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Stripes and bows
I saw a short, tight dress in a shop window. Pink and red bows, rather large, floated relatively randomly over a background of black and white vertical stripes. Insistent connotations. The female body as a prison cell for any man tempted by flirtatious femininity. The female body imprisoned underneath that same feminine overlay.
- May 31, 2010
- Filed under: Beauty, Men and women
- Comments 0
Removed/refreshed
I deleted my Facebook account last week. I’d been wondering for a while what to do with it.
I opened the account in December 2008 thinking that Facebook would be fun professionally more than personally. I said to friends soon after I’d begun that it was “fascinating and dorky.” Read more
- May 28, 2010
- Filed under: Bookshelf, art, and media, My work
- Comments 1
Sweat on the back of my neck
I took a walk this morning and bought groceries halfway through. The bags were very heavy. Shoulders down and back, with ease, as I walked home in the increasing heat. The prediction is for 100 degrees today. (If that happens, it will be the first 100-degree day of the year. Late for Tucson.) Blueberry, raspberry, and white chocolate muffin, with unsalted butter, loose gunpowder green tea, brewed strong, with a bit of nettle, a not-too-thin slice of mozzarella. AC not on yet. Heat and sweat flow over strong shoulders, flexible neck, a face with no makeup and under thick hair covering the scalp. The sweat feels especially delicious on the back of my neck. I put up my hair.
The buddha girls who love change
“The buddha girls who love change.” That phrase charmed me, wowed me, as soon as my friend said it. She’d never said it before.
Buddha. Anyone can be a buddha. Like THE Buddha himself, you devotedly practice yoga and meditation.
Girls. Grown women who like to play, who are playful.
Love. The deepest affection and kindness. Rather than passion, whose fever leads the soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body into turbulence.
Change. Anicca is a Pali word meaning impermanence. Pali was the Buddha’s language, and impermanence defines all of life. Anicca is at the core of meditation practice within Buddhist lineages. Everything changes–that’s an awareness that comes from such practice. An awareness that transcends mental understanding and that a yogi could describe as equanimous. Commonly, people fear change. Fear kills equanimity.
Buddha girls are beautiful. Beauty is their ground and essence. Fear kills beauty.
Buddha girls are beautiful because they align with change.
Life-altering
I heard about a book–or movie, news story, disease, unexpected occurrence–this morning while half listening to NPR that an announcer, interviewer, or talk show guest called “life-altering.” The adjective “life-altering” caught my attention, but neither its object nor the speaker did, because the use of “life-altering” seemed arbitrary.
Although a “system” exists for calling something life-altering and includes matters of loss and gain and of life and death, that system feels pat, both too inclusive and not inclusive enough. Too inclusive: a new job, a firing, a retirement; marrying and divorcing; giving birth or expiring are life-altering because they mark what people consider to be monumental, grand, or absolutely memorable. Not inclusive enough: everything is life-altering because individuals’ reactions–or non-reactivity–to all that comes their way leaves a subconscious imprint.
Petite, unimposing, forgotten–no matter. The small composes the large, the ephemeral composes the earth-shattering, and quintessentially prosaic acts and impressions, whether old and latent, superficial and seemingly forgotten and inconsequential, or unconscionably self-critical, determine life alterations, what human beings call fate.
- May 25, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind
- Comments 0
Rushing minds in rushed bodies
Some journalists who host talk shows or speak on them talk really fast. I wonder if it’s because they feel pushed by a time limit. I wonder if they’re conscious of their pace, which sometimes has me laughing, as do the halts, overall jumpiness, and even stumbling over words that often accompany the speed. The voices impress me as overloaded–with information that a person wishes to communicate? With emotions that must be suppressed in order to convey objectivity? Actually, the vocal rate and rhythms sound excessively excited and not at all neutral. Rushing minds in rushed bodies. Vocal urgency expresses lack of peace, lack of pleasure.
During my time as a professor, students every now and then told me that I talked really fast in class. They were right.
I’m not thinking that the rapid speech I hear on the radio or TV makes the ideas or facts that it contains any more or less credible than does slower speaking, but the hurry conveys anxiety. More particularly, I feel mildly anxious listening. The journalists’ haste makes waste of my peace, if I let it do so. When I laugh, peace resolves the anxiety.
I wonder if the interviewers and interviewees talk that fast at home. If so, I’m glad that they don’t live with me. I’d rather be living with a person of sensuous speed, meaning movement through time and space rather than rapidity; a sensuous speed that communicates self-awareness and quickens my own.
- May 22, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind
- Comments 0
The efficiency of peace
Peace is efficient. Like the human digestive system, which operates most efficiently when chi is neither stagnant nor deficient, peace operates most efficiently when love is neither stagnant nor deficient. The free flow of chi creates an easy digestion, of food in the body so that it is nourished well and of love in the heart so that its openness welcomes peace.
We tend to think of efficiency not only as acting economically–no waste, only necessity–but also as mechanical rather than human. In other words, without consideration for kindness. However, love cannot exist without kindness, and peace and kindness walk hand in hand. We think of emotions and feelings as being attached to–desirous of–a person or an outcome. That’s romantic love, for example, but efficiency indicates non-attachment. A peaceful person can risk not wasting time, words, or energy. Such beautiful economy makes best use of the resource that is love. Such beautiful economy is effective–certainly for the “economist,” who remains loving, kind, and unattached.
In Buddhist terms, “skillful” might replace “efficient.” In more broadly spiritual terms, peace is artful.
Photos
I’ve never been one to take snapshots. If I want to document my life or remember the past, for the pleasure or retrospective revelation of it, I turn to journals, which I’ve written mostly since midlife and when I travel. On my first international trip, to Europe when I was around 20, I took a camera, probably bought for the journey. Early on, the camera broke, before I’d shot even one roll of film. I felt bad at first, but that had more to do with how I should be feeling bad, I should want those pictures, and I should buy another camera right away than it had to do with the loss of either “memories” or the camera itself. Submitting or catering to the tribal tourist–who must take photos. Quickly, the fairly shallow mourning disappeared and the tribal tourist gave way to the solitary writer. I’d brought a journal, and its images and insights as I wrote and when I read them later satisfied me just fine. Also, I have a very good visual memory, so I easily recall people. (I also easily remember people’s voices.)
I love the gorgeous solitude of writing, even in a botanical garden in Belfast or Melbourne, a restaurant in London, a gazebo in the jungle of an Indian ashram, and poolside drinking a lot of coffee at the Arizona Inn in Tucson (where I stayed several times while living in Reno before moving to Tucson). In each of those environments people walked by, close or at a distance, I heard them speaking, sometimes to me, and I observed and listened. Observing and listening, which can happen for hours at a time, give me great pleasure.
Bathing suits and friends
I own 2 bikinis, one from my 20s and one from a few years ago that a lover gave me. They both fit.
The bikini from my youth is green with a flower pattern. I remember wearing it on a beach in Italy. The newer bikini is white and I have yet to don it publicly. My lover saw it in a shop, thought it would look good on me and was my size, and purchased it. I was shy trying it on for him and appreciated his loving perception of my body in the bathing suit, which he reminded me fit the same way that my bras and panties did. I felt attractive and comfortable in them, and his sight altered my own.
I’ve been vaguely shopping for a bathing suit, mostly online. As if I’m intuiting a new Mediterranean sojourn. A man I recently met likes to snorkel in the Caribbean, though I think he’s into private accommodations and naked bodies. I swim infrequently, and the bathing suit I’ve worn for that activity over the past 10 years is a black Speedo.
Setting sex right
“Remedies for sexual activity” read a recent email subject heading. Surely someone was selling Viagra or another remedy for a real or imagined sexual disorder or dysfunction, but the syntactical impairment had me laughing. Hmm, sexual activity itself linguistically rendered as a malady.
Within the miseries of romantic love, the initial requiting of sexual longing can run afoul of fantasy, or so I’ve heard, consequently turning sexual activity into an overworked and/or under-satisfied body governed by a consciousness that lingers in a void of unfulfilled desires cum ambitions.
I don’t believe it, that sexual fantasy is better than actual sex, having experienced lovemaking with one and another man that exceeded my fantasies preceding our first time together. (I also have tolerated literally nauseating disappointments.) Nonetheless, the displeasure of sexual underachievement in a culture whose forceful marketplaces sell sexual achievement as a kind of good and as a kind of both essential and luxury goods might mean that the subject heading “Remedies for sexual activity” is both syntactically and conceptually correct.
- May 7, 2010
- Filed under: Bookshelf, art, and media
- Comments 0
