Month: September 2011

The Edge

Today, we saw the edge of a controlled burn, red flames against char.

Today in Dayton, pieces of charred wheat fell from the sky, thin as paper, dark as night.

Hanford joke: The waste is a terrible thing to mind.

I believe the land wishes it could talk, and I believe it speaks through us if we let it.

Today, the sun comes and goes like a thought never quite completed. (Or a lover always hurrying away to be with anyone but you.)

What I feel when I read poems is something like love—a waterfall suddenly inside me, every drop longing for the source which brought it into being, longing for the great, ordinary mind that saw fit to put those words on the page.

Offered today on the Walla Walla Freecycle list: A bag full of UNUSED condoms.

Our dog has informed us that her new nickname is Nom Chompsky. 

Nom Chompsky says: You never need an argument for the use of peanut butter, you need an argument against it. 

Nom Chompsky says: Unlimited use of peanut butter has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by Nom Chompsky. 

Nom Chompsky says: You don’t get to be a respected intellectual by uttering truisms with a mouth full of peanut butter.

Those who are exceptional are not the gifted; they are the gift.

Meditation without proper form is merely breathing. Poetry without proper form is merely prose.

Time is different out here. I can’t keep up with anyone, let alone who I was trying to be.

Just misread Fun with Homophones as Fun with Homophobes.

I think I might be done with Facebook.

Being (mostly) inactive on Facebook for the past week has taught me nothing about my relationship with Facebook. It has, however, given me time to think about my relationship with my work, my writing, my spirituality, and even my life. It’s amazing what emerges when we don’t fill every available moment with something, with anything, that keeps us from fully thinking and feeling.

Instead of the option that allows users to omit “Games” their friends play, we should have the option of omitting “Head Games” our friends play.

I might not be able to make a living here, but I can certainly make a life here. That’s the beauty of this place, the beauty and the wonder of it.

When a trapdoor closes, an actual door opens.

Stop trading what you have for what you want.

I’ve lost my will to die.

For a long time, I thought I was Hindemith, but it turns out I am Satie.

Poetry shouldn’t explain anything. It should explain everything.

The best advice my mother ever gave me was, Don’t step in shit. The second-best advice she ever gave me was, Don’t touch a dog on the butt.

This town is all ears and mouths.

I am 819 words into this essay, and I forgot the point I am trying to make.

Last night I dreamed your name meant, Rub cheese all over your throat and mouth.

Last night I dreamed your name meant, Paint a beehive automotive white and wear it like a lampshade on your head.

Last night I dreamed your name meant, Be a skull that roaches enter through the eye sockets.

For me, the key to figuring out what to say to adults was figuring out what to say to children.

I am a force. A weak force, like a potato battery, but still a force.

One year. One open heart. Boom. Starts now.

Sometimes we don’t have room for love. We have to make room.

I’ve never been one to follow paths. Instead, I build them.

Sometimes we have to be erased to be redrawn.

For me, poetry is more about understanding than aesthetics.

Dyslexia: A label created by people who don’t understand dyslexia.

I long for the land in rural areas and the people in urban areas.

I love therefore I am.

What I’m saying is that Eastern Washington is an expression of human existence, really, in the landscape. — Dana Guthrie Martin, in a voice mail to Andre Tan dated Jan. 23, 2011

More on Eastern Washington: You feel something strange about your existence and your safety, out here, but it’s also quite beautiful. And I really think that’s the way life is. — Dana Guthrie Martin, in a voice mail to Andre Tan dated Jan. 23, 2011

There are only a few important things to say. That’s why people who say only important things tend to repeat themselves.

Two Selves

I meditated for a couple of hours this morning after reading selections from Essential Zen. At first, there was mostly open space in the meditation, punctuated by thoughts I noticed as they made their way in and out of my mind. If I were to compare this particular meditation to a landscape, it would be the scrubby terrain of Eastern Washington, where there’s not much to speak of, not much to notice, until—suddenly—a tree. And so you notice the tree, then move on.

I am now coming to understand that self and other are both inside me. They are both self.

The thoughts that slid past like trees included not taking more than I need, not expecting more than I should, and living in harmony with all the sentience surrounding me.

Then I had another level of experience, not thought-based but rather image-based. In the image, I split off from myself, so that I was two selves. The first self was able to simply be who I am, to feel comfortable and free in my existence. The second self was like the first in all ways, with one distinct difference: She was conscious of herself. This led her to go around apologizing for the first self’s behavior, to loathe the first self—even as she was, in fact, identical to the first self. This means the second self was also engaged in self-loathing.

Self and other have always played a strong role in my life, my thinking and my writing. I never really understood the draw to this duality until I learned I was dyslexic. Dyslexia is not just about reading text—it’s about reading the world. In my opinion, experts and advocates are so focused (with good reason) on teaching dyslexic children and adults to read that they don’t spend enough time focusing on the unique, often dualistic, world those who are dyslexic inhabit off the page.

Dyslexics can perceive the world as differently as we perceive written language. Just as the dyslexic can misread a passage, in turn creating an entirely new text from that passage, we can also read the world in multiple ways, with multiple orientations—some of which others might never perceive or understand. On top of this, we also learn to adopt different minds and bodies depending on the situation. We learn early that we have to be the quiet child, the focused child, the still child—at school, in social situations and often at home as well. But we retain our essence, that other self who never leaves us and is always by our side.

I am now coming to understand that self and other are both inside me. They are both self. Just as self and other are both outside me. They are both other. When I think of self and other, I might be thinking of that duality I carry within, or I might be thinking of the dualities that others, in their own ways, carry within them. But I am not always, and I suspect I am rarely, thinking about self and other in the traditional sense of there being a single, inflexible, fixed self and then everything that falls outside that single, inflexible, fixed self.

As I learn to better attend to the self and other I carry inside me, I hope my second self will be more at ease with my first self, and vice versa. Both might learn to understand and respect their respective self/other. In this process, I might come to meet those I once called “other” in a new light, inside the deepening understanding that everything—and in that I include everyone—I label as other really has something to do with me and cannot be disconnected from me, nor me from everything.

To turn on anyone else in judgment, to create a wall between them and me, will come to seem as unreasonable as the self-betrayal illustrated in today’s meditation. I wish I’d had closure on that image, but instead the scene grew fuzzy and dissipated, my two selves across the room from one another, the first sitting on the ground playing, the second scowling and crossing her arms.

As the image moved farther away, my two selves began to resemble trees. I think now about the idea of souls inhabiting trees until they find atonement. Maybe in some other reality that’s where my selves are: inside trees, waiting.

This is what I sit with, what I pay attention to. I am not sure which of my selves is writing this post, or if both selves are working together. For now, I (whoever the communicating “I” is) embrace them both, love them both and hope they will both learn to embrace and love the world in all its non-otherness.

Attention

The word attention gets a lot of play in the context of aspiration. We seem to want to individually and collectively achieve an unflappable state of “paying attention,” often joining the term with other aspirations, such as mindfulness, gratitude and intention.

I don’t like to call my forms of attention a ‘deficit,’ because that implies a lack, a less than.

Attention also happens to be a charged, and even controversial, word in many respects. An example that comes to the forefront is the way it’s been used in the diagnosis of children and adults who are deemed to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. ADHD seems to be one form of attention we want people to steer clear of, regardless of their age.

As I did some journaling around the question of attention today, the word “choice” appeared over and over. “Is the attention my choice,” I wrote in the upper-right corner of a hot-pink lined page. I also wrote “forced or given” coupled—just below the words—with the heaviest underline my Pilot Precise Grip Extra Fine tip could muster.

Many people who are dyslexic have differences in attention when compared with the norm. Some of us carry the dual diagnosis of dyslexia and ADHD. As an accompaniment to my recent dyslexia diagnosis, I have a provisional diagnosis of ADHD with overfocus, which means I can (and often do) go hours on end working away at something that’s captured my attention.

I also am able to take in a great deal of information all at once, and the sensory input / processing / synthesizing can sometimes be overwhelming, even draining. I actually find this aspect of my attention quite useful, however, as I pull seemingly disparate elements into my writing, in particular my poetry.

I don’t like to call my forms of attention a “deficit,” because that implies a lack, a less than, a “should aspire to be something else”—something feathering the perimeter of what’s considered normal. Instead, I like to refer to my dominant forms of attention as “focused attention” (notice I’ve dropped the “over-” prefix) and “wide,” or “roaming,” attention.

That’s where I am at with it right now, that is. Next year, or even next week, I might conceive of my attention in a new way.

I think “choice” and “force” come up for me when considering what attention is, and how it makes me feel, because I am often asked to perceive the world like other people: to think like them, to feel like them, to work like them, to learn and discover and believe like them. In short, I am asked to have forms of attention that are, or at least seem, congruous with theirs. I feel as if I am being asked to enter into a foreign way of paying attention at the expense of my own ways.

Given my ways of paying attention, my definition of attention will most likely differ from that of others. I don’t necessarily want to change the fundamental ways in which I filter and experience the world. I will probably never aspire to living in a way that depends on focused, central-task attention which neither verges on being “too invested” on the central task nor allows too many “tangential” elements in that could threaten that central task.

Still, my core definition of attention might have something in common with other people’s: something to do with noticing, with letting in, with experiencing, with using all “57 or so” senses in any encounter. Something to do with letting others in, letting the self in, letting mystery in, letting awe in.

My definition also includes staying with something, whatever that something happens to be at the moment, in the connection and expansion of moments: focusing like a camera lens on what’s in front of us, behind us, under us and above us. Focusing on each other and on ourselves.

In a nutshell, my definition of attention, then, seems to center on two seemingly contrary elements: focusing and letting in. I guess that’s in precise alignment with the focused and roaming forms of attention I’ve been blessed with and sometimes challenged by. Fancy that.