Delays, delays...

You can learn a lot about the human condition when your flight boards, and then, and hour and a half later, is cancelled. Things become fierce as you form an infinite cue with your co-travelers for flight re-scheduling. You realize how hollow and tenuous optimism can be; you tread the far-reaching borderlands of compassion.

I stood obsequiously aside as a first-class passenger harassed a bedraggled Delta agent. "I paid a thousand dollars for this ticket!" he shouted, "Serve me first! I must get to Minneapolis." Later he trolled the Line of Eternity asking everyone to confirm that the agent had been unacceptably rude. I wanted to look at him and say, "I'm sorry, Sir -- despite the fact that we live in an unfortunately capitalistic hegemony, it makes sense that the employees of the airline do not stratify our humanness in terms of our income and our willingness to spend. Your tie is overly pressed and not flattering."

I did not say this. Instead I took a sip of my coffee and tried to feel serene and glad that I wore my festive holiday sweater. Now I get to hang out in the airport for nine hours. If anyone ever wants a detailed description of the A Terminal of Boston Logan, I will gladly draw you an interpretive, artful sketch from memory. 

East

I am in New York City, sipping a latte in a hip coffee shop with a preponderance of mirrors and shafts of light shining artfully through bottles of vintage wine. I just submitted my first graduate school application.

I flew to Boston on Sunday to visit Harvard's Divinity School, and now I'm in New York to eat some bagels and realize my dream of ice-skating in Central Park whilst wearing a billowing scarf. So far I've spent a lot of time taking trains in the wrong direction on the underground. Also, my dear friend Kai and I split a pitcher of sangria last night and wandered the parks and streets of this place, pondering how the myth of a city can affect our experience of a particular tree.

It was fascinating to visit Harvard -- it feels absurd and audacious that I would consider that institution (speaking of myth), but their Religious Studies program is full of inspiring people that I would love to work with, so I really can't resist. That does not mean, however, that I was not thoroughly intimidated by the vast numbers of chandeliers and shiny shoes that I found on campus. It scared me somewhat, all of the history and the opulence and the ego. I walked through the historical architecture of Harvard Yard, dwarfed by monumental panes of stained glass and old stones engraved with Latin phrases that struck me as foreign incantations. I felt a deep pain in my chest when I compared the steeples and the slate-gray sky to my home in Oregon. If I were to study on the East Coast, I would be so far away from the forest and the mountains and Eugene.

But then it was three o'clock, and the bells tolled the hour, beautifully. There's a circular labyrinth outside of the Divinity School that's shaped exactly like the one that I know on Orcas Island at Indralaya -- I stood at the heart of the winding paths and used every fiber of my being to bind New England and the Ivy League to the salt-smell of the Pacific.

I met with a professor that teaches an entire class on eye-contact. She works with prison inmates, studying the way that Buddhism and Neuroscience can be integrated and then taught to prisoners in such a way that they can live free, meaningful lives behind bars. I remembered that I read a book by Thich Nhat Han when I was an exchange student in Chile. The monk is writing for prisoners of all sorts, from the literally incarcerated to those ensnared in the inevitable constraints of civilized culture. He says that, if you feel trapped, you should listen for bells, because every bell means that you're free, no matter where you are. Since then I've always been listening.

I'll be back home on Monday, to feel festive and celebrate my 24th birthday on the 24th of December. I will no longer be prime, but rather very highly divisible. I'm kind of excited to find out what that means.

A different perspective:

...TICKTOCKTICKTOCKTICKTOCKTICK...

That constant heartbeat of a noise, like an unending polka danced by an obese woman in stilettos, had been pounding rhythmically ever since anyone could remember. Even though each beat created a minor aftershock in the clan's wall space, it faded into the background, an unquestionable element of life. Like ear mites.

Unquestionable, that is, until Simon stuck his whiskers where no mouse should tread. 

"Dad," he squeaked on an otherwise routine Tuesday, "what is that sound? Do our walls breathe?"

Monohan Mouse, Simon's distinguished father, regarded his son condescendingly. "Don't be silly," he said with a nervous twitch of his tail, "our walls are inert, nothing more than a delineation of our world. You mustn't think of such things."

Had Simon possessed any sort of sense, he would have left the matter at that and continued along the well-oiled family tradition of caution and prodigious replication. He had always displayed a perilous propensity for pondering, however, and we all know that young mice lack sense.

As a result, that previously inoffensive Tuesday raised it's fists for combat and prepared to go down in history. Simon (that little rascal) disregarded his father's sage advice and got ready to Leave. 

Vamoose. 

Pry at the Gaps. 

Escape.

...TICKTOCKTICKTOCKTICKTOCKTICK...

Simon's ears quivered as they searched for the source of the cadence that had heretofore defined his existence. It somehow seemed to come from all directions at once. Well, he told himself, I have no choice--he would have to violate every moray of mouse-hood. With that thought, the errant son attacked the wall tooth and nail. His fellow rodents barely had time to gape in horror before the tip of his tail slithered through a gnawed perforation in the the wall. 

"He's a goner," rasped cousin Edna. 

Simon was a world away from his petrified family, however. He emerged into glaring light that poured down from an impossible height. The light glinted off of an equally expansive floor. Simon would have been faced with an uncontrollable urge to zoom a zamboni across that gleaming surface, had he known what a zamboni was. Instead, his heart caught wordlessly in his throat. What was this blinding place of forever dimensions? For the second time in a single Tuesday, Simon confronted just one option. The little mouse made his reluctant way across the foreign ground, the click of his nails producing an dissonant echo.

...TICKTOCKTICKTOCKTICKTOCKTICK...

It was getting louder. Simon's exhilaration blended with the sobering realization that, for the first time in his life, he was alone. Just as his doubts were beginning to put a stutter in his gait, he saw It:

It was like nothing he had ever seen before. It towered almost to the limits of his vision. Its wooden sides reflected the glimmering mist of the forest from whence the cleft wood came. Simon did not know what a forest was. Its glass doors contained an entity that seemed to dance with Its rhythm. Simon could not discern its true shape. Its face... Simon couldn't see its face.

...TICKTOCK...

The mouse ran up the clock.

La La Land

So I made an interesting discovery about two days ago: one of my graduate school applications is due in just four weeks--an entire month earlier than I had planned. Eeep. I needed to rapidly come to terms with several highly stressful states of affairs, given that I really want to enroll in a master's degree program starting next fall. Unquestionably, the largest source of my newfound stress was the GRE (the "Graduate Record Examination" is pretty much the grad school equivalent of the SAT). After a frantic and barely-intelligible conversation with an outsourced exam scheduler in India, I discerned that the only way for me to take this exam in time for my deadline was to have it proctored to me in Portland, today. So I forked over the $160 registration fee, and came to Portland.

Let me just say now that I think the GRE is a manifestation of everything that is wrong with the educational system. In fact, I will claim that the GRE is evil. I hate that I have to take this test; I hate that the schools I am interested in require me to take it. But. My conviction that I can carve a path for myself studying The Questions That Matter made me swallow my pride and submit myself to the exam. I entered a room full of computers and artificial light, donned the yellow noise-canceling headphones, and clicked and typed my way through four hours of bullshit.

I bought The Princeton Review's Cracking the GRE to help me study for this test. The authors have a hilarious, sardonic take on standardized testing: "If you find yourself in the math section with a half a page full of calculations and no answer, you are in La La Land," the Princeton Review told me. It then gave me a neatly bullet-pointed list of tips on how to escape from La La Land. And, indeed, there was a moment today today when I was wandering a quagmire of calculations, and I was like, "Oh no! Caitlin! You are in La La Land!" I forgot the bullet-pointed list, and laughed out loud at the hilarity and hopelessness of La La Land. Then the test proctor came in and told me not to disrupt the testing studio. It was great.

But really, I survived. I actually finished the exam 45 minutes early, walked out of the Computer Lab of Exam Doom into an invigorating autumn downpour, and heaved a sigh of relief. Now I'm rocking gently on the train back to Eugene... Take that, Mr. Man--I can take your tests, and they do not daunt me. I may not get the best score in the world, and I may spend a portion of my life floating in different dimensions of La La Land, but I'm going to try with everything I've got to figure out this "Grad School" thing.

Employment

Since I've been back in Eugene, I've have to confront the inevitable fact that I need to find a job. It's really been fascinating a experience, given that I've spent the past five years of my life using every single resource I possess to evade the so-called real world. And by "fascinating," of course, I mean "ego-shattering." Getting a job necessarily means that I will be rejected again and again--probably upwards of millions of times in this economy--before I succeed. And I have not yet succeeded. I sent an e-mail to eight professors at the university asking if they needed research assistance, and six of them politely rejected me in just one hour. Two responses to my inquiries have been scams, and I will never forget how blatantly dismissive a manager of a café became when I told her that I didn't have any experience as a barista. Even worse, perhaps, is the silence. I've spent a fair amount of time in the past couple of weeks wondering what will become of the resumés that I have dropped off at local businesses. Will they slowly rot in forgotten drawers alongside the resumés of a thousand other job hopefuls? Do managers and business owners crumple their innumerable useless resumés with a wry chuckle? Maybe their laughter is maniacal. Maybe they actually eat the resumés.

There was a low point today, after I picked up a job application at community credit union. Everything felt bleak--not only was I considering working directly for the Man who fabricates the illusion we call "money," but I also needed to buy a watch. (My watch broke a few weeks ago, and I had taken it as a sign that I was free of linear time... but now it's become apparent that I actually need one to keep appointments and such things.) So I was marketing myself to a bank, I was shackling myself into time, and it was also starting to pour so that the ink ran on my warped resumé. Bleak indeed.

But then, when I started the engine of my car, this is what was coming out of the radio:

"Music is on the radio – I notice that as I listen, I think of my mistakes, ill words, wasted time, and the next note I think of who I love and who I hate and the success I've had at both and of my tomorrow's chances. And I feel like a singing god riding on a cloud snapping my fingers and ruling a universe."

Pete Seeger spoke with deep reassurance as he strummed his banjo, and I remembered that I love the rain. I remembered that I chose to come back to Eugene because this place is my home. I am not trapped--even in this conventional urban 'wasteland' there is music; an intensity of the human spirit that makes my skin crawl. Here there a long conversations over coffee, mountains, community, and my family. I am always free, wherever I am. 

Maybe I can face the job market tomorrow. Reject me, I dare you.

Danyo's Bowls

There was a silent meditation retreat during my last days at Indralaya. About 15 people partook, and it was perfect to end my time on the island in an atmosphere of deliberate silence. 

The meditator who I will remember most from the retreat was a Somalian man named Danyo. His complexion was so dark that it was almost purple, and he wore loose white robes. He walked slowly, with a sort of hulking grace. Before the vow of silence was taken, Danyo told a story about how he sustained a compound fracture in his upper arm running from a hippopotamus in the swamps of Somalia. 

The first evening of the retreat we all gathered in the library to enter into silence together, and Danyo unveiled his bowls. He had seven bronze bowls of various shapes and sizes. Wrapped lovingly in burlap, they were nested inside of one another like Russian dolls. He took them out one by one with an astonishing gentleness, and arranged them around his folded knees. And then he told us the story of his bowls.

Danyo told us how he moved from Somalia to Manhattan, and then got a job as a taxi driver. One day, when he was driving around the city, he passed a shop that was owned by a Tibetan couple--it sold traditional Tibetan items like thangka paintings and incense, and Danyo was immediately attracted to the place. That very day he parked his cab and walked inside. "It was like I was going home. I loved the bowls as soon as I saw them," he told us. His accented voice was rich and sweet like honey. 

Over time Danyo saved enough money to buy his bowls. Now he knows each of their voices like they are his brothers. He calls himself the steward of the bowls, and he lives only to let their singing lead people toward truth. To begin our silence, he rang the largest of the bowls. He struck the thick brass with a wooden mallet again and again, and I could feel the deep ringing in my chest. This was a sound that a whale would understand; a sound that a mountain might utter over the course of eons. And then everything was quiet. 

Now I'm not exactly sure about my status on reincarnation... I tend to believe very little, but lately I've been trying to remind myself that believing nothing gives me the space to accept everything. Why shouldn't Danyo be a reincarnation of a Tibetan lama? It really would make perfect sense. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a Romanian Religious Studies professor that I met on the train in Tibet, when I was leaving Lhasa. After briefly discussing the clouds and their meaning, this middle-aged Romanian woman relayed to me her experience in a Tibetan monastery. She told me how, upon entering the walls of the monastery, she immediately fell to her knees and dissolved into tears of joy. She told me that, before that moment, she had never felt like she belonged anywhere.

Why not?

I left Indralaya at dawn, before the silence was broken. The sun rose as the ferry bore me across the sea to the mainland. It's sort of a scary thing, "the mainland." It's a land of job markets and graduate school applications; a land where I could see the Bellingham oil refinery belching out plumes of dirty smoke over the Pacific. But we all have to return to the mainland, I guess. We have to take the peace and light that we gather on our respective islands and bring it home with us, bottled up somewhere inside of us. We have to share it to the best of our ability, cuz it's far too easy to get lost in the fog. At least that's what I'm trying to do. 

When I focus I can still let myself hear Danyo's largest bowl resonate. Or at least I can still imagine the vibration, somewhere near the pit of my stomach.

 

Written for an Indralaya Publication:

I grew up coming to family camp at Indralaya with my mother and brother. I vividly remember the sense of magic that permeated my experience of this place: we would always stay in Apple Cabin, and the carpets of my secret workshop that I built during guided meditations were deep purple. All year long I would look forward to painting my nails for the Sock Hop, or watching my intricate beach mandala vanish in the tide. That was back when I thought that “ferry” and “fairy” were the same word. It was easy for me to see the halos around trees.

A decade has intervened since my last visit to Indralaya. I started High School and then I graduated; I enrolled in college and emerged with a degree in Religious Studies and Neuroscience. I’ve studied in Egypt and Turkey, taught English in Tibet, practiced Buddhist meditation in India, and hitchhiked across South America. I’ve engaged critically with the questions that I find beautiful, been lost and confused, and grappled with the implications of my own freedom. I don’t know about “growing up” but I’m twenty-three now. I’m striving to carve out a place for myself in a chaotic world.

And now, ten years later, I have returned to Orcas Island to spend six weeks at Indralaya as an intern. And it’s beautiful. Again. I meditate in the morning, comparing bells with gulls and remembering the limitations of my analytical mind. I’ve laughed in the basil patch, made gallons of pesto, and stuck my face into plum trees in search of their perfect purple fruits. There have been moments where time collapses, and where I sense the presence my childhood self—the girl who believed that anything is possible. After being swept away in a whirlwind of continents, résumés, and unanswerable questions, it is so relieving to plunge my hands into freshly turned earth and breathe.

Of course my path is still loosely defined, and my thoughts still get the better of me. But my hands are stained with beet juice, and the other day I watched bioluminescent lights kiss and spin in the nighttime ocean. I’m remembering exactly how deep a moment goes. Although many years separate me from wide-eyed childhood wonder, Indralaya continues to be a beautiful place for me to plant my feet and remember my spirit.