Silence

Dear Blog,

This is what I would say if I could feel well enough to write.

The bad side is, when I’m not doing well, neither is my blog. We’ll sit in silence and stare at each other for long periods of time (the cursor always blinks first). When my emotions are tangled, so are my fingers, and I can’t write. I get knotted up. I get tongue- and finger-tied.

Thankfully, Kyeli said it for me instead.

Hope to see you again, soon.

Love, Dawn

Head West

Head west, young (wo)man. What else is there to do when everything you believe in is disintegrating under your acidic gaze, slipping through your grubby fingers even as you try to grab on to the fading tendrils of reality? When life gets so convoluted that the only thing that gets you excited anymore is the thought of living out of your car for three months … that’s when you head west.

Unfortunately, once you start the journey you realize that heading west is more of a placebo than a panacea. It doesn’t actually fix whatever problems underlie the desire to head west, but it does make your head think things are better, if just for a bit.

The idea of heading west is a better pill than the actual western experience. As long as it all stays in your head, you can believe that the enormous sky and snow-capped Rockies can engulf your emotional anxiety and wash it clean away.

Maybe there was a time when heading west wasn’t just a placebo, when Route 66 wasn’t just a few dilapidated Main Streets now called Business I-40, when the road was brand new and not cracked from disuse and disrepair, when the road was more important than the destination itself. Maybe there was a time when the asphalt/concrete of Route 66 itself seeped miracle cures for heartache, loneliness, and the quiet desperation bred by a consuming consumer lifestyle. Maybe those times are just the stories we like to tell ourselves about how things used to be, hoping against hope that at some point in the history of the world there must have been an easy pill to pop, an obvious action to take, a simple road to drive on to pull our lives back together.

- journal entry from my move to Durango, March 4, 2004

Buddhist Beginnings

I believe that I first started to practice Buddhism on a fall afternoon in Athens, Georgia in 2003. While I had taken a course on Buddhism in college in the late 90s, it had remained a purely intellectual pursuit. Early in 2003, I started going to Al-Anon meetings, as my partner at the time had become an alcoholic before my eyes. I’d resisted going for months, terrified of going to a meeting that talked about God when I was living in the middle of the Bible Belt. Once I was desperate enough to go anyway, I met other people searching for a spiritual path when all the traditional paths had failed them. One friend I met there decided to pack up her home and go to India for a few months. I offered to help her pack, because I’d appreciated her insight and was sad I was not going to be interacting with her for months.

While at her home, she gave me Pema Chodron’s book When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (Shambhala Classics). I knew this was a book I needed to know intimately when I turned to page 1 and read the first chapter quotation: “Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.” All I felt during this time was fear: fear that he would leave, even greater fear that he would stay; fear that I would do the wrong thing, fear of what would happen if I did the right thing; fear of whether he would survive without me propping him up, fear of whether I would survive a life of propping him up.

So I read and read, and learned about nonattachment, compassion, and just being with the feelings that were swirling in me. I most remember during that time feeling a strong desire to act, to fix things, to just do something, but finding the courage to do nothing. As Pema Chodron says directly, “Usually we feel that there’s a large problem and we have to fix it. The instruction is to stop. Do something unfamiliar. Do anything besides rushing off in the same old direction, up to the same old tricks” (p. 137). My old tricks had got me in a pretty miserable place, so I was willing to try something else, anything else. Sometimes the gift of suffering is that our desperation makes us try something new.

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The first in the “What is Practice?” series.