#SOL16: The (un)Fixed

Parked (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

I. 

For the last few weeks I have been practicing Transcendental Meditation (TM). Last week I returned to the center for a check in and as I was viewing a talk given in 1971 by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, two things he said struck me as significant. First, he said, "Stagnancy does not belong to life." This stopped me. Ironic, yes. How difficult it has been to move beyond Rob's death and to reconcile, if that is even the act I am seeking, the loss of Rob in my life. When Rob died, I lost my very heart. I moved from living to not belonging to life. And these last few months I do function, but I do so with an ear out listening for the dead. What would Rob think? Oh, that was a song Rob loved. Here is a magazine he used to read.  How might he have responded to this or that?  I must remember to tell Rob... If only Rob were here... and so on.  I could not have made the life I made with Rob for nearly three decades and not feel the absolute amputation of heart and limb that happened with his death. 

I am missing parts of me. There are holes you could drive through. 

And it is this sense of absence, of holes that I am thinking about when earlier this morning, two friends, Renee and Michael, from New Hampshire stopped in for breakfast. After they left I was filled with a profound sadness as Rob was not here to meet with them. Years ago, Rob was the best man at their wedding. Rob, Michael and I all met in graduate school and we have such history together. This morning was the first time they have been here since Rob died. Michael stayed with us when Rob first came home from the hospital in mid-February during the first few days of Hospice care, but he and Renee have not been here since Rob's death and their presence and then departure echoes Rob's absence. Honestly, the whole living world echoes Rob's absence and my loneliness.


II.

It seems that since I listed all the things I am angry about I have not been able to stop crying. If I'm awake for 16 hours in a day, at least half of it has been spent sobbing. It's like that list somehow opened a faucet to where my heart once beat and out flows buckets of tears. ("Got all them buckets coming out of my ears/Buckets of moonbeams in my hand...") And for each moment in the day I am not crying, I can feel the press of more tears that are merely a breath away. The triggers are endless. 

If the natural inclination of life is flow, movement, I wondered if grief gives rise to stress when a body refuses to move. Is this emotional stagnation I feel a part of grief? Is grief its source--if such complexity can have a source? Or is the world of bereavement simple?  Input. Output. As I write this I am reminded of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a collection of essays that Rob first gave me to read years and years ago and if I remember correctly it was a book that he and Michael had read for a class. In the essay, The Fixed, she writes,

“I want out of this still air. What street-corner vendor wound the key on the backs of tin soldiers and abandoned them to the sidewalk, and crashings over the curb? Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal, who lay a bullock on a woodpile and begged Baal to consume it: “Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.” Cry aloud. It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of its mindlessness. The fixed is a Mason jar, and we can’t beat it open...The fixed is the world without fire- dead flint, dead tinder, and nowhere a spark. It is motion without direction, force without power, the aimless procession of caterpillars round the rim of a vase, and I hate it because at any moment I myself might step to that charmed and glistening thread" (pp.68-69).

And that is how I feel when I push up against the grief.  Fixed.  A mason jar you can't beat open. And I wonder will I ever feel alright?  Will I ever feel like the confident me I used to be?

III.

Towards the end of the talk, the Maharishi spoke about the use of the mantra during the meditation to gently return attention when the mind drifts. He said, "It just takes a whisper until that whisper goes away." I puzzled over that statement for a few days.  I understood it with regard to the mantra and how thinking the mantra is mostly about brief intention. It need not be mechanized and overt. Earlier a collection of essays by the Maharishi, I read, "...the capacity of subtle experience is rusted, the machinery is not used" (p. 101, from here) and I laughed aloud. How true that is for me. 

Being present is largely about subtlety--about letting a place happen to you. In Kathleen Norris's  wonderful, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, she quotes a monk who says, "You have only to let a place happen to you...the loneliness, the silence, the poverty, the futility, indeed the silliness of your life." 

Over-attention isn't a way through the grief.  Letting a place happen is where my heart, though faint, beats. It is where I must (un)learn to stand. 

I feel this centering power each day as I walk. Stepping foot after foot roots me to earth, to the present, to where grief washes over me and my footing is so solid, the earth so kind, that my movements with grief allow it to wash over me. Somedays, I move to feel whole.

The Shallow Breath of Standards: Seeing Beyond Things

My friend, Ethel's husband, Mark, loaned me a book today: The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life (John Daido Loori).  I started reading it and could not put it down. Early in the text, Loori describes an exercise he did that legendary photographer and teacher Minor White  provided.

Venture into a landscape without expectations. Let your subject find you. When you approach it, you will feel resonance, a sense of recognition. If, when you move away, the resonance fades, or it gets stronger as you approach, you'll know you have found your subject. Sit with your subject and wait for your presence to be acknowledged. Don't try to make a photograph, but let your intuition indicate the right moment to release the shutter. If, after you've made an exposure, you feel a sense of completion, bow and let go of the subject and your connection to it. Otherwise, continue photographing until you feel the process is complete.

Well, now that exercise is pretty clear to me as a photographer and one I anticipate trying this weekend.  I have experienced that odd exchange of energy between myself and my subject when I am in such a zone. It's as if my finger on the shutter and my eye in the viewfinder are no longer limited to my body, but somehow are deeply connected to the subject, located, if you will, outside of time and space.  What is central to these moments out of time, is the state of not knowing that defines how I see.  Certainty has no voice in these dramas. It is pure spirit.

This zen reading and thinking about art, reminds me a lot of what it means to be a teacher and how critical it is to not know, perhaps more so in this time of false certainty. Like my finger on the shutter and eye in the view finder, the space that is made in a classroom with students is not defined by the physical realities of walls, floor, or ceiling.  Something far grander is composed in these learning landscapes--something akin to what Maxine Greene labels as wide-awakeness.

Greene (2008) writes:

To open spaces for learning is to give learners a sense of absence, of open questions lacking answers, of darkness unexplained. If people respond to all of this with a blank disinterest, they are, often without realizing it, acquiescing in the “given,” the fixed, the unchangeable. (LEARNing Landscapes, 1, 3, p. 18).

Formal educational standards are the "given, the fixed, the unchangeable."   I have always been graced with students willing to wander into that unexplained darkness and a deep desire to venture along.  Perhaps that is why I find the standards movement to be at best a shallow breath, and at worse an impediment to all breath.  The use of educational standards assumes a decontextualized world where there is something called "the student" and a separate something called "the teacher".  The sad truth though is that this student can never be your subject, nor one whose presence resonates. Likewise,  "the teacher" can never venture into a landscape without expectations.  Such exercises are folly or in these days, perhaps even seen as sinister.

The given. The fixed. The unchangeable.

My exercise for myself this week is to find some darkness--an absence and reclaim my voice; to be truthful, and to stand against the certainty that is likely to doom us.  

What is Written. Image by M.A. Reilly. Tuscany, 2009.

I wish you, dear reader, an educational landscape sans expectations.