Pondering Relationships


It’s been a while since I’ve engaged writing here specifically as a practice.  The most recent posts have felt report-y.  So here I am.  I don’t know what I have to say, but I can trust this welling-up feeling.  Is it hope?  Hope that something good will come out of me?  Something helpful or insightful?  Yep, that’s definitely in here.  

Relationships.  That’s where a lot of the juice has been for me lately.  Just writing that, it’s like blowing on a bed of coals glowing in my diaphragm.  Relationships are hard, and I love them.  I think I take refuge in an image of myself as successful in my relationships.  When I get really discouraged and hopeless about my research, I find myself trying to latch on to and shore up my relationships.  “I refuse to be a workaholic, because relationships are what will really make me happy and proud,” I say to myself.  I’ve been doing a contemplation recently on impermanence and the reality of death.  Every relationship I have now will dissolve.  Even my relationship with Maitri.  Either she’ll die first or I’ll die first.  I can’t depend on relationships to bring any kind of lasting happiness or satisfaction.  Which I also know because the most meaningful relationships I’ve had always include some element of pain.  Also, I conveniently exclude my work relationships from this pride calculus.  

Lately I’ve been feeling like I’m bumping up against a glass wall, trying to communicate to those close to me how meaningful Sacred World Assembly was.  Trying too hard is disappointing.  Unshakeable Lake came to visit.  And I’ve been bumping up against a similar glass wall.  Except this feels more like an enclosure.  I can’t even share how I feel with her.  Why is that?  The quality of my heart is unconfirmable.  I’m in it now.  It is now.  Any feedback I receive is necessarily about then.  So there’s just this being.  I’ve tried to convey this depth of being to others by playing up my excitement.  It doesn’t work.  I only find tenderhearted aloneness made more poignant in the presence of another, unplay-up-able.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wearing out the shoe

Image
I spent this last weekend at Karme Choling in Barnet, Vermont.  I was there for a leadership intensive with Shastri* Nick Kranz focusing on the practice of social meditation.  Already, I can feel myself being drawn into the role of the slightly detached explicator as I write this, wanting to explain the word ‘Shastri’ and what the practice of social meditation is.  That role is very comfortable to me.  I think I actually do that with myself as way to distance myself from difficult feelings.  Information and it’s accuracy is soothing to me; it’s how I get ground.   Last weekend was hard.  Social meditation is about creating a culture where the norms and customs nudge us toward being genuine and awake, in touch with our humanity.  Doing this practice and being around 55 other people doing it too makes any disingenuousness on my own part vivid.  Not always clear.  I didn’t always have a clear idea of what was going on, I just knew that I felt this pain.  I should also say that it
Read more

Dissertation Dathün: Day 1

Image
Today I’m beginning a project.  For the next four weeks, I aspire to engage my life as I would on retreat.  Today is Monday.  On Friday I had knee surgery with 2 possible outcomes: 1) Remove part of my meniscus: 2-7 day recovery and 2) Repair my meniscus: 4 weeks on crutches with no weight bearing, 6 weeks on crutches minimum.  When I woke up from surgery, my left leg felt large and amorphous.  It had a pretty serious brace on it.  I asked the nurse in the recovery room the outcome of my surgery.  I have no idea how she responded but I remember knowing, without much thought: 4 weeks without being able to carry out everyday life tasks unassisted. 4 is a magic number of weeks for me.  In the summer of 2007, I thought a lot about weeks in groups of 1, 2 and eventually 4.  These were weeks of meditation retreat.  In the Shambhala tradition we have a practice called ‘dathün’ which is a tibetan word meaning ‘month [long] session’ (edit: really it means 'moon session', which
Read more

Thirst

I've been feeling like I should write for a few days (or maybe weeks) now.  Going back to the practice of 'manifest spontaneity', what arises? I'm tired, but not sleepy tired.  I'm tired of avoiding my experience.  And I've been doing a lot of that lately.  Reading lots of sci-fi and stuff on social-emotional learning, but not what will help me finish my dissertation.  Not emailing the people I need to email to get my data analysis rolling.  Cowering at fear is exhausting.  And so habit forming.  I have the itch to switch over to i-books and pick back up in my sci-fi novel right now.  There's something else down here too, though.  It's not just tiredness and avoidance.  Longing.  Longing for genuine connection.  Longing to be seen without the cheapness of having to confess everything I feel like is wrong with me or every stupid thing I've done.  Just thirsty for water, as opposed to a fancy cocktail, perfect latte or the IPA that gets that flora
Read more