| aphrodite's garden volume 10 part 1 - 1989 january-february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
20th January 1989 Vancouver Airport Alarm BEEP-BEEP very loud it seemed at five. Jumped up with sweat chill at the back of my neck. Last night I watched LA Law with Laiwan. "She gets to sit on him and suck his finger." "Do you do that?" "Yup." Lay down sore it seemed on account of Rob. When I called it up short my body sighed yes. Working this week moving my garden, Tuesday in heavy rain, Wednesday in open light, seeing him at a distance working too, I liked and wanted him. Why. Because I could see him. His height is beautiful. Laiwan was in the bath. I sat on the floor in the hall and talked to her. It was the closest we'd come and she initiated it. It's seven in the airport cafeteria. The tables have filled. I loved coming onto Hastings in the fresh air. Credit Union clock said 5:26. Waiting for the first 20 Granville. There was a real woman, big pocked nose, creased brown mug, a bunch of books stuck in the side pocket, long grey ponytail, stride, loafers. Behind me the stupid middle-Canadian mothers, "We hit him in the pocketbook, right where it hurts." Berkeley 23rd Monday [At Nyingma doing a chanting retreat] Slow. Take refuge in the black man who stands in the North Gate block. Smile, he said. When I saw his face I didn't take it badly. Next day he was aiming a purple crystal at a bird. He stands there a door up from Schuyler's. Today the grand trees are standing in falling water - ribbony eucalyptus, many kinds of pine. Bells from the tower tell the condition of the air. Today muffled. I dreamed in this restless night: the home place converted to a residence planet, look out the port see metal-clad depth after depth of rooms. The road a corridor and the last room occupied by people who've come since we were there last - though maybe the red dog has passed on. Saturday's afternoon nap I saw a flashed wall graffiti, something like careful it's dangerous. On the first afternoon a man's head seemed to acknowledge me. What's with me. Rob though I hadn't wanted. (Look again.) Laiwan's quality. When I buzzed the forehead a whole direction for the garden shed. I asked to see what I see in people, knowing it and in a relation to what they'd want to be. That other stopped point: "subject dealing with its object is like a dream." In chanting feeling so much the difference between energy and fatigue. 24 I go on the roof of a barn to pee, at the far end among grass wisps. See they've bulldozed a road through the gully, to join a street on the far side that used to be unreachable, ie it's joined towns. There are four of us fooling around, I play with the man whose wife is somewhere else. It becomes a passion (as if the story says so). His chest skin. We're singing rapturously. It's like a Mozart duet. "It's classical" he says. Inference, his wife listens to something else. She arrives and I talk to her. "I liked it, whenever he was around." She's big and fair. She has her own interests, something about apples that can be shown in categories according to their bins. "Winesap going into --- with an aftertaste of ----." In a decrepit toilet listening to the group from next door coming home singing the Internationale. A man comes in, like an old Communist. He's joking and talking. I get shit on my dress. When I leave I pick out some hanks of white hair. Are you in the hairdressing business? His implication is they're from corpses. No it's for the plants I say. On the road there's a deep ditch with water kept clean by giant snails. I jump in and I wash off my dress (it's white net) thinking why can't I have a substantial artist man like Terry. The [prayer] wheels strobe a pulse at the chest. What do they say. They're like the life in the body having to keep working without ever stopping. The flags are something different. They stood with their colors folded in the mist like tall beings. Yesterday I saw a breeze for the first time lift one to show its sheet of writing. To have known it at the time would have been the passionate love. I'm not only the solid abandoned wife but when I'm abandoned I am. - Schuyler's coffee shop I'm not accepting the ordeal, which gives me a separate stress. Often thinking of the week at [the zen retreat at] Cultus Lake, because I accepted that ordeal and got to something good. What's different about this one. I don't know. I don't believe any of them know anything. That by itself doesn't mean the ordeal doesn't work. Maybe it does - maybe it needs a presence. Cultural Buddhism. 'The tradition' is like a museum and is the puja a sacrifice of our present to the past? So if I were to bring eucalyptus branches it would be accurate. Buying flowers means I'm sacrificing someone else's time? Orchid and pine. Sacrificing a cultivated perception. And free California. "When he died he went into everything." What does that? It's a feast of sound, in a way. Now that I come to die is a catalog. "Equanimity is like the level earth." Pictures of the state. It's a long time from yesterday. The feast of hearing stopped. Stopped with a silence the men hadn't the sense to hold. So beautiful a silence full of tremour. I'm slow and shaky but with the nervous importance of ritual. Many moments of the one thing. The two women who were in it like devoted sex. The one behind me who came last night in her Tibetan colors, light aqua and orange red, would sit against the wall and float her breath through her body in a way to open it most to the buzzing of the others' vowels. I was carefully learning from her, and at two when there were few of us left we were making a space together that was cream velvet, her voice and mine showing separate ends but one thing in the body, amazing. The fine standing shiver across the back. The goddess wife with her exquisite face tipped up burning with commitment. Oh I liked it when she seized the men's numbing pace and slowed it to where she could feel it most. She was ringing so strongly I jumped in beside her with my best. Is it a third? - the note that brings the others' most into the hearing. There was a crossing harmony that was too mechanical, I got to hate its church tones going round and round. A few woman did something atonal I think, just for one note. That was good again and again because every time the note had to be reached for and defended. There were vigorous women singers who grated by their insensitivity. The bearded tall Dutchwoman had a, what, an unpleasant tight unspreading sound - a yell, which is projectile. The Brazilian was beating away energetically as if to insist by / on her energy. There was a large man with a big head who sat with a curved mouth and then later was shaking with laughter. I wondered if he was laughing at the room full of people devoutly repeating Vajra Guru paid ma CD / o-oh oom-aye ya-hoo. But then he began chanting again in a way I recognized, the voice pours out surprisingly strong with individual joy released. The four o'clock break yesterday was the stonedest. I realized by the way I was walking across the concrete stairs and climbing the steps that I was crossed into another condition. I just wanted to sit in the sun's heat hearing the great roaring texture of the street seeing patterned red through my eyelids and feeling my body quake. Thinking of Joyce saying Tibetan Buddhism is like acid. Cold like acid. Not "sit in sun's heat" - be skinned in sun's heat. What is the building saying. What is the route that has brought these people. A verging confident gentle curiosity. Where does this city get so much dreamy music. KDFC. When it's over the ordeal is gone out of it, it becomes something else. So ordeal means dread of the time still to come. Quite unheavenly people walking past downhill in this street in heaven. They look worn and drab. The light has a pale frail quality and it isn't getting to them. I got to love the wheels. Sitting with the fairy woman after, I heard monks far away chanting on two notes - a host of whispers and rustles from the back corner. Oh attention. Fri morning So what is it about Eric. My father screaming at Annabel. I'm amazed, what does he think he has to do with her. He looks quite young and he's really screaming, he's at an angle down from his mouth. I yell back that he's not worthy of her. Something about a news service editor or publishing boss having got married to somebody he knew a long time. His nose. In the chant I had already picked him to dislike. I kept seeing his long sharp nose in the small room. Keeping my eyes closed not to have to see him. "Complacent mediocrity." But it's more than that. Joan O'Brien. A self-hypnotizing tone. Haven't got to the end of it. He's ugly. Changed my mind about Michael by starting to see him as being there. Pink, feeling something. Grateful to laugh. And wow, when he was beginning to pontificate and a cough jumped out of my throat he actually heard it and stopped and listened to it again. Eric is ugly, how. The way he moves. I saw how importantly he stepped from the lobby onto the stairs. Scraggle of his unnourished hair. Smallness of his eyes. Malevolent German dwarf. Beady. Criminal maybe. It could be a secret that's freaking me. Sat? 8th Then he wasn't ugly and didn't preach. Want to say - the moment I turned to the tall woman to ask about an iron and her face was taking me in as if with its whole surface. Dreamed a cabin with firelight where I lived with a man like Jim Campbell. It's not right to say that. What, then. Weak worn out and disappointed. "Are you abandoning us next week?" [to Michael] (Am I getting sick?) I did something I've never done before. I decided to feel into the (slowed down, seeing when I want, a passing sound came in, fine delicate shifts and openings, the head turned as sweetly as if a branch moved) pitch of escape I felt when Christina was telling half a page of textbook insight. I started to shake from the solar and went on like a washing machine on spin. Couldn't do it now, had to be really loosed and was. It wasn't an emotion but ah - if that's what the solar clamps down. Also I did notice what it was politically and wondered whether it was reliable. Then Eric made a sly move when he had a chance and I had to rally up unhurt, and did. And then he said it would be only him next week. It meant: only the school kids (oh I'm wanting Joyce), the horrible church kids, no bright soft curious seeing eyes. (He said "Then you have to start the fire." Silence. "Yuh!") Thinking of the (self portraits of artists, the paintings with people in them that have live eyes) skinny bum and accent more American than Americans, either I have to feel them or I have to feel the hard hold of not feeling them. January institution. It's like that. A desk in the foyer. Food. [eavesdropping] "Ich fühl mich reif, als Frau. Verstehs' dass? Du suchst für eine Liebe. Du musst nur ehrlich sein. Sei mal zufrieden. Dein' Korper, dein' Gefuhl. Es hangt alles von dier. Fang' an, ich hab' nicht die ganze Nacht zeit. Klag' nicht uber dich selbst. Zo'st ein kleines Kind. Kanst es nich sagen? Helen, du bist nicht hier. Sag' doch was los ist, sag' was willst du von mier." Elfreda - was the picture of the long neck and held face - I didn't know Elfreda was the beautiful one - who stands on a pillar of confidence. Anguish turned to the right and stood on the incapable stick. Mütterlich, ja ich unterstütz dich dass du ein' anderes Mensch bist. Es ist besser fur mich dass ich geben kann. Schutz haben, dass ist Kind. Du musst nur kucken, ist es mehr wie ein Freund, ist es mehr ..., wie ist dies gefuhl? Ausspricht und doch weiter arbeitest. Ich bin immer wieder durch gebrochen. In der Arbeit höhl dich los - es ist hier erlaubt. Genau zo ist es, dass nen' ich Verantwortung, ja. Wo war ich, allein, zuhause - dass ist gut, du fängst an. Can you feel them both? Alles was in mir dringt, dass erlaub' ich jetzt. Lauf' nicht davon. Ich will 'raus von dies Dreck. Ich war so klein und zart - da hab' ich mein' einziges Liebe. Brutalitat und Hersche. Dass ich mein Selbst finde. Grosse Liebe für dich selbst, dass ist wichtig. Sunday Alison said he first knew that baby going by when it was about so big - two centimeters. "I told her it was a girl. I said, 'You're pregnant.'" Five years, he says. The pigeons, Ruby with rhubarb-red feet and a speckle on the wings, Emerald with more green on the neck, white bars on the wings. "You see that tree there? Hummingbirds live in the top of it." He has wide gaps between his big white teeth, lives in his hood and moved across the street into the sun. Up there the pines and eucalyptus. My heart's beating in the solar plex, trembling. Last night was lonely and I went to German speakers in the kitchen. France crying brought tears without sadness. "I am afraid of next week, I want to change but I am afraid." (I said, "Where are you feeling it?" "In my buh-dy?") "You don't have to think of next week, you don't have to change, all you have to do is feel it where it is in your body. Every time you get scared that's all you have to do." "I feel like you don't need anybody. You know how to take care of yourself. You know how to feel." -Was it alright to instruct if I had unsad tears on my face? The coffee is so good. The ice cream was so good. I've been leaving two-thirds of my plate. Noticing it was the moisture in the apple sauce I was after. "I don't know what it means but it's utterly welcome." The tremour. But still on the hills a clamp in the forehead, a fierce hand on the notebook. The music playing in the s.p. If that's what it's for why does it harden at night. Seeing beautiful eyes. [Berkeley botanical garden: California bay, redshanks, wooly blue-curls, salvia spathacea, salvia sonomensis, greenstem ceanothus, coulter pine, patulla pine, China rose arctostaphylos hookeri, canescans, crustacea, uva-ursi, pilosula, myrtifolia, stanfordiana, andersonii, pecoensis, manzanita chaparral - vertical foliage, burls, ground or below, even spacing by toxins and extensive roots "manzanitas, ceanothus, chamise, redshanks, toyon, and sugar bush" 3-6', urnshaped, small hard evergreen leaves, soils poor often rocky, sharp, hot dry summers, wet mild winters chamise is greasewood] Monday At night in class woke with heat pouring from the solar like the fine rays off a chrome glint. Go into the heavy dark sinking energy. Crying for the damagedness I've felt. I never have before cried for body's sake. Light rising bright - a brightness like the vapour. In the dark to mend or rest. No I don't have to face him three times a day. - The morning long ago, also the garden (cried because I have a job). Working. 1. I want to see Odiyan 2. I want to see Rinpoche because I want to see someone who can. The oddness of so useful a belief in tradition. "Rinpoche kept urging us to work at our peak all the time." The self has practiced ways of presenting itself with gestures and language so it will communicate confidence, accomplishment and knowledge. To see how fear of failure inclines us to ignore our situation. When we are less oriented toward seeing the job done than we are toward being the one who succeeds, success and failure don't give useful feedback. To query without getting caught in language, we have to really want to know, almost desperately. I could feel my own fear of teaching. What did I really know that I could trust completely? The cleanest course I have ever taught. It does not promote any particular view at all, but penetrates to our deepest issues. Learned to work together, overcome obstacles, use combined energy, to accomplish unexpected. Tarthang Tulku 1984 Knowledge of freedom Dharma Publishing Longchempa You are the eyes of the world Snow Lion Publishing Longchenpa and Herbert Guenther Kindly bent to ease us Dharma Publishing How was it in the small buried room, red-lit and so profoundly humming into my flesh. Moments gasping as if I'd cut off my breath, waking and gasping. Something deeper would happen it seemed after thoughts had wandered me away to the right, sort of ribbony. I'd have to float right away with them. What was it that did happen - I'm not sure I remember - maybe the hum penetrated more - I thought it was 90 minutes, it was twice that, dark when I came up. Sudden noises are gashes in the solar. Here in the kitchen it's the refrigerator purring into my sex. Enduring Jack's talk yesterday, after the chant had made me shake. I said I would keenly study what it is to endure like that. I saw - oh how responsive and tender body is, much more than warrior-mind is accounting. I don't know whether defense is necessary, it will be useful to know. Yest felt myself breathing with my back! -
Weds Some days ago going to the former country solitary retreat ('Valhalla'). As other times in dreams finding it partly derelict with a derelict man sleeping in it. Last night a letter from my mother has in it scraps of paper with brilliant crayon drawings and some maybe childish writing, a few sort of drawn words. I think she's sent some of mine, they're like fall color trees, orange, red, thick and waxy. But I realize pleased that they're hers, she late as this is learning to draw and see with pleasure. Thursday Two children left behind by a Chinese mother. A station platform where she or they are sleeping in a van or screaming for food while I'm further down the platform in another car or a hotel bed. A train coming. How to get the children dressed and into the train, how to stop the train. It goes past but it was just a van full of people. I go off and do other things though they may be screaming and are left alone all day. When I come for them they're dead asleep on two levels with their heads drooped down, but they're wide awake the moment I look at them. A system of surveillance with many connections. A former wife. A woman looking at and loving her mother. Clothes in the mirror. Bulgaria having a nuclear alert. At the end I'm driving from the right side and it's easier to steer and see around the kids in the middle but I have to ask the one on the left to signal. I think the shift isn't working but then it seems to come into more powerful bursts. "You seem to hold back, stand back." "So tense and withdrawn." That's what the men say, but not the women. Noticing I'm weeding almost only with the left hand. "The wild gardener." That was Ellen. Friday At Paul's new house. I've come with Shan, his room isn't the one in the west, it's the other one. When I'm in it a moment I put my arms around him. He's lost ten pounds too. A factory job I come down to, but late. Strawberries passing. The forelady hustles me off down into the corridors. Now I'm following a man and when he gets near the office I lose him. I can see them through the window. It's the side door and then over obstacles, gear wheels maybe. Make up an explanation for the boss. More important (how do I know) is the one about luggage, in some place like Dawson Creek with a satellite town like Fort St John. There's said to be a place to have the suitcase mended. I've come by air at another time, the luggage has been stored. Now I'm dealing with it. There's a set of records from school and I'm sorting them. The white on black list of the order I learnt different letters and numbers I set aside. But seeing it now I think I was being shown something maybe I hadn't the sense to look at. Have been thinking 'the practice' is about efficiency. "The ground of consciousness." "What is mind doing." I don't like their analysis. The space between thoughts. They don't connect. That meant. They're not there. A woman I'm happening to walk beside is looking at breasts. I like those. I walk up ahead and look at hers. Do you put kleenex in your bra? Yes. Hoo - I remember another one. At an art school lobby an older woman has spotted me. She sets me up to be evil or dangerous force. I'm supposed to zap someone, she thinks I can. I throw my hand forward not very strongly once and then again. A cloud forms with some blue lightning in it. In this phase of our being, 'imagination,' as the ability to devise fresh models for the disclosure of the meaningfulness of an ultimately intelligent universe, is of paramount importance, although it must not be used as an end in itself. RNying-ma thought
Es zittert. The very spontaneity of the self-present setting is the meditative setting for those who tune themselves in. Saturday Trying to do the wakeup gong with two small gongs at first muffled. Try different things. It won't sound, just a dull clack. Etc. Another story. I and my child and another woman meet a man with a truck who's driving back to his place. We are as if along for the ride. A cherry tree. I'm off course interested in the place but he's picking up the other woman. He drives very close to the fence in under the hedgy growth. At the house she and he in a little room talking to a senile mother. I go upstairs or around and find a couple of boys playing mind games. The one facing me has a moon face and ears. What they're doing is interesting. At the end she gets a note from him, few words and a few thick colored lines that make a space. It's that I have taken him because it is in my style. He has learned. Something else. White structures part of a monumental construction I was to and wanted to work on. Extending the white on the structures, but somebody else has been doing it, or hasn't left me material, and it has been growing fast without me. That leaves out the curiosity and pleasure of seeing the structure grow. Today is like having been subtly beaten up, dragging through the morning session gnawing on some social ends. The split reel is found. I went out with faith but looking for shoes for Ro. Sunday So intensely bright and cold. Palm trees streaming in glitter. They're like flags on high flexible poles. Also they're as if flying north with manes rippling back. The sky is so clean and deep. Thinking of coming back, doing philos in dreaming, Guenther/Saskatoon, kum nye. Have to have a car, Odiyan. After the show, faces looking up absorbing me in wonder. Dieter, Margaret. I said things and they laughed so willingly and closely (but not Michael). At the ice cream parlour Paula Martha Suzanna the psychologists, Martha pink with intelligence, what a beautiful face. Suzanna like porcelain a genetic oddly unknown, I could never read her though I'd catch her studying me, but talking shop I could see her, now. Something like a professional woman, sharp and Flemish? Hey Robert MacLean. Alison this morning looks cold and sick maybe. A dark purple shirt. Monday 5th Reluctant to tell. Shop talking with Kip after dinner. Women are not allowed to ring the gong. He says I'm feeling something. I am but he is pursuing me with the question method and I am on alert. I fold myself up and go silent, noticing I've lost the possibility of the offensive but still taking time to move carefully. "There is something sad and hopeless." Yes. Willing to have him keen, but sifting so it won't be at my expense. He presses and I'm angry. "If you mean do I trust you, no I don't. You're playing at being the teacher because that's what other people are doing to you day and night." Then I can tell I'm in the clear though he says it isn't so. I have been not wanting to look at him. "Do you think I'm not feeling anything?" Then I look carefully. Kip with his Dutch boy eyes wet and squeezed. My hand wants to thank him. "Okay, yes you are feeling something." His hand is a cold hard one. But we've broken through by right bravery on both sides. "I want to go ring the gong." That's the story, the furtherance is not yet. Writing this word by word. When these things happen I shake and go cold. Vancouver Weds In the big chair hearing the oven. The meeting last night with students. Rob telling about his dream, I felt myself open and warm so I'd be able to lie down with him but his old tricks warned me off. I rang the gong, with Kip in the dark. San Francisco Airport a desert cold and bright. Flying north and north over vast volcanic fields patched light and dark with clearcut logging. White cones standing high enough to move against the background, spider veins of white logging roads very pretty, a lake with a complex drawing of sums of forces on its surface. Paula "You are so byoo-ti-ful, I lawve to look at you." A so warm soft furry hug. And Martha, Suzanna. Eileen left a note on my jacket. Ellen, Sarah somewhere upstairs. Hal Gurish for next time maybe. Miep with her hair wet, eyes screwed up embarrassed, "the best" in Dutch English. Fenna by herself. A whole story from the days changing, a strange head showing the whites of her eyes like an ecstatic, thick hair cut off so abruptly her head is seeming to float, but her body straight and well anchored. First it was the perfections of her cooking, then the kindly challenges in what she'd say, then her radiance with my films. She was the one I found the night I went looking for people. She knew the heartbeat and liked it best. A Berliner, 55 scepters an hour. "I was in Vancouver for eight hours. I felt there is something funny about this place. But after I heard that while I was there the person who was most dear to me had died. She was ninety seven. She was my breathing teacher. She was more like a mother to me. I saw her in the morning and that evening she died." We were on the steps. I gave her what will we know. I could feel between us her love for her teacher. Melody like a bird skull, gaunt and harrowed. Then after I challenged Eric she spilled. Christina. I liked her when I saw her on the steps. Self managed and intelligent-looking with her white hair in a 50s side parted flip. This straight slim woman's almost fifty, she knows what she's doing. But she's a daddy's girl and Dharma slave who isn't questioning anything about 'the tradition' that's to lift her history out of having been nothing but a mother. I didn't dare like her. I'd watch her find her way accidentally to the head of the table while I was doing it on purpose. And her voice was that loud blind exaggerated fitting-in thing I'd be wincing away from. I could see an abbess; take away the American college girl hair, there'd be a severe German upper class face in a wimple, missing the heart of the teachings while she organizes the names and dates. It wasn't like or dislike so much as keeping off and watching with a sense it's there but would have to go slowly. "A warm red heart beating." And France. From the beginning and never really changed, a cultural dislike. All these correct joyless clothes, body sexless, hair cut so it's a shape without touch, starved face, like a white mouse a creature who's never been out of the lab, "It's very hard," two hours weeding, self-pity the closest friend, longing for the moment she can put herself to bed, tuck herself in with a letter from home. - That the 'poisons' are not immoral so much as they are a waste of time. - To go to the feeling in the aversion. - The diaphragm did unlock. Body is firmer and smoother. Hardly farted. Didn't talk about going into the afternoon class and Michael shaking his head no. I picked up swift and light but then the evening collapsed in pain and I avoided Michael to avoid showing anger or pain. By then I no longer trusted him. It was because of the way he'd been seeming to be not saying what he thought.
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