Past are the afternoons scribbling in journals on wooden docks floating between home and away.
Silenced are the nagging questions of my 20′s as to my exact being, purpose, and fate.
Retreated has the wave of life overwhelm that I used to feel ever sneaking up behind my back.
And taken are the pictures of sunsets, flowers and friends met along the way.
Surprised am I, with the realization that silence, grounding, home and routine are words for which I now have affinity.
The elders snicker. They kept their little joke. As it was kept from them.
Knowing the most lucid in life – comes always by surprise. And not denying me that pleasure.
If there is anything that I have learned from Life, it’s that it has a sophisticated sense of humor.
Only Life can pull off, without mean-spiritedness, the expert use of irony, pun, and satire.
With the effect of leaving me shaking in simultaneous tears and laughter.
After all, those are the moments,
Where I feel my heart beating, in my feet, and in rhythm,
With something greater.
Missing are the sentences of explanation within my paragraphs.
Dissipated is my ambition to be distinguished.
Quelled is my fire to move.
Yesterday I stood on top of a small mountain and cried at the perfect sound of the last golden aspen leaves applauding in the wind.
Today, I stood on top of the same small mountain and grabbed the mulch of the fallen and breathed deeply of its decomposing musk,
Sending me to the profound underworlds of memories unknown.
Alive is my ability to tremble with raw beauty’s stab at my soul.
Engaged is my appreciation for every breath of life I’m awarded.
Curious is my spirit for the sighting of all that moves when one is still.
This month, I quit half my job: the “stressful half” I tell people.
Last night, I recorded six subsequent dreams in my journal.
More than all the dreams I recorded in the entire year prior.
This year I lost two friends, my own age, to cancer.
I feel them close. At the top of the mountain.
I’ve spent 6 of the last 7 months travelling.
But said are all my sentences in summing up my travels.
Uninterested am I in talking about myself.
Please don’t make me. I find myself constantly pleading.
The weather, today, calls for snow.
And I will keep my eye on the horizon. Waiting.
I will hike up the mountain again. And even though it’s cold, I will take off my sweater.
To feel the bitterness of the wind on my skin.
And when the snow comes, I will welcome the blanket of quiet,
Mirroring that of my retired aching.
Three times this week, I’ve sat with time, coffee, and stalled fingers over my keyboard.
But nothing came.
Confused is my instinct on where to begin.
Last night I fell asleep at 9.
This morning I woke at 5.
And clear was the voice that whispered,
Just begin where you are.
Hands down. Cover to cover. My favorite monthly read.
Independent & Ad-free.
“From its idealistic, unlikely inception in 1974 to its current incarnation as a nonprofit magazine with more than 70,000 subscribers, The Sun has attempted to marry the personal and political; to honor the genuine and the spiritual; to see what kind of roommates beauty and truth can be; and to show that powerful teaching can be found in the lives of ordinary people.” - About The Sun
“The members of Occupy Wall Street may be as unwieldy, paradoxical, and inconsistent as those of us living in the real world. But that is precisely why their new approach to protest is more applicable, sustainable and actionable than what passes for politics today. They are suggesting that the fiscal operating system on which we are attempting to run our economy is no longer appropriate to the task. They mean to show that there is an inappropriate and correctable disconnect between the abundance America produces and the scarcity its markets manufacture. And in the process, they are pointing the way toward something entirely different than the zero-sum game of artificial scarcity favoring top-down investors and media makers alike.”
“If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over. And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it’s a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say “No. We will not pay for your crisis.”
America cannot expect a bunch of disenfranchised park-dwellers to come up with a solution to its economic woes — they have a political ruling class to do that.
Watch Jeffrey Sachs, leading environmentalist and economist, and a respected Professor at Columbia University, speak out at the growing, inspiring Occupy Wall Street movement.
A black cat leads us in kora.
And we follow in dumb curiosity.
Underestimating the confidence in that stride,
The intentionality of that tail,
Not until three rotations does it dawn on us,
That we have been taken for a ride.
The Cat, he now perches himself perfectly.
In a shape that we finally recognize as divine.
By the time we catch up with him, he is feigning interest in his paw.
So as not to embarrass us.
As we are left dizzy.
In the convergence of impossible realities.
A dakini whispers to us from behind a stone,
A foreboding wind blows,
But doesn’t stop us from a typically human and stumbling approach.
The closer we get, the farther we know we should run away,
Yet we ache to hear the song clearer and, instead, inch closer still.
Till the song is a scream in our ear, and the ground begins to shake.
And finally comprehending that it’s a language we don’t understand,
That these are secrets we are not yet ready to hear,
We turn – and unclaimed momentum shoves us away.
The door shuts. The dakinis’ whispers hushed.
And we are left, windblown, in the awe and calm,
Of a story rarely re-told.
Aaron Anderson. Of kora-ing cats and whispering dakinis,
You have always been and will be.
A living witness to the greater mysteries,
Ever pulling on our strings.
On the door of the Mystery, you (always) knock.
On the porch of the Mystery, you pull up a chair with a stranger.
In the trees outside of the Mystery, you identify birds.
In the basement of the Mystery, you search for the rarest records.
On the hardwood living room floor of the Mystery, you breakdance, in spandex.
Face to face with the Mystery, you exchange mantras.
And on the water-bottle of the Mystery, you leave your autograph.
Famous AA, you will always be.
For the birthmark of bravery on your soul,
That ever called to you in this life like a bird from the bardo.
I have never had anything but faith in you.
Or doubt that you would not follow that song in kora,
Around this world, around our hearts.
Once upon a time, in Sierra-tree-stump-sitting dreams,
We laughed together at our fumbles through this fumbling world,
And at our happiness in finding our friendship in this lifetime.
As I have had faith in all your journeys AA,
I have faith in this one.
Bardos have never held you back. (Quite the contrary.)
May we fumble, find, and laugh again.
As I have always signed all my letters to you:
With love,
From this life to the last.
Christina
WRITING HAS MORE TO DO WITH MATH than luck, talent or training. It’s simple statistics: discipline and exercise make a writer. This MAY be more naïve hope than natural law, for I started writing with no particular education, talents, mentors, or skill inheritance in the realm of literary arts. I was 23 when I for the first time in my life searched a blank page for an internal prompt (a failure on so many social and personal levels, it physically hurts me). Or maybe I just wore a helmet of adolescence cinched so tight that my self-awareness suffocated. We are lucky that “the kids these days” are smarter. I work with them, so I can confirm the fact. My students have internal prompts and thank God they do, for this fact saves me from the hopelessness that would otherwise drown me in the New York Times every morning. As a professional, I work in the field of Experiential Education – which is exactly what a dictionary would suggest. But at the end of the day, quite literally, I want to be a writer. And aside from about seven years of weekly blog posts (before “blog” was awarded the word of the year), I have no training in the field. I’d rather be thrown on a pyre than re-read my first essays: the compound-curse of the dynamic evolution of revising and static nature of web. I am finally old enough to have learned that you have to know the rules to break them. I would like to get back to the math, science, rules and discipline of writing. But my ultimate aim is to write more – and cringe less.
I HAD TO GOOGLE IT: “LETTER OF INTENTION” but the clip-art frightened me, so instead I reached for the dictionary. A statement of my designs? Now that creates some white space and makes my fingers twitch. In fact, if I let my eyes float to the left corner of the ceiling where my memories tend to hover, I come to the surprising realization that everything I cherish in my life began with a letter of intention. Not of the formal sort, of course, but what I would call, “to the wind” letters. The kind that, sealed and sent, left me light on my feet with the over-confident conclusions of, “If he loves me, I’ve risked nothing” and, “If it’s the kind of organization that doesn’t want to hear it from the heart, let them shred it; I want as little to do with them, as they me.” Today, I sleep soundly and live meaningfully thanks to such seeds thrown into the wind. A letter involves the most pure form of active listening. Every single word read is an agreement to engage and be silent at the same time. There’s little tactical advice I offer that doesn’t include the crafting of a brave and gentle letter.
I will come back to this blog; I’ve just been planning a wedding for the last 6 months (and abroad for 2.5 of those) – so please just forgive me.
In the meantime, I do invite you to watch our “save-the-date” video – because it’s fun and love stories should be shared. We’re also doing pre-marriage counseling (which I LOVE) and it was on our task list to write a letter to our wedding guide/officiant/counselor/mentor explaining “why we love our partner”, and I sent her the following letter this morning. It’s rough, unedited and intimate. But the world can handle it.
Why I love Slade.
The first thing that actually comes to mind, are the three words we chose to root our wedding: travel/explore, witness, play. And I think it’s because we both embody and practice these verbs together in our partnered approach to life.
Our relationship was born on a plane. We’re met in LAX and spent the first 24 hours of our life together, in route from LA to India. He was wearing flip flops and jeans – two things that I told our student group, explicitly, not to pack. And yet he provided me with a rationale in such confident good humor that I felt no need to challenge. Instead I laughed. And thus began the softening of Christina (slightly hardened, as 8 years of independent travel and living will do). We spent two weeks preparing our program together – WORKING – researching, contacting, setting up, communicating, organizing. From 7am till 11pm. Finally, it was time to pick up our students and we boarded a train that was supposed to take us to Calcutta in 12 hours. Mid-course, the train stopped. It had stopped for about 8 hours, but Slade and I hadn’t: we just talked, and laughed, and talked and laughed. I remember there was a moment of silence, when we both laid down in our separate train bunks for a few quiet moments. Looking back, we both remembering thinking at the same time, “I could care less if this train was broken for another 12 hours. Will I ever grow tired of this person? I think I’m in trouble.”
Exactly three years later, I feel like I’m still on that train with Slade; crunched up in our bunks, caring not for time or “breakdowns” – but hanging out the open door of the train, sipping chai and encouraging him to try some slightly dangerous and very spicy mung beans (or other challenges he can’t resist). Back in the bunk, Slade is prompting humorous and engaging conversations with all those that pass by, as I (still fail at) trying to read even a chapter of my book (ever) in his presence, instead being unable to resist his charms and falling over myself for just a little more banter, laughter and flirting with the elements of life together. Even now, nestled in our home together, we travel. We open up our laptops – and though others can’t see it (or necessarily speak our language) – we venture into technologies and designs and windows to worlds of imagination and invention that don’t always exists for others. Or we collaborate on a project. Be it building a green house, website, flower bed or wedding invitation – there is an element of exploration in everything we do together. A trust in following our curiosity. A faith in knowing the steps to getting there will inevitably influence the vision. And a deep love for a blank slate.
Which gets me to play.
I think it’s my natural tendency to take things a little too seriously. And at the same time get caught up in my strong imagination. Don’t worry – I know that these characteristics are also a source of my creativity. But what I didn’t know, until I met Slade, was how much healthier and lighter I felt when I had someone who could keep these elements in check – and do so delicately. I call on Slade for a “reality check” on almost every interpersonal altercation I encounter – as he has a DEEP and intuitive rational that’s calm, kind and super strategic. He says this of his mom, so he probably inherited it – but Slade is the BEST problem solver I’ve ever known. I respect him deeply for this emotional and intellectual intelligence, and actually can’t imagine having a more competent or resourceful person by my side. And as “efficient” as that sounds, I think this resourcefulness comes from his most natural drive - which is to PLAY with the elements around him. Be it a game, paintbrushes, website, camera, puppy or small child – he’ll pick it up and follow with focused curiosity. And there’s very little I love more than watching him in this state; his “artist” state. I have profound trust in his vision when he’s in the this state; It’s something I love to foster and I find myself conspiring ways of setting him up with the elements and the time, for him to “fall” into it. Especially as this spirit of constant play is infectious – and infuses my own life with a lightness – that it does need. Play and exploration were enormous themes in my independent childhood – where I spent 10 hours a day outside doing both, within the natural elements. I’m not sure what got lost or hardened along the way (maybe it does with most adults) – but what a delight to find it again, and to laugh and dance and play – feeling like that IS God’s (as loosely defined as possible) wish and our responsibility.
And I guess that gets me to Witness. I’ve seen a lot of this world. And surprisingly, I do think it’s much more beauty than ruin. Still, we’ve both seen hard things – and more than enough to put our privileges and position in perspective. I live with that every day. And I also live with the task of fitting the responsibility of what I have witnessed into my life action plan. Before I met Slade, it was really hard for me to center myself in this spinning world view. I always joke that I never felt jet lag until I met Slade; I just landed and my equilibrium re-centered immediately, and I took off running. A nice talent – but also a slightly dangerous and very unrooted one. After I met Slade, I, for the first time, felt my equilibrium struggling to stop spinning in tune with his – I literally felt like my heart had to re-calibrate. I can still acclimatize and acculturate – don’t worry. But there is something very healthy about knowing that I actually am tethered, no far how I reach, to a pole that can bring me back to center.
And the other half of Witness is the simple act of holding everything in life SACRED. I feel/know Slade to do this. As I do. And the combination allows us to hold life, beauty, and relationships with profound appreciation for their blessings. Slade’s parents are sacred to him. MY parents and siblings are sacred to him. Nature is profoundly sacred to him. This wedding is SACRED to Slade. It’s not an event or a commitment or just another traditional life stage – it might be the biggest thing in his life. Aside from the birth of a child. And he knows this. Respects and holds it as so. As I do. And probably the only thing more important in life than approaching it with humble gratitude and respect, is having a partner who can mirror, complement and share in the upholding of the same values and approach.
There are hundreds of other “reasons why” and individual characteristics of Slade that I love (already sent you 64 of them!) – but it’s really our shared approach to life and the harmony and health that I have found born between us that I love most. Like a good recipe or alchemy, complimentary ingredients just came together and made something beautiful. Something that I could have never conceived of on my own. And so to sum it up with a very appropriate metaphor: if he and I were going on a trip (along a shared life path, perhaps?), and we could only put four things in our backpack to take with us, they would be: a creative approach, playfulness with the elements, the container of our India train bunk, and a humble and sacred appreciation for all that we encounter and witness.
the cow outside my window (in the village of Kanda, Uttrakhand)
Oh. Creaky, rusty fingers. Of which I would prefer to point at the Himalayan monsoons in blame. But really, we all know, the real culprit is disuse.
Blog content comes to me like the first bubble on the bottom of a pan being watched for boil. I wait. And then there’s this tiny thought. And I stare at it. And recognize that there might be something there. But if I get impatient, distracted, and walk away to water a wilted plant, turn another page into the next chapter on my book, or remember an online bill that I have to pay today – well then the pot boils down behind my back. And even if I remember it, and run back, I find myself scratching my head over my initial intended use. What was it I was, again, I was watching or waiting for?
On the other hand, if I focus, meditate really, on that first bubble. (And it is not easy.) If I put aside the natural ADD of the mundane world and really WATCH that bubble. Then before I know it, there’s another by its side. And then the whole bottom of the pan has suddenly multiplied with these tiny, disorganized but themed dots of thought. And that’s exactly the moment when I need to grab a pen or saddle into my keyboard. For a moment too late, and it’s still all steamed away.
So this the first bubble spotted on my bottom of my unboiled thought: “I wonder how these sheets were dried?”
A little context:
I’ve flown for 14 hours and two days into the future and landed in the ever-dusky city of Delhi. Delirious with time travel, I tip out the taxi driver, uncurl my stiff Hindi tongue and hand over my passport to the hotel manager. Without a fight, I allow a boy to take my bag and show me to my room, collapse into bed, dissolve a melatonin pill under my tongue, and black out with the night.
When I awake, this is my first though: “I wonder how these sheets were dried?”
They smell clean. And they are absolutely crisp. For everything, always, is pressed in India. (Even my socks are returned to me with pleats.) The hot iron, however, usually erases the story. Bleaches all sheets equal. But still I’m left smelling and wondering of the industry that dried my sheets. Was it sent to a dhobi (laundry man) as I do myself when I’m settled locally? Did he roll it up in a bundle and tie it to the back of his bike, and return it two days later, with a whistle at the door? Was it dried on a roof in this monsoon, but sweltering hot, season? Did it flutter in the fog and pollution of the city before an iron pressed the history out of it? Or was it stuffed into the people-machine of a newer urban underground industry? In this fancy, developed, city – was it actually tumbled in a dryer? I’ve heard rumors of them existing, but still never seen one in India.
Wait a minute.
Have I ever, once, woken up in hotel or bed at “home” and had an entire mental discourse on my sheets? Have I ever done more that kick them aside?
Ah yes. This is why I travel. To do less. Or more. Than just assume and kick aside. To feel the texture. To inhale deeply. To task my imagination. And to question.
