Oh, Rumi...

For more on Rumi, Mr. Amazing Himself, go here. Or here. 

Inspired by John O'Donohue (again)

"I think it makes a huge difference, when you wake in the morning and come out of your house, whether you believe you're walking into a dead geographical location, which is used to get to a destination, or whether you're emerging out into a landscape that is just as much, if not more, alive as you, but in a totally different form—and that it subsists primarily in silence, stillness, and solitude.  But that if you attend to it…and if you go towards it, with an open heart and a real watchful reverence…that you will be absolutely amazed at what it will reveal to you."

 -John O'Donohue

(From his interview with Krista Tippet on On Being)

I believe I owe Los Angeles an apology.  It has been years now, since our move from New York to LA…a move which was supposed to be temporary. A move which was supposed to create a parenthetical in our lives and not, as it has, a full stop. New sentence.

The landscape of New York is undeniable. I remember once, on a trip from my apartment in Brooklyn to my then-job in Times Square, counting all of the different environments I passed through along the way. 

1. quiet and cold and cobblestoned on the streets of my beloved DUMBO. 

2. smelling faintly of urine and punctuated by the scrabbling of rats on the Brooklyn side of the subway. 

3. silent—all of us headphones on in the train car.

4. boisterous and gruff underground in Times Square, a thousand elbows all trying to get up and out first.

5. even more boisterous and even more gruff, up street-side.

6. And finally, the dull hum of fluorescents and air conditioning and smooth steel corporate elevators, whooshing from floor to floor, inside the sound-thick walls of my office building. 

This, I remember thinking, is why we all keep eyes pinned neatly down as we make our ways from home to work and back again—could the body, if it were left alone to osmose all of this—could it even survive it? It doesn't seem likely.

Los Angeles is not like this. Los Angeles is a place of roads and yards, of 1920's duplexes upon duplexes. Of lines of impossibly tall palm trees. Of cars and billboards and surprising succulents growing roadside. It's a place of buildings and order and doorways. It's a place of pods. Pods with wheels and pods with porches and pods within pods within pods. Sometimes, when you're driving down a familiar street, on a day when the layer of smog and marine gust has cleared, you'll suddenly realize, as the peaks of the Sierra Madres tower into view, that you are in a valley. In a desert. In the bowl of a hundred mountains. The landscape of Los Angeles, just like its mountains, comes in and out of view.

I have not been kind to the landscape of my new (gulp) home.  Hence, the apology.

I realized the other morning, while curling around Tracy Street, slowing for the dip in the concrete, and for the cop who is always parked outside of the nearby high school, (the same high school where the final scene from the original movie Grease was shot)—as I was taking the shortcut, left down the tiny alley where it seems impossible that two cars might fit, and yet, they always do—it occurred to me, as I was driving these roads, that I have spent nearly all of our almost 34 months here, stubbornly untouched by the body of Los Angeles. 

Maybe it was the NPR interview, humming along in the background, with a local artist who was talking about her favorite parts of the city. Street corners and museums and cemeteries I have never been to—talking about them as if they were the soft spots and creases of her own anatomy. Maybe it was the whisper of worry in the back of my head about my husband, about how much he misses our New York, and about how hard it can be on him—the hours in the car, the hours in front of screens, the feeling of isolation that is so common in la-la-land. I was, in my head at that moment, making lists of things we ought to do. Ways out. Ways in. When suddenly it landed on me, like a rock might come thudding onto hard-packed soil…that it is time to honor the landscape that IS.

When we are children, loving the minutia of butterflies and sidewalk cracks and the sticky tar of pine trees around us, is simple. Natural. Like breath. It requires no commitment, because it just is what we know and have known and will know, and we have no fear that loving one landscape precludes loving any other. We drink it in, because it is what is there.

But as adults, what is around us becomes so tied up in what we are and what we aspire to be and what we need in order both to be and to proceed to be better, that it can become, in the words of John O'Donohue, "a dead geographical location". This is what we have done to LA, my husband and I—not just because, as it seemed perhaps at first, it is not our kind of city, but more than that, out of some kind of stubborn insistence on the preference of one landscape over another. And with it, a denial of the life of the landscape around us. And with that denial, it's so clear now, comes a denial of some part of our own life. And livelihood. How, really, can you thrive in a place that you refuse to fully breathe in?

Last week, my husband and I rose early and drove to a part of town we'd never been to before. A little suburb just north of LA where there is an "old town" and a Sunday market praised for its quaintness.  It should also have been praised for the enormous heads of cauliflower and dozens of varieties of hummus and fresh-caught salmon and strawberries nearly ready to burst, all on offer there. We walked up and down the long aisle of vendors, holding hands and taking pictures of chickens spinning on a rotisserie. (The smell of coal-grilled chicken makes me feel like I'm nine years old again.) And we ate eggs and bought hummus and talked about things we wanted, and how we might get them. And as we headed, happy and full, back to our car, the mountains, which had been hidden earlier by morning fog, rose up to cradle us.

Speaking Sanely...

So, I have to admit, I listened to this interview with Mormon author Joanna Brooks because I wanted the dirt!  I wanted the juicy insider-info about the Mormon church!  I wanted the gossip-monger satisfaction of secrets revealed!  I wanted to dish about weird underwear and weirder customs!

But that is not what I got...

Joanna Brooks is, according to her website, an "award winning writer and scholar of religion and spirituality"...and also, a Mormon.  She is a Mormon who grew up in a conservative Mormon household, but as an adult sort of accidentally turned into a feminist.  And then not-so-accidentally married a Jewish man.  Whoops!  She is a Mormon who struggled and volleyed with her faith, but who ended up making a decision that so many people, on so many spiritual paths, have made before her--which is to not abandon the religion to which she was born, even though at moments, it might have felt like she should.  And, because of this, she is a Mormon who has found a way to expand enough to hold all the nuances and contradictions within a faith that she obviously loves very deeply.  And I will tell you, Joanna Brooks may be a Mormon, but as far as I'm concerned...this chick is a yogi.

I loved her so much, I wrote her a fan letter (email) immediately upon the conclusion of the interview.  She and Ira Glass are now the only two people I have written fan letters to.  (As an adult.)

(And for those of you who know my deep love for/borderline obsession with Ira Glass...that is saying something.)

 Joanna Brooks wrote me back.  Ira Glass did not.  Point, Joanna.

Okay, so full disclosure--I don't know a lot about Mormonism.  I had a good friend when I was growing up who was Mormon, but we were young, and all I knew was that her family had a big store room full of food and supplies (the encouraged "years worth of food"), and that she, my friend, was constantly in pre-teen agony about the boy she loved not being a Mormon.  When I was graduating from high school, years after she and I had grown apart, I got an announcement for her wedding.  Not, of course, to the not-Mormon boy she was in love with.  To some other boy, someone I'd never met.  At only 16 myself, and just beginning to discover the world, I remember feeling so...disappointed.  How could she get married?  She wasn't much older than me, maybe two years at most, and at the time I thought, well, that's it for her.  She's done.  She would get married and then there would be babies and babies and more babies, and that would be it.

So this, until today, was my basic understanding of Mormonism--it was strict, you couldn't marry who you wanted, and if you were a woman, your job--your life--was going to be about having babies and being a wife.

And then there's the, ahem, politics of the Mormon Church, which are unquestionably ultra-conservative slash deeply disturbing.   And though it's not really integral to this post, I do feel like it's important to mention that I do not agree with the stance of the Mormon Church on gay rights or women's rights--or on social issues in general, it's probably safe to say--and no interview, no matter how lovely, is going to change that.  Though of course, the same could be said for the Catholic Church, and the Evangelical Church, and for countless others.  I just want that on the record.

But, it's not the Mormon Church that I found so moving, it's not the history and ritual of the Mormon faith--though it was beautifully rendered by Ms. Brooks in her interview--which inspired me to first write to her, and now to write this.  It was, instead, the power of her flexible, and sane way of speaking about her faith, that moved me.

I have realized, since writing this blog these last few years, that if I have any goal in mind...if there's anything that I really WANT from all this writing and interviewing and talking and teaching and practicing, it is to seek out and nurture spiritual sanity.  To figure out how it is that those of us who are on fire with God in some form or another (whether your God is one God or many Gods or whether your God is Art or Breath or Movement or just the sacred stuff of your Life)--how is it that we can bring this God into our lives in a way that is real, and meaningful and leaves room for the very necessary doubt and constant change that is so much a part of our world.  Is there a way to be a person of faith and have a dialogue about it that doesn't include dogma but DOES include divinity?  And love.  And compassion.

And people like Joanna Brooks make me feel like that goal is accomplishable.

Because, without question, she and I are very different.  We have very different backgrounds, and very different conceptions, maybe, of the practicals of God--what that looks like, how it came to be, and how to call it by name--but I would imagine, though I can't speak for her, that our ideas about the essence, the heart, of God...are probably very much the same.  The easy road, of course, is to retreat to opposite corners, to claim lack of understanding and to grudgingly go on our ways.  The difficult thing, and the thing that Joanna Brooks is trying to do, that all of the teachers and speakers I respect most are trying to do, is to stretch the walls of her understanding of God so that it becomes more inclusive.

I was reading something the other day by Thomas Traherne, a "metaphysical poet" (thank you, Wikipedia) from the 17th Century, and he was talking about how we all, as children, are born with a divine knowledge of presence--the world is new to us, and everything is one unfolding mystery.  But, he writes, the real work, the real trick of divinity, is not to somehow go back to before we knew anything, it is, instead, this process of "unlearning" everything that has darkened our view thus far.  This is the more miraculous thing, he says: to travel from corruption back to innocence.

And I couldn't help but think of Joanna Brooks, and how devoted she is to this work, not of abandoning her faith, but of instead, stripping away the layers of corruption, to get back to the sweet center.

Check out the interview, if you have a chance, or Joanna Brooks' blog: Ask Mormon Girl.  And then let me know what you think of her and the work she's doing...yay or nay?

This Hamster is FOCUSED...

First of all, Shanti-towners, thank you!  Because, Shanti Town has now hit 100 followers!  Small potatoes in the blog-o-sphere at large, but a big deal for this lady, so thank you, very much!  I'm so happy to have you all here!

Ahem.  On with the show.

The other day, in the midst of my third wedding-related melt-down in as many days, whilst trying to explain my deep state of overwhelm to my very amazing soon-to-be husband, he gently (as is his way) pointed out to me that perhaps part of the problem wasn't the amount of work to be done, but the way in which I was trying to go about doing it.  He reminded me that often it is my habit to try and carry around and accomplish all things at all times, instead of setting out to do just one thing in an allotted amount of time.

The problem, in other words, was focus.

(And just for clarity's sake, let me just say...we are BOTH very involved in the wed-planning.  This is not one of those bride doing all the work until she makes herself crazy, situations.  Just so ya know.  I'm just more prone to, um...crying.)

Okay, so...where was I?

Oh, right.  Focus.

Sooooooo...my wise mister suggests it might be about focus.  And as soon as he says it, I think back to an interview I had been (re)listening to the day before, with these two writers/parents of an autistic child, about autism.  And in the interview at one point the dad talks about how one of the traits common in people with autism is the ability to focus really deeply on something, to the exclusion of all other things.  He talked about how this was also a notable trait in most people we consider masters or geniuses, and I remember thinking, even at the time...argh! I'm doomed!!  

Not because I don't know how to focus, I do...but because I forget, so often, the importance of focus and instead let the guise of obsessive productivity take it's place.

And I thought about what it's like, you know, to really focus on something...the way that the whole world can just drop away and time sort of fans out, like it might just go on forever.  You know that feeling?

So, with all this on my mind and in preparation for classes, I took it to the books...specifically to The Heart of Yoga by Mr. TKV Desikachar (a famous yogi dude), to get a refresher course on the last three limbs of yoga:  Dhāraṇā, Dhyāna, and Samādhi.

Okay, brief primer: Dhāraṇā is the sixth limb of yoga (of the famed eight limbs that make up the backbone of the yoga philosophy) and it is, essentially, concentration.

Dhyāna, is the seventh limb, otherwise known as, meditation, and;

Samādhi, the eighth limb, which is bliss...absorption...the big tamale, the grand prize at the end of it all: enlightenment, yo.

Okay, so, these last three limbs...they're my favorite (philosophically), because of how beautifully they work together and what a smooth final progression they form to lead a body to bliss.  Basically it works like this:

In Dhāraṇā, when you're focused on a singular object (or person or idea, or whatever)...your mind is quiet and moving in just one direction, toward the object of your focus.  You're checking it out, you're learning about it, you're mind is on it, and only on it.  You're focused.

And if you keep doing this for awhile, you get to move up a level, to Dhyāna...meditation.  When you're in Dhyāna, you've still got this movement of your mind and your attention in the direction of your chosen object, but NOW, you've also got stuff coming back at you, from said object.  It's vibing you back.  And so inspirations are arising in you from the object, insights come seemingly out of nowhere...but it's not nowhere, it's just that the lines of communication have been opened (thanks to your dutiful focus) and now energy is moving in two directions, back and forth.  This is Dhyāna.

And last but not least...if you can hang with your meditation, this deepened state of focus, something amazing might just happen...instead of you just sending your attention out to the object or it sending something back at you...now you and the object become one and the same.  There is no more you.  There is no more object of attention.  You are subsumed, consumed, by one another.  And this is Samādhi.  This is bliss.

And isn't it, though?  Isn't that bliss?  To be so deeply involved in what you're doing, in what's right in front of you that the whole world, and you, and it...just disappear?  I think this is just the most perfect description what deep focus is.

But the magic...the amazing part of this whole process, is that you can't just sit down and DO it.  You can't sit down and say, now I'm going to be in Samādhi, or even, now I'm going to focus, because if your mind is wild or distracted or upset, well...good f-ing luck.   These are organic states, that arise organically, so the only thing you can do to practice them, is to cultivate an environment that might just have fertile ground from which they can grow.

And that's why we practice.
And that's why we breathe.

And that's why, when we get overwhelmed, it might behoove us just to go for a walk, or read some lovely something, or just sit on our little porch and drink some tea and let the wind brush against us.

Like I am going to go and do...right. now.