My Gorgeous Somewhere

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.

Love and Light

Found book title: CB Talk for Goodbye.

I’m 40 years old. Time to stop acting like a cheerleader and simply act like a leader.

I’ve decided to write poems that people can understand. Regular people, not just poet-people.

One year ago on Facebook, I wrote: If I started talking about love and light and peace and healing, would that freak you out?

Handwritten sign posted in neighbor’s yard: Pick up after your dog or he/she might get shot.

The world is full of what you believe it is full of.

I am finally learning what it means to see everything and everyone as a teacher.

T-shirt idea: Your past is not my present.

There’s a pillow moving all around in the bedroom. I suspect there’s a dog under it.

Morning in Walla Walla: 4th Avenue is alive with horses.

The Larger Body

Over the course of my lifetime, I have learned and re-learned the lesson of what it feels like to be treated like trash, like something disposable. I am trying to do something with that feeling and its attendant grief. I find myself falling into the misguided desire to turn this feeling, which I need to simply sit with, into doing something productive.

I entered my teen and adult years absolutely terrified everyone was going to leave me.

I have this terrible, sinking feeling that we’ve learned to see one another as commodities. That we pick people the way we might select a bar of soap or a box of cookies and that we then expect perfection from the experience. If someone doesn’t live up to the expectation imposed on a commodity—providing exactly what they want, nothing more or less or unexpected—then we cast them aside, ignore them, degrade them, tell some lie that’s akin to “It’s not you, it’s me” and move on to any of the other 6 billion human commodities this world has to choose from.

Today, I’ve officially lost one of the deepest, most meaningful friendships I have ever had in my life, one that was years in the making. Not to death or a big move that’s created physical distance. Not to a huge blowout or anything I can easily look to for an explanation. There have been smaller losses, too, which serve to counterpoint the real loss, the central loss, the way rivulets feed into a stream.

If I were to make a map of losses, each loss constituting one circle drawn on a sheet of paper, they would be as plentiful as lily pads at Juanita Beach Park in the middle of summer, or as balloons at a privileged child’s birthday party. I could skip over the circles with my index and middle finger in feigned play that masks the pain. I could skip all the way back to the largest circle of all, a loss I didn’t expect to survive: that of my father.

But he died, he died, I tell myself. He didn’t choose to leave. Others have chosen, the way they might, without giving it a second thought, move on from a Facebook profile, or unsubscribe from an RSS feed.

Because I lost my father so young, I entered my teen and adult years absolutely terrified everyone was going to leave me. So I left them before they could go. I got the hell out of there while the getting was good. I dated people and broke it off. I even married one person and broke it off. At transition points—such as graduation from high school and college—I was the one who never wrote my friends at their new addresses, the one who never called, the one who dropped postcards I received into the recycling bin and later, if pressed, said, “You sent a card? I don’t think I got it.” I was also the one who did not speak to my mother for nine months before she died.

I’ve learned the hard way that this way—the way of leaving, of getting out, of protecting myself against what I think might happen if I stay (abandonment, death)—is not the way. I’ve spent half my life learning this lesson. I’ve also learned another lesson, which is to hold onto those I love. To just hold on. As I’ve learned this lesson, I’ve also learned to say words like “I love you” and “I care for you” and “I am here for you.”

I realize that I now have an even bigger lesson to learn, which is that I must stay with this stance and attitude, one of holding on, even as others are still caught in a mode of letting go, including letting go of me. I won’t go back to letting go first in order to protect myself. If I care for you, I care for you. If I love you, I love you. If I am there for you, I am there for you. I can’t control how anyone else behaves, and I can’t make their choices for them. I can only control my own behavior and choices. I won’t turn away from others out of fear of being rejected, even if that means there are times when I will, in fact, experience rejection, not just worry it’s coming.

Perhaps I am not trash after all. I’d rather think of myself as recyclable material. My love, my devotion, my desire to connect—these are aspects of my character that cannot be thrown away, not by anyone. They remain, even through the hurt and suffering, and they continue to have a place in the world. In this way, they continue to help me find my way.

Making Room for Attention

I shouldn’t have to do this for attention—sequester myself in the bedroom with my laptop. But that’s precisely what I’m doing. When I’m home alone, following my day as it unfolds, I can pay attention in the proper way, reaching an almost meditative state and in fact moving in and out of formal meditation several times.

I will make my way to him the way a narrative always makes its way to the next shift in plot.

The weekends change all that. For two days, there’s a noticeable shift in energy as another person, namely my husband, moves through the house with me. Though he’s literally sharing the same space as me, we are not in the same space. That is to say he hasn’t reached a point in his life where introspection seems not only healthy but necessary.

He’s not doing anything disruptive, mind you. Our energies simply aren’t in alignment. I can feel that fact when I’m in the same room with him. Susan Zwinger, a poet and writer of place, says there are “57 or so” ways we get information into our bodies. Our senses, according to Zwinger, include electromagnetism, barometric pressure, humidity and temperature (to which, as a former Seattle dweller, I would definitely add light, or lack thereof). Zwinger challenges the writers she works with to move beyond the five conventionally recognized senses and incorporate the entire suite of senses into their lives and work.

I don’t know what I am picking up on, exactly, that has sent me into my own room today, where I can write and think and pay attention without feeling divided between where I’m currently at and where my husband’s currently at. Part of me wants to drop everything and go to him, enter into his way of being, which is largely about doing things in the world, not being in the world.

For now, I continue to sit here, staring out my window at two blooming shrubs whose genus I don’t even know. Zwinger would advise me to find out what the shrubs are, to push for specificity with regard to any element that enters my writing. As she says, you will never invite readers into your story without concrete details, ones they can relate to.

“Write for the person who has never been off the canyon,” she advises.

Zwinger also says journaling is “the mind made visible.” I don’t journal, exactly, other than keeping lists. Nothing like Zwinger’s artful Technicolor notebooks whose pages are filled with facts, drawings, watercolors, clippings and other information she calls on when she sits down to work on her books.

I do write, however. I have no idea if writing makes my mind visible, to me or anyone else. I like to think writing is a way of planting a marker, like a kairn, one that signals, “On this small and seemingly insignificant day, I was here. I took part. I belonged to the world.” Increasingly, I hope my writing also lets people in—either into my life or into some aspect of their own lives.

Now the sun is moving through the room, sneaking up on my feet. My dog sits next to me. She’s a faithful companion when I write. When I’m not writing, her new thing is running up to me from across the room, licking my ankle once, and then running away. I have no idea what that’s about. Maybe it’s her kairn, her way of noting that she’s here, she’s taking part, she belongs. Maybe it’s her way of saying a repeated thank you to me for saving her life.

At some point, I will leave my room. A feeling will stir inside me, like a little storm that passes through a small, nameless town on a summer day. Who knows which of my 57 senses will trigger the stirring. It will not only move through me, but also move me: I will rise from my desk and pull the bedroom door toward my body, just enough to see my husband sitting in a chair we call “Mr. Comfy.” He might be coding on his laptop or even asleep, his legs propped up on the oversized ottoman, Mr. Comfy leaning so far back it looks like it’s about to careen into the living room wall.

I will make my way to him the way a narrative always makes its way to the next shift in plot. I might brush my hand on his cheek, or do nothing but watch him. That’s when he will be included in my practice of attention. In that moment, we will breathe in, one shared breath, the whole world breathing with us—both the parts we can name and the parts that, at least for now, remain nameless.