torrential rainfall and the disputed kingdom Protista

radiolaria

It’s been raining torrentially all day- this morning we took the dogs to kelly point park, the superfund site where the metallic Columbia meets the sewage-filled Willamette, and big cold drops began to pelt us as soon as we stepped from the car. We walked along the path through the woods, throwing Emy’s ball before us. The poplar trees, huge overhead, swayed ominously in the wind from the oncoming storm, and we watched in wonder as limbs broke off, now and then, and fell in slow motion to the ground. Let’s go to the beach? I said. A tree might fall on us? But the beach was too exposed, the wind beating us like a newspaper and the rain splatting us and the lights from the grain barges on the river. Back in the forest, we watched the trees. Woo woo, they said. The air was grey with condensation. Along the trail nettles grew hopefully, taking up nuclear waste from the soil.

Now I’m in my trailer with the space heater up too high, and it’s still raining torrentially. Earlier I tried to study, laying in bed with my big floppy biology book, watching the water run in rivulets down the little trailer-window, but I fell asleep instead. Before I fell asleep I’d been trying to focus on the disputed kingdom Protista, but instead I was thinking indulgently about summertime, and houses I used to live in, and meadows I have known.

I’ve been feeling a lot of nostalgia lately. Maybe because it is the wet end of the wintertime, maybe because I have been in the city too long with only crowded backyards and superfund sites to retreat to. And it’s funny, because when you finally let a thing go, sometimes years after you first realize that you should be done with it, you never think that it will come back all draped in the soft colors of nostalgia. But that is how I feel today, tonight, about all sorts of things- and I am thinking of them longingly, here in my little driveway-house full of warmth with the rain pounding on the aluminum roof.

Where do they go, these things that happen? Our experiences, our disembodied stories? Apparently there is a compost heap in my brain where they are recycled into magic treasures, more whole then they ever actually were.

I think of North Dakota often, it is one of my muses, if I am using muse in the correct sense, if a muse can be a thing other than a person. Also my friends are muses, people I have known, mostly old friends who cannot get their shit together, who are propelled helplessly through life by their own irreconcilable contradictions, who are moved about as if by mystery. Who do not use logic. Who are painfully beautiful. Who always seem more alive than other people but also more ungrounded. Which is maybe the same thing.

And North Dakota. North Dakota from a freight train- the train goes fast, because north Dakota is wide open. The train could be said to hurtle. On both sides of the train, the soft gold grass. Bent at the tops, like an ocean. The native prairie that grew back after people fled to the cities. Just the grass and the train and above you, the glass observatory of the sky. Now and then a broken down barn, melting into the grass. A stone fence, half-finished, built from stones fished from the ground. A shiny ribbon in the prairie is a stream, flat and clear, like you could float down it on your back. Wind, and sometimes clouds, charging from the east. Lightning.

I used to do whatever I wanted. Travel all the time, move back and forth. I ate dumpstered birthday cake and slept outside under forgotten clumps of trees and that was ok, because I was young and needed nothing. I thought that everything was too fucked up to invest in anything, but then investing in nothing made me feel like I was already dead, and that made me wish that I was, and that feeling was confusing because I had no reason to want to be dead. It was like I wanted to be free so bad but then when I was free I realized that there was nothing else. Like when I was little and I would try and play the video games my brother liked so much but all I cared about was finding the edge of the world, moving my little man into all the corners of the screen to try and find some place beyond what you could see. But there’s nothing else, there’s just the tunnel or whatever, and it’s all set up for you, you’re supposed to jump and get the coin and stomp the mushroom and it’s supposed to make you feel good.

When I was younger, I never thought about what would happen. I figured that the world would just end soon so there was no point in thinking about it. The world felt old, tense, used up, on the brink of something. Everything felt so extremely precarious, like if I touched it it would fall over. It didn’t make any sense to me to put my efforts into something that would just end anyway. I didn’t know then that things that fall over build themselves up again, over and over like magic. It took me a long time to see that.

I used to not need anything- not money, not a home, not any specific food. But there’s a lot of stress in that lifestyle, and loneliness, and eventually your adrenals get worn out and you wake up one day and your body hurts and you can’t do it anymore and you need things. Or you throw yourself off a bridge, because the world hasn’t ended yet and you can’t keep bluffing.

I’ve been in Portland for a year and a half straight. I used to leave for about half of every year. Also notable- I’ve had my dog for a year and a half, I’m starting my second year of undergrad next term, and March 18th is my one-year anniversary with Seamus. I turn thirty this year, and I’m so grateful that this shit is getting easier. And it feels sweet, this nostalgia for the way I lived for so long, tonight, sitting in my trailer with the rain coming down- memories, dreams, popping up like treasures from underwater. Sometimes I feel anxiety about it- like I’ll never be able to travel again, because I won’t have the money, and my body can’t handle the way I used to travel, for free. Waking up on the freight train, sided somewhere in Minnesota, watching the dawn bleed into the sky. Shoplifting grapefruit and sardines. Spending days in a bramble thicket, reading Steinbeck. Walking for miles in the dead of night, looking for water. So many moments of feeling so alive- stacking up on top of each other, making the universe hum like an electrical current. Like it was just me and the universe. The universe moving through me, like I wasn’t even there. Have you ever felt that way? Like you can actually forget yourself enough for the universe to go about its business right in front of you. Like in any Farley Mowat book, when he’s been in his canvas tent in the snow for long enough and the wolves decide he’s just a bunch of lichen, and they start playing with each other and acting out all their wolfy dramas in front of him. Like he’s found the secret place at the edge of everything, where there’s something else that no-one knew was there.

I haven’t been working on my book for a while. I took too many credits this term, and I moved, so I haven’t had time to write. And I hate being really busy. It gives me big fluffy piles of anxiety. Too much of my brain is devoted to thinking about stuff like colors and shapes and patterns of light and very little is devoted to time management and schedule planning. So I sort of freeze up if my life gets too complicated and then I can’t do anything. I need large blocks of time to stare out the window and think about sea creatures. I need to be able to accidentally fall asleep while studying. I need to be able to be ten minutes late for everything. I may not actually be ten minutes late for everything, but I need that to be ok.

I wish I had another three month stretch to work on my book. It’s my ladder to the moon- I need it to climb out of here. But you need a really strong ladder to climb out of one way of life and into another one, and it takes a long time to build a ladder that strong. Right now I’m doing undergrad to prepare to go to school for my master’s in Chinese medicine, because that’s my other dream, besides writing. But when I look down that road I see full-time school for the next five years and then after that, working full time to pay off my student loans, and then working forever until I die. And there’s no time for writing in that anywhere.

How do you do it? How do you be an adult. How do you want things hard enough to make them real. It’s like I woke up one day and all the rules had changed. Or I woke up one day and realized where I was- in this body, on this ground, with this rain coming down everywhere. There’s no place at the edge of everything, and yet there is. And I can want both worlds, but so far, I haven’t figured out how to have them both at once. And that’s painful, but pain can be good. A motivator. Soothing, even. I feel pain, therefore I exist. This sucks and I want something else, therefore I exist. This sucks this sucks this sucks, I exist I exist I exist.

my life right now

Restless sleep. Ambiguous mornings. Daylight that does not differentiate- wet and gray, so gray I have forgotten any other color. Occasional sunclouds, the storms churned into piles of whipped-cream and floating in golden caramel. The heavens can be rainbows, pink and blue, molten gold? Surely not. My dog takes three cold showers a day (that is how often we walk). We go to the park and I throw the ball in the mud. The other dogs, at least fifty pounds larger, do not bother her. She exudes calm-assertive energy. She telepathically claims her space in a non-confrontational way. On occasion, she concedes to be the rabbit.

Frozen marionberries and decaffeinated tea. Writing in great bursts, tenaciously grasping hope, becoming frightened. Looking at facebook on my phone while my non-English-speaking Latina neighbor gathers cans and bottles in the rain with her two small children. Locking the deadbolt on my apartment and trying to have a conversation with her, and not knowing what to say. I am aware of how stupid I look, stepping out in my gore-tex rain jacket with the mini-chuckit under my arm, small dog barking. Her two strollers sit in the rain, piled high with bags of cans. Her small daughters, in their pink Dora the Explorer jackets, cry.

I wish that I spoke Spanish, although I am not willing to do the work it takes to learn Spanish. My partner, who knows Spanish, talks to my neighbors at length, learning everything about them. She tells me, so that I might befriend them, too, and I immediately forget. I am an introvert and a coward, and I subconsciously avoid interactions that happen outside of my comfort zone. I am a textbook gentrifier.

Meanwhile, my book becomes an arena in which to battle my demons. They enter what I imagine to be a school gymnasium one by one, huge talons swinging, acrid smoke curling from their nostrils. I run at them with a rusty kitchen knife, knowing that I cannot possibly fight them and live. Somehow I jump quickly enough over their flailing barbed tails that I live long enough to stab them in the face with my knife, and they crumple, one by one. If I gloat for even one minute, though, they come back to life and stomp me into the ground. Even writing this might count as gloating.

Corinne is back, and I am reading all her New Yorkers. There is an article in the back of the March 21st New Yorker about a therapist who councils blocked screen-writers in Hollywood. His advice is essentially what I have read in Pema Chodron’s books, only filtered through the culture and language of southern California. Here is what he prescribes for writer’s block:

Imagine yourself falling backward into the sun, saying “I am willing to lose everything” as you are consumed in a giant fireball, after which, transformed into a sunbeam, you profess, “I am infinite”.

And this advice for facing something you’ve been avoiding (like writing), because facing that thing is painful:

Imagine a cloud of pain. Silently scream “Bring it on!” while pushing into the center of the cloud. Once in the cloud, say “I love pain,” and then, “Pain sets me free.”

Writing a novel requires a lot of growth. In order to grow my ego must concede die, again and again, and be reborn. Death, of course, is painful, and we try, above almost all things in this culture, to avoid it. The goal, I think, is to not to avoid death but to become better at it, to run towards it with a kitchen knife, or nothing at all.

I love pain. Pain sets me free.

no hope

“Without hope, there is no fear.” -Buddhist saying

“When hope dies, action begins.” -Derrick Jensen

I’ve been trying to apply these concepts to my own writing.

Writing is easy, writing is fun. Writing a novel is like digging through a wet cement wall with just my fingernails.

The difference, for me, between writing “just for the sake of writing” and “writing a novel”, is hope.

I hope I finish my novel by august.

I hope I write a really good novel.

I hope I don’t fuck up.

But hope is a killer. When you have hope, you have something to lose. When you have something to lose, you become afraid to lose it. That fear, over time, can be paralyzing.

I hope that I am successful at everything I aspire to in life.

I hope I don’t fuck up.

Hope vs. Manifestation:

Hope looks like this: I hope I finish my book by august.

Manifestation looks like this: I know I will finish my book at the right time.

In hope, there is control: I want to finish my book by august. I had better finish my book by august. I am rigid in my need for things to be exactly a certain way.

In hope, there is fear: I fear that I will not finish my book. I fear that I will fail at everything I aspire to.

In manifestation, there is acceptance: I accept that I cannot control my book. I accept that I cannot control my art. I accept that I cannot control the fluid, ever-changing creative energies of the universe, of which I am a small, humble part.

In manifestation, there is trust: I know that things will happen at the right time. I know that I am smart, creative, and prolific. I trust that everything will work out, as long as I stay grounded, focused, and open.

Behind hope hides fear and control. In manifestation there is trust and acceptance.

To quote from Natalie Goldberg’s awesome writing book, Writing Down The Bones- Writing is not a mcdonald’s hamburger. That is, writing is not exactly the same every time. In fact, nothing is a mcdonald’s hamburger. Nothing is exactly the way you want it, every time. Nothing in life can be controlled like that.

Pema Chodron says:

Milrepa, who lived in the eleventh century, was one of the heroes of Tibetan Buddhism, one of the brave ones. He was also a rather unusual fellow. He was a loner who lived in caves by himself and meditated wholeheartedly for years. He was extremely stubborn and determined.
The story goes that one evening Milrepa returned to his cave after gathering firewood, only to find it filled with demons. They were cooking his food, reading his books, sleeping in his bed. They had taken over the joint. He knew about the teaching of nonduality of self and other, but he still didn’t quite know how to get these guys out of his cave. Even though he had the sense that they were just a projection of his own mind- all the unwanted parts of himself- he didn’t know how to get rid of them.
So first he taught them the dharma. He sat on his seat that was higher than they were and said things to them about how we are all one. He talked about compassion and emptiness and other key Buddhist teachings. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. The demons were still there. Then he lost his patience and got angry and ran at them. They just laughed at him. Finally, he just gave up and sat down on the floor, saying, “I’m not going away and it looks like you’re not either, so let’s just live here together.”
At that point, all of them left except one. Milrepa said, “This one is particularly vicious.” (We all know that one. Sometimes we have lots of them like that. Sometimes we feel that’s all we’ve got.) He didn’t know what to do, so he surrendered himself even further. He walked over and put himself right in the mouth of the demon and said, “Just eat me up if you want to.” Then that demon left too.

So I am digging through a cement wall with my fingernails, and I am facing my demons.

Demon one: I will not finish my novel by august.

Demon two: I will run out of money, my novel will not be finished, I’ll be working full-time/going to school full time again, and I’ll never have a big chunk of time to devote to writing again. Ever.

Demon three: I’m too young to write a novel.

Demon four: I don’t know how to write a novel.

Demon five: I will try, and consistently fail, at writing a novel, for the rest of my life, until capitalism collapses and/or I succumb to chronic illness. The cycle will go like this- I want to write a novel, I am inspired to write a novel, I know exactly what I want to write about, but I do not have time/money to do it. Suddenly, by some random stroke of luck, time/money falls on me from the sky and I am able to write. I sit down to write and merrily hammer out the first fifteen thousand words, at which point I am abruptly crippled by my fear of failure. I am unable to write another paragraph. Instead, I think about writing, think about all the things I want to happen in my book, have dreams about the characters, talk about them. But when I sit down to write, I cannot. And so I anxiously wring my hands until my time/money is gone. Repeat cycle into infinity, until life, in retrospect, seems like a sort of hell, and I have squandered everything, with absolutely nothing to show for it.

Demons one through four are like the first demons in the parable. In my more heroic moments, I can accept them, and they vanish. But I am so, so afraid of demon five.

So here is my mantra for today.

I accept that I will fail, again and again, for the rest of my life. I accept that I will never arrive, and that things will pretty much always be the same as they are now. I accept that I will always be poor and unfocused. I accept that I will always look like a failure on paper. I accept all of my broken parts and the ways that I am flawed, and I accept the cycles that I am doomed to repeat, again and again, for all of eternity.

And Annie Dillard, my favorite eco-theologist, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not IN its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down. Simone Weil says simply, “Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love.”