Look at it only out of the corner of your eye, like a dim star in the night sky.
--Challenge it to chess.
--Leave a thimbleful of honey in a foxprint and lie in wait.
--Fish for it, and bait your hook with clever puns.

With these ideas in mind, I am going to continue writing about that which cannot be articulated.

Sometimes Sundays seem a little silly.

Roots, Again

We had a poetry group in India, called "And Thus I Have Word." One of our "assignments" was to write about home, but, although I tried desperately, I couldn't write anything more than scattered notes about Oregon, or family, or trees. Yesterday I discovered these notes. And yesterday, although I should have been working on my comps, I compiled them into a semi-coherent expression of home.

Here it is:

I remember my father speaking to me as he steered winter-studded truck tires along Lorane Highway, through the gloam. Douglas fir silhouettes serrated a silver sky and my dad nodded to his daughter over a vanilla latté, casually explaining that a Doug fir skyline at sunset is what it means to be home.

Before that white pickup truck there was a white Chevrolet, a behemoth of a carryall piloted by my plaid-clad forester grandfather with thick-rimmed glasses and an intimate knowledge of trees. Before that… there are vague allusions to the Potomac and the British Empire, but nothing I really know.

My mother’s dad was a forester too, and with sylvan synchronicity my grandfathers took their families eastward by rail in 1964. After riding the Empire Builder backwards with their forester fathers my parents fell in love, even though they were too young.

What follows is a story of a marriage sundered in New England blizzards, of a strange succession of stumps over roots, and of a retreat back to what was left of the forest so a lost growing daughter could perceive both laughter and tears in Pacific rainstorms. Listening for tree-speech, she would hear Ken Kesey’s cuckoos sing eulogies for silenced animistic whispers and other forgotten truths. Her grandfathers’ great notions became ashes, and she gave them back to the Cascades.

And now. Sometimes I curse myself for moving east again. In college I’m learning about religion, about how early evangelists felled the sacred forests of Europe and then stuck sweet-smelling effigies in pots to celebrate the birth of a saviour. I think westward, to a Christmas tree farm in Skapoose, where I was conceived. I recall my mother’s father; how it took him over a decade to write his dissertation. I like to imagine him hunched over his typewriter, struggling to find the right words to talk about trees.

"Write your way through the tangle..."

My professor said this today; he was referring to the "comps project" (or senior thesis) that we religion majors are expected to complete this term. He also said that we had 0.5% of our lives to write this paper. I don't know if this was comforting. One girl ran out of the classroom crying.

I myself haven't internalized how difficult this is going to be. I was re-visiting my proposal for the first time since I wrote it in October (apparently I'm writing about the ineffable?), and I discovered many amusing found poems* that were written in India while I was putting together my foundational ideas for this project. Because I'm not yet as worried as I probably should be, I'm going to copy them below.

#1 From: The Craft of Research, Chapter 1 (some punctuation altered)

Readers and their common problems
Writers and their common problems
Motivate the question.
That word "problem," though
Has a very special meaning:
Space Flight
War and Peace
(Re)Creating Yourself
...
Freedom might be frustrating.

#2 From: The Encyclopedia of Religion, "Theological Positions and Virtues"

Our millennial nostalgia
is looking a little dog-eared
we seek a sense of coherence
a common center
but we produce little more than
bland tolerance--
please
disclose something of the mystery.

#3 From: Eihei Dogen: Mystical Realist (this kind of alludes to how ridiculous my project is going to end up being...)

the painted picture of a cake
could not help being literary--

the dharmic drama of the universe
reinterprets the moon.

skin, flesh, bones, and marrow
entwine as vines

and the painted picture of a cake
with secret words
is matchlessly poetic.

*For those who do not know about found poetry, it is written by looking at a source (such as a page from a book) and selectively re-arranging phrases to make a poem. It is highly entertaining--one of my favorite procrastination techniques.

The Year of the Tentacle

 In Bodh Gaya, when we were waiting to meet the Karmapa, the Oregonians on my study abroad program decided that we needed to have a new year's party when we got back to the States. Of course we needed a theme, and after a little brain storming, we decided that (obviously) the changing times demanded that we wear tentacles.

It would be two-thousand tentacle.

This came to pass. Gladly. A lot is often made of New Years, what with resolutions and ridiculous parties and finding someone to kiss... This year it was relieving and beautiful to put on tentacles with a small section of my sangha. We went to the beach and played games and read from the dictionary and drank Blue Moon beer in honor of the blue moon. At the stroke of midnight I reached my arms for the ceiling, laughed a little, and then went to bed.

Now I'm back at Carleton, where my pipes keep freezing and my to-do list keeps growing beyond what can reasonably fit on a sheet of notebook paper. Instead of rain there are icicles--they reach for the ground, but can't quite touch... But it's been lovely to reunite with long-lost friends, and I'm intoxicated by the smell of books. I've been bustling around, constantly late, but I've made a point to make every walk from my house to campus a walking meditation. (Note: eyelashes freezing to scarf.)

On New Years Day, we tentacle-ers went out to the beach to bid farewell to the sea. We stood without speaking as the wind and roaring ocean bored into our eardrums, at once grand and beautiful and a little bit cruel. My friend Lilly looked out over the raging, exquisite foam and spoke:

"The ocean is here. All is well. It's going to be a good year."