The Experience

For a while now (since I went to India and people couldn't stop noting to me, "Well, that will be . . . an experience.") I have had an uneasy relation with that particular word, experience. I hated how vague it sounded, how people used it to say you have no reference for the feelings you are about to experience.

That was until I realized that experience is all we have. The feeling of the sun on your shoulders, the beating of your heart felt on your upper lip, the recognition of a song you love in a beautiful voice are all experiences. The memory of an embarrassment in the past an experience. The pain of watching crowds of people walk past savoring scoops of gelato when you've sworn to eat better an experience of its own. I recently took ten days to live like a monk at a Vipassana meditation center in the Burgundy region of France and it was an experience.

Waiting for the bus that would take us to the rural center, I met an English pilgrim in cat-eyed glasses. Talking to her of a pilgrimage trail called the Camino de Santiago, I asked her how it was to walk for miles on end on a pathway traveled by millions throughout history. "It was many things," she responded, the exact response I found myself giving moments later as she asked me how it was to travel in India. The same must be said about the Vipassana center, it was in fact, many experiences, and certainly different for every person who attends.

On arrival I was required to surrender my telephone, my wallet, any and all reading and writing material, food, drugs, and finally, my power of speech. Ten days is relatively little time, but count as your one and only activity the observation of breath and everything becomes bigger. The ten days I spent at the Dhamma Mahi center allowed me little respite despite my apparent inactivity and never have I truly felt so much experience was going on in, around, and through me.

I found the vow of silence easy, no longer did I have to watch my words trip around like wobbly toddlers, no longer did I worry the silence with idile talk and happily, nobody else did either. I didn't find the technique of meditation particularly hard, I like a well thought out method. I liked eating less and eating healthier. I liked waking up at 4:00 a.m. to the full and gentle sound of a gong approaching from afar in the dark. Washing my clothes by hand gave me an unforseen pleasure, especially since I had so few things to wash. Other people didn't take so favorably to the things I enjoyed. Expressing themselves by farting because they couldn't talk. Stealing food and hiding it in the room because he was hungry. One ground his teeth so loud that I could feel my bones vibrating in the night. Some cried from the misery of old memories, new fears, or the physical pain of sitting for hours on end. Another literally climbed the walls one night, waking me from a half sleep in his monkey impressions to turn off the emergency exit that shone like a nightlight.

Some didn't make it through the full experience, not content to walk the grounds (yes at times it felt like living in a retirement home), to listen to the thousands of birds singing in the fields and forest, not content to watch and see the myriad wildlife that lives at our feet, scarab beetles, spiders, and slugs that slowly feast on fallen apple flower petals. Often though, the hardship is easiest to recount, that is the first Noble Truth of Gautama the Buddha's teaching, life is lived in the realm of suffering and misery. Yet the moments of quiet, not labored by the birds or a distracted mind, the moment where truth simply rises up and fills you up, yet only recognized in the moment where it escapes forever, are beautiful. Freedom surprises you, so far I've only felt it on its way out the door.

By the time the tenth day came around (about 100 hours of meditation, a few pounds lighter, assured by the gentle, true, and reassuring words of Mr. Goenka) we all discovered again the world of words. We spoke softer, more carefully, and the silences deemed acceptable. Returning to Paris on the train I watched the rich green landscape roll by and I felt, quite unmetaphorically, my eyes were wide open. Even in the big bustling city itself I didn't get caught up in its chaos but sensed myself moving through in complete understanding of how I belonged to the moment and the movement swirling around me.

In this same peace I returned to my apartment in Avignon. My posters, my computer, my books, my bed, my clothes, my things, my things, my things! Suddenly a version of myself rose up and stood looking me in my wide open eyes. For ten days I cultivated my consciousness of being in the moment, of identifying only with the waves of ever changing sensations that washed through my mind and body. Now, these objects which for so long had been infused with my identity cried out to me with all their heart, that is, I felt that old attachment to them I had left behind. What can I do? Just remember that more than suffering, the world is the realm of change, annicca, this too will pass away as new things arise, to pass away again. This is the meaning, the experience.

Divertissement

Birch branch reaching out
Dangles in sky over the river
Scintillating leaves in the breeze
Dazzling green and silver
Fish scales in the sun

In a forest. . . .

More words from my journal.

May 4

Writing is very often difficult when we think nothing seems to come. Yet a writer, any artist who is true, can only try to frame what arises, take the the gems and the crap that falls into your hands and treat it for what it is before it passes on to something else.

I am in a pine forest in the Alpilles just south of Saint-Rémy, eating lunch between English lessons. Normally, that is to say up till about 2 months ago, I would be at La Grosse Galine with my ex-boyfriend's family I had tried to adopt, sharing lunch and circular conversation. I had hoped that even after the "I can't be your boyfriend anymore" talk that I would be able to continue sharing the Monday lunch hours with them while he was away at work. For whatever reason, maybe I was now a freeloader, someone felt awkward, I cannot say, but the last time I was there, A. in her delightful and well brought up manner uninvited me back for the next week's lunch. So subtly did she say it, insisting on forwarding my mail to Avignon because "it's so much more convenient for you," then inviting me to return at some unspecified future occasion, that only after I had returned to work did I realize I was not to return without explicit instructions to do so.

I at once admired her skillful coercion and detestd her for it. Betrayed! I thought, Do I not exist outside of the relationship I shared with their son and brother!? The short answer is yes, but to be fair to my adversaries, I should qualify what I have said.

I now know that it was a show of refined manners, not coercion, to ask me to kindly see the door. I cannot presume to be welcome in their home today just because I was yesterday. Whether knowingly or not, A. did me a favor, handing me two hours of every Monday to follow and saying, "Take back your life, go be yourself." Truthfully, I was never myself in their home. Being an individual who is probably quite far from self-actualized liberation, the surroundings of my environment play enormously on my spirit, pushing and pulling me. Where I had once stood a straight and true tree in a forest of my peers, the winds of this new climate started to bend me over. I sought not the light of truth or sustenance above my own head, but only to evade the gusting new windI encountered, bending down to lessen its force and hopefully I would not fracture. Now I feel freer, I have been handed back to myself and what a lovely chance I have to sit in the woods among the pine trees, themselves bent as they protect me from that same Mistral, whispering to each other, anicca, anicca, this too shall pass, this dance of wind will blow away and we will again stretch our limbs as we seek the sun above with clarity and strength as the old think trunks have learned to do.

Feeling pretty good about myself and the world, I gathered my things and went back down to the school to finish up my work. As I motored north to Avignon the wind pushed back determinedly, yet I made it home where I emptied my pockets, finding that my wallet had taken this chance to test the strength of my serenity by leaving my pocket unannounced. I scanned the road all the way back to Saint-Rémy where the boulanger had picked it up in front of her shop after I left, the Mistral scattering fifteen euros to the wind, what lucky person caught it? I was so thankful to have gained the time back I might have spent canceling credit cards and getting replacements that I celebrated with a pain au chocolat. Light hearted and relieved, my scooter chose this moment to ask me to slow down by refusing to go past half throttle. In the face of all these lemons I am rethinking my trip to Italy. New plan, walking. It took Julia sending four rapidfire emails to convince herself that it is indeed an excellent adventure. I think I will call this Rome-Avignon journey "The Schism Trail". Little to carry, no scooter to break, lots of time to savor. Life gives you lemons, you make limoncello.

Silence

This is mostly from my journal today.

May 3, 2009

Now in less than two months I will be on a trip with Julia through Italy and hopefully writing down the experience all the way. I have put a stay on any writing for a while as I have been experiencing many extraordinary things my life has been handing me. This is also convenient for someone whose natural state errs toward sloth when there isn't a fire under my butt, a blade above my head, a carrot on a string, or any number of motivational tactics based in fear, aversion, desire, or craving. It has also been hard to write because of my love for artifice in language, which I so often confuse for excellence or beauty or truth. Most of my writing I have taken very seriously is accompanied by the thesaurus, bricklike in my sea of thoughts as I try to express myself; I have tried to take my thoughts and stretch them onto a grander, more gilt framework. I have been going through a writers version of analysis paralysis, some call it writers' block, but I treat it more as a shedding of old habits that weigh me down, give me fear of words like "content," "style," "legitemacy." Many of the experiences I have been living through urge me toward the truth, what I see before my eyes. My old love for inflated, make-up painted words like tarted up prostitutes is a lot of deception, and far from the truth.

I am now sitting in the same spot where I started looking for an appartment in Avignon. The cafe in front of the Utopia Cinema, same table, same chair, same sense of calm quiet in the shadow of the towering Popes' Palace. A little over half a year from the last time. I am quieter now than I was last time, no longer trying to read the thoughts of my lover and in the process completely losing control of my own. What I am coming to realize in many ways (intellectually, experientially) is that I had attached myself to a person, wise, if at times unpracticed in compassion, who rather than indulging in his own experience of my uncontrolled emotions and reactions to them, held up a mirror, perhaps to guard himself but nonetheless illuminating my own distressed and anguished mind. In this sort of awakening to my own self, it should be noted that last time I was here there were four others, I am here sitting alone now. I don't know if this marks a full or a partial revolution in some cycle but I feel (emotionally) that this is a significant moment, undisclosing its future issue or incarnation, but vibrating there, calmly, giving no direction, only asking to be felt.

Avignon has woken up. The air is getting hot even though the wind still blows and some days the hoards of tourists move like crowds of fall leaves, collecting in piles at the gelato stands or blown up into chairs on terrace cafes, but all purposeless moved about by the winds of their own whims. Tomorrow I return to the enfants and their handlers and I'm happy because I can scoot up to the lac de la barrage in the Alpilles and watch the reflection of the peaks in the still water, sit among the buzzing myriad insects, and write down what happens.